Nicholas G. Paparoidamis

Service quality, relationship satisfaction, trust, commitment and business‐to‐business loyalty

– The purpose of this study is to establish a theoretical basis for evaluating a strategic increase in customers perceptions of service/product quality – specifically in terms of an increase in relationship quality and customer loyalty in a B2B environment – and to test this theoretical basis empirically., – Drawing on the relationship‐marketing literature, the authors empirically test a model of business loyalty in a sample of 234 advertising agencies clients., – Using the Gronroos conceptualisation, a clear pattern of service‐quality dimensions is established and several important findings are reported – including empirical verification of the mediating role of overall relationship satisfaction in the formation of loyalty attributes. The effects of trust and commitment are also verified., – Studies that model attitudinal as well as behavioural relationship outcomes have strong precedence in the relationship marketing area. Although in this study the “intentions” approach is followed rather than a behavioural one, the measurement of the real behaviour of industrial clients proves to be very difficult from a practical point‐of‐view., – In this service continuum, managers need to clearly define relationship development strategies, service provision policies and develop homogeneous service provision. Towards this direction, it is essential that firms communicate the service and product quality standards to partners so that differences in service provision can be avoided., – The study integrates the concepts of service/product quality, relationship satisfaction, trust, and commitment in a business‐loyalty model, demonstrating the benefits of investing in relationships based on trust and commitment.

Service quality and marketing performance in business‐to‐business markets: exploring the mediating role of client satisfaction

Drawing on relevant literature, the authors empirically test a model of business loyalty in a sample of 234 clients of information systems suppliers, integrating the concepts of service quality, satisfaction, and loyalty. The study builds on recent advances in services marketing theory and assesses the relationships underlying the identified constructs in the specific industry. A clear pattern of service quality dimensions is established following the Gronroos conceptualisation. Several important findings are reported, including the empirical verification of the mediating role of industrial satisfaction in the formation of loyalty attributes. Industrial satisfaction fully mediates the relationship between accessibility and loyalty and partially mediates latent constructs relationship with technical assistance and delivery service. The results provide robust evidence concerning the direct effect of industrial satisfaction on loyalty. accessibility, delivery, and product reliability as antecedents of industrial satisfaction.

Learning orientation and leadership quality

Purpose – Although sales managers influence to a great extent their salespeoples outcomes, research examining the impact of leadership effectiveness and learning orientation in the sales department is limited. As such, an investigation of the impact of sales managers learning values and leadership – on the grounds of goal‐setting and leader‐member exchange (LMX) theories – on salespeoples goal orientation and performance is warranted. This paper aims to investigate these issues.Design/methodology/approach – To explore these issues, the author presents the extant literature on learning orientation, goal orientation and leadership quality, in an effort to provide the basis for the development of theoretical propositions. A strategic learning pathway is proposed for further research indicating that sales managers learning orientation and leadership affect salespeoples goal orientation and performance.Practical implications – Each of the underlying propositions is explored and managerial and research imp...

An empirical investigation into the impact of relationship selling and LMX on salespeople's behaviours and sales effectiveness

Purpose – This study aims to develop and test a model of relationship selling management. It seeks to examine the impact of leadership quality and relationship selling, as antecedents of salespeoples relational behaviours, on sales effectiveness.Design/methodology/approach – Starting from a review of literature, the model incorporates two classes of salespeoples relational behaviours, namely customer‐oriented selling (COS) and adaptive selling (AS), two classes of managerial antecedents (i.e. relationship selling strategy and LMX) and one consequence (sales effectiveness). The authors collected data from 164 sales manager‐salesperson dyads in a sample of French firms. A structural equation modelling approach was employed to test the hypotheses.Findings – The findings show that relationship selling and LMX stimulate salespeoples relational behaviours, which in turn positively affect sales effectiveness. Moreover, the results reveal a positive impact of relationship selling on sales manager‐salesperson e...

Hedonic price function estimation in economics and marketing: revisiting Lancaster’s issue of “noncombinable” goods

Following Lancaster’s (J. Political Econ. 74(1):132–157, 1966; Variety, equity and efficiency, 1979) interpretation of his characteristics approach to consumer theory, this contribution focuses on theoretical and empirical arguments questioning the smoothness of traditional hedonic price estimation techniques. Lancaster argued strongly against “combinability”, i.e., that any efficient combination of characteristics is feasible and sensible. We therefore explicitly test the impact of convexity using a set of recent non-parametric estimators. The test is carried out on a sample of 114 digital cameras whose price evolution is followed over 6 months. The hypothesis of convexity is rejected using the Li (Econ. Rev. 15(3):261–274, 1996) test. The conclusions point out implications for economics and marketing.

Top management staffing in international strategic alliances: a conceptual explanation of decision perspective and objective formation

Past research in the international collaborative strategy area has paid little attention to the matter of alliance staffing, limiting insight into conditions framing the adoption of alternative management staffing approaches. Following a thorough conceptualisation of staffing objectives and perspectives, this paper takes a theoretical approach to analyse the forces shaping managerial perspectives on international strategic alliance (ISA) top management staffing, drawing on a diverse range of literature and employing examples to provide illustrative grounding for our assertions. We suggest that risk perceptions are fundamental to parent firms choice of staffing objectives, but are stimulated and tempered by other influences. Theory development on ISA management staffing is enhanced through the provision of a substantive, testable model along with a set of research propositions. The complex analytic focus of this study exposes important directions for research on the subject and offers guidelines for management practice. Furthermore, our typology of managerial decision perspectives provides a new tool for studying ISA staffing issues.

Comparing efficiency across markets : an extension and critique of the Zhang and Bartels (1998) methodology.

The use of non-parametric frontier methods for the evaluation of product market efficiency in heterogeneous markets seems to have gained some popularity recently. However, the statistical properties of these frontier estimators have been largely ignored. The main point is that nonparametric frontier estimators are biased and that the degree of bias depends on specific sample properties, most importantly sample size and number of dimensions of the model. To investigate the effect of this bias on comparing market efficiency, this contribution estimates the efficiency for several datasets for two main product categories. Following Zhang and Bartels (1998), these results comprise re-estimates for the larger samples limiting their size to that of the smaller samples when the model dimensions for different samples are identical. Furthermore, sample sizes are adjusted to mitigate the eventual differences in dimensions in specification. This allows comparing market efficiency for different markets on a more equal footing, since it reduces the bias effect to a minimum making the comparison of market efficiency possible. However, the article also points out the critical limitations of this Zhang and Bartels (1998) approach in certain respects. Apart from reporting these negative results, we also offer some suggestions for future work.

Service Quality, Customer Satisfaction, Value and Loyalty: An Empirical Investigation of the Airline Services Industry

Successful businesses are increasingly aware of the importance of service delivery in generating competitive advantages, loyal customers, and long-term economic success (Wagner 1994; Jones and Sasser 1995; Liu et al., 2000). It is widely acknowledged that well-designed customer-service programs enhance customer satisfaction, customer retention, market share, revenue, and profits (Reichheld and Sasser, 1990; Rust and Zahorik, 1993, 1995; Anderson et al., 1994; Jones and Sasser, 1995; Anderson et al., 1997; Loveman, 1998; Hoffman and Kelley, 2000; Johnston, 2001). These issues are of particular importance in the airline industry, in which the delivery of high-quality service to passengers has been shown to be essential (Sultan and Simpson, 2000; Aksoy et al., 2003; Park et al., 2004; Chen and Chang, 2005; Chen, 2008). However, although the link between airline service quality and passenger satisfaction has been established empirically, the exact nature of the relationships that exist among the constructs of airline service quality, passenger satisfaction, and loyalty remains unclear (Park et al., 2004). The role of value in the airline industry is also unclear. Because service failures can occur in airline services as they can occur in the best-run companies in any business setting, improved complaint management and service recovery are obviously important (Boshoff, 1997, 1999; Johnston, 1995). The providers of airline services, like all service providers, need to implement effective complaint-management and service-recovery strategies to ensure (or at least enhance) consumer retention (Liu et al., 2000). However, there is lack of a reliable measurement tool to capture the impact of particular airline service-quality attributes and service-recovery actions on passengers’ behavioural intentions. The purposes of this study are, therefore: (i) to develop an integrated model of customer satisfaction and loyalty in the context of airline service failure; (ii) to undertake empirical testing of the position and effect of perceived value in such a model; (iii) to identify a set of pertinent service-quality dimensions for airline services; and (iv) to provide evidence for the causal relationships among the constructs of service quality, perceived value, overall customer satisfaction, and loyalty. The questionnaire contained items extracted from the existing literature on airline service quality (Park et al., 2004; Chen, 2008; Chen and Chang, 2005).

Building Brand Love Through Co-creation

The last few years, the concept of co-creation emerges as central for both academia and industry (Pongsakornrungsilp and Schroeder 2011). Despite the undeniable importance of this topic, the investigation of co-creation’s role in building strong brands in the literature is limited. More precisely although there is some research investigating the role of co-creation in branding issues (e.g. Payne et al. 2009; Tynan et al. 2010; Bello et al. 2007), the impact of co-creation on consumer’s love for a brand remains unexplored. This conceptual paper is a first effort to build the theoretical grounds for the relationship between co-creation and brand love. More specifically, we examine how co-creation affects various dimensions of brand love, as they have been conceptualized by Batra et al. (2012). At the same time, we provide some first theoretical insights on how co-creation can indirectly positively influence brand love through other constructs such as product quality and brand personality.

Modelling Ethicality in Consumption: Bridging the Literature on Ethics

In recent years, the western world has observed the growing popularity and gradual consolidation of the ethical consumers who express ethical concerns through consumption. Research efforts to model the ethical consumer mostly draw on attitude-intention models and ignore existing ethical decision making models in the business and consumer context. Also, a major issue in this field is the attitude-behaviour gap, where consumers claim to be ethically concerned, but do not behave accordingly. To overcome these issues, we propose a new model drawing from a number of models in the general field of ethics and marketing.