William B. Dodds

Managing Customer Value

This paper builds the framework for linking the established work of competitive advantage with the emerging discipline of value marketing. The outcome of this linkage is the concept of strategic value management. Strategic value management focuses on the right combinations of product quality, customer service and fair prices as the key to selling to today’s value conscious consumers. The core of the strategy stresses the firm’s ability to combine and manage these dimensions of value in a way that a strategic value advantage is created and maintained. This advantage provides long‐term profitability for the firm and satisfaction for the customer segment. Three companies that excel at strategic value management, Southwest Airlines, Hewlett‐Packard, and Nordstrom, illustrate how this advantage provides long‐term profitability for their firm and satisfaction for their customer segment. Value oriented actions have been developed to support a strategic value approach.

Market Cues Affect on Consumers’ Product Evaluations

This paper reports the effects of market cues, price and store name information, on consumers’ evaluations of quality, monetary sacrifice, and value and on their subsequent willingness to buy. Retailers use market cues as perceptual indicators to influence consumer behavior and consumers need to be better informed so that they can evaluate these cues. The study reexamines the conceptual model of Dodds, Monroe, and Grewal (1991) with emphasis on testing the quadratic relationship between the price cue and perceived value and willingness to buy. This study found that as prices increase, buyers assume increases in product quality and monetary sacrifice. However, buyers’ perceptions of the value of the goods and their willingness to buy initially increase and then decrease. The effect of store name information does not influence buyers’ perceptions of value but does influence their opinions of quality, intention to buy, and the perception of price.

Perceived Value: A Dimension of the Consumer Risk Construct

This paper examines the effects of price and brand information on consumer risk in making purchase decisions. The introduction of non‐monetary risk reinvigorates a promising research stream that has investigated the relationship of market cues and buying behavior. Research results strongly suggest that, in addition to the monetary risk of value, non‐monetary risk such as social risk can be a key moderator between product character (quality and price) and consumers’ willingness to buy. Not only do consumers make a rational tradeoff in terms of dollars and quality, but they appear to buy in terms of how they will be perceived by their friends, families and peers. Perceived value is found to be a multi‐dimensional construct that covers the specturm of financial and non‐monetary risk. The results solidify the following arguments for a market cue‐product evaluation model: depicting how buyers use price and brand information as indicators of quality and monetary sacrifice; determining how quality perceptions and monetary perceived sacrifice influence the perceptions of monetary and non‐monetary risk; and establishing the influences of purchase intentions.

An integrated model of channel conflict

Conflict in channels of distribution has been a fruitful area of academic investigation for over thirty years (Stem and Gorman 1969). In addition, it has long been recognized that conflict in a channel of distribution can be either functional or dysfunctional (Anderson and Narus, 1990; Brown and Day, 1981; Brown, Lusch and Muehling, 1983; Hunt 1995; Reve and Stem 1979; Robbins, Speh and Mayer, 1982; Schul Pride and Little, 1983; Walters, 1974. Hunt (1995) argued that a disproportionate amount of time and academic effort has been spent on dysfunctional conflict while the functional nature of conflict has been systematically ignored.

The Effects of Brand Quality and Price on the Evaluation of Brand Extensions

This study investigates the influence of brand quality and price on perceptions of quality, value, and buying intentions for brand extensions The results suggest that quality may become the basis of fit between the brand and the extension, and the extension’s price should be consistent with the quality image of the family brand.

A Pedagogical Perspective for Creating Value Via a Better Understanding of Behavioral Demand–Abstract

This paper presents the argument that classical economic theory of demand is useful, but incomplete as the primary pedagogical method of instruction when developing the notion of demand. In addition, it offers an overview of some of the topics that could/should be presented when discussing the concept of demand. It is not the intention of this paper to offer a complete description of all the topics that should be presented for a thorough understudying of demand. Rather, this paper offers a sample of some of the topics that could be presented to augment economic theory of demand with a generally accepted marketing perspective of demand. What is needed is for these perspectives to be better integrated and presented in principles of marketing textbooks so that both the students and professors have a more complete understanding of the construct demand.

A Framework for Strategic Value Management

This paper builds the framework for coupling the established work of competitive advantage with the emerging discipline of value marketing. The outcome of this linkage is the concept of strategic value management. This idea defines the marketing structure for building and maintaining a value advantage. The strategy stresses the firms ability to combine and manage the dimensions of price, product/ service quality and customer service in a way that a strategic competitive leverage is created. The outcome provides long-term profitability for the firm and satisfaction for the customer segment.

The Dominant Effects of Brand Name Information: Implications for Consumers’ Product Evaluation

The objective of this research is to replicate the market cue/product evaluation model tested by Dodds, Monroe, and Grewal (1991) with a small, tight experimental design that focuses on the issues of incremental cue information and the asymmetrical influence of the information content of the price and brand name cues. There are two key issues in the relationship between price and brand information and their individual and combined effect on product evaluations. One, the change in effect size of one cue when another cue is added as extra market information.

The Exchange Value Concept in Marketing

The concept of exchange value in marketing is a useful tool to position product and service offerings. Consumers use value to evaluate the worth of the offerings as compared to competitive offerings. From the seller’s perspective, buyer oriented pricing involves understanding consumers’ benefit needs and setting a price consistent with this value. This paper suggests that the exchange value concept is a medium for achieving a more balanced relationship between buyer and seller in the market place. Recommendations are made to move toward marketing terminology that embraces the interaction between buyer and seller as moderated by the exchange value concept.