Stephen J. Grove

Customers behaving badly: a state of the art review, research agenda and implications for practitioners

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to highlight important issues in the study of dysfunctional customer behavior and to provide a research agenda to inspire, guide, and enthuse. Through a critical evaluation of existing research, the aim is to highlight key issues and to present potentially worthy avenues for future study. Design/methodology/approach – In reviewing recent and past advances in the study of customers behaving badly, an overview of existing research into customers behaving badly and addressing issues of terminology and definition is provided. Thereafter, three perspectives that provide the most opportunity and insight in studying the darker side of service dynamics are outlined. This leads to a review of some of the research design and methodological problems and issues that are faced when rigorously studying these issues. Subsequently, the paper devotes a section to the provocative idea that while dysfunctional customer behavior has many negative influences on customers, employees, and service firms, there are actually some positive functions of customers behaving badly. Findings – A research agenda is provided that is believed to identify and discuss a range of projects that comprises not only insightful theoretical contributions but is also practically relevant. Originality/value – The paper identifies a range of issues about which managers should be aware and proactively manage.

Going green in the service sector

Over the past decade there has been an increasing awareness of the many ways that businesses affect the ecology of the planet. Most of the attention, however, has been directed towards activities of organizations in the manufacturing sector of the economy. Argues that service organizations have social responsibilities in the preservation of the environment, too. Presents the importance to a product, such as longevity or specific marketing, of green practices among services, a framework to describe green activities across the service sector, and a pragmatic means to implement a green programme for service organizations.

The future of services marketing: forecasts from ten services experts

Over the past two and a half decades services marketing has emerged as a well established area of inquiry in the marketing discipline. In many ways, its growth and acceptance in the academic arena are indeed noteworthy. A question arises, however, concerning the direction that services marketing as a field of study should take in the future. This article reports and content‐analyzes the insights of ten leading services scholars regarding that question. That group comprises Leonard Berry, Mary Jo Bitner, David Bowen, Stephen W. Brown, Christian Gro¨nroos, Evert Gummesson, Christopher Lovelock, Parsu Parasuraman, Benjamin Schneider, and Valarie Zeithaml. Recurring themes and provocative observations among the services experts’ comments are related and discussed. Concluding remarks are offered.

Observational data collection methods for services marketing: An overview

Applications of observational data collection methods to services marketing research are explored. Three key dimensions that distinguish the various forms of observational methods are presented. General applications of observational research to services marketing phenomena are posited. Specific applications of observational research to services quality are suggested. Issues concerning the implementation of direct human observation are considered.

International environmental marketing claims: Real changes or simple posturing?

Examines the differences in types of environmental claims used in advertisements in Australia, Canada, the UK and USA. The advertisements are examined using a content analysis schema with four categories (product orientation, process orientation, image orientation or environmental fact) which have been developed and reported in the literature. The four types of environmental advertisements can be “compressed” into two groups: substantive claims (product and process based) and posturing claims (image and environmental fact based). Suggests that claims in advertisements may be a proxy for firm behaviour and therefore firms using substantive claims in their advertisements are more environmentally involved than firms using posturing claims in their advertisements. Finds that US advertisements use the most posturing claims and least substantive claims, with Australian advertisements using the most substantive claims and least posturing claims. This may suggest that US firms (i.e. the companies making these claims) are less environmentally involved compared with firms in the three other countries examined.

Consumer intentions to use a service category

Even though service marketers are interested in influencing customer choice at the service provider level (i.e. the service brand level), the decision to patronize a particular service firm seldom occurs until after the customer decides to use a service provider in the first place. Ultimately, this initial “make‐or‐buy” purchase decision – the decision to use a service category – restrains customer decisions at the service provider (brand) level. To enhance our understanding of customers’ service category decisions, a double cross‐validation approach was employed to investigate the applicability of a service category choice model which we adapted from Howard’s work on consumer decision making. Our model, which was tested with two different service categories, was supported.

Does environmental advertising reflect integrated marketing communications?: An empirical investigation

Abstract We describe an empirical assessment of the degree to which environmental ads may be classified as integrated. A framework discussed by Nowak and Phelps (1994) is applied to a set of “green” ads to determine whether such ads are truly integrated. Because organizations should use more than one approach in order to develop a green posture, integrated marketing communications would appear to be a suitable method for forming an environmentally conscious stance. Results indicate that only about half of the environmental ads that were studied were classifiable as integrated according to criteria discussed by Nowak and Phelps. Further, integrated green ads do not appear to be applying the types of direct behavioral inducements that might be optimal for building a positive environmental posture. Such findings may have implications for the recent decline in use of and interest in green advertising.

Improving ServicMarket Imperfections and the Targets-Instrument Approach to Financial Services Regulation

Services are generally thought to be less tangible to consumers than physical goods, a trait which may create communication diffculties for sellers of service products. To accommodate the special nature of service products and the generally greaterper ceived risk associated with them, many scholars argue that services marketers need to stress factual information in their adver tisements. While this perspective has been advanced for years, little empirical research has been conducted to examine its adoption by practitioners. In this article we investigate the extent to which the advertisers of services emphasise specifically suggested factual information cues in their messages. Over 17,000 newspaper ads and 9,800 television ads were scrutinized to reveal that services advertisements do indeed provide various proposed factual cues and that their incidence increases as ser vice products become more intangible in nature.

Improvisation in service performances: lessons from jazz

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to establish the efficacy of jazz improvisation as a useful metaphor to understand and implement features that contribute to excellent service performances.Design/methodology/approach – The paper begins by presenting services as performances that often require flexibility and adaptability in their enactment. It then offers the metaphor of jazz improvisation as a means to comprehend and communicate the dynamics of such flexibility and adaptability. Jazz elements are used to illustrate their application to service delivery issues.Practical implications – Similar to jazz, services deal with complex and real time delivery circumstances; this makes services prone to uncertainty at the service encounter. Lessons from jazz offer service managers guidelines for improvisation by each player in their ensemble that can enable them to adapt to customers and produce a coherent and cohesive performance.Originality/value – The jazz improvisation metaphor offers a template and gui...

An experimental examination of mood effects on retrieval and evaluation of advertisement and brand information

To ascertain the effect of mood on information retrieval and evaluation of advertisements and brands, subjects were induced into one of three moods (positive, neutral, or negative) via a modified Velten procedure 72 hours after they were exposed to five fictitious advertisements. While delayed positive and negative mood states had opposite effects on memory-based recall of information, with subjects in the positive mood condition recalling significantly more information than those in the negative one, they had no significant effect on ad or brand evaluation. Recall data are consistent with previous reports in the literature and evaluation data can be explained according to the information processing goals of subjects as described by Keller (1991) or Srull (1990). Thus, it appears that inducing people into positive moods as much as 72 hours after they have seen an ad for a product can have a significant impact on their memory for ad copy.