i AKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii TABLE OF CONTENTS iii LIST OF TABLES xi List OF FIGURES xxi

With the objective of creating market value, wine marketers are using grape variety as a component of brands of wine linked with a commercial or region name. This strategy assumes that the consumer is able to perceive differences between varietals and possibly identify them. This experimental study aimed at measuring the ability of consumers to recognize and evaluate the typicality of three varietals: merlot, cabernet, syrah. Three groups were tested: occasional drinkers (n =17), regular drinkers (n+21) and experts (n+21). The results show that consumers are unable to differentiate between varieties, whatever their level of expertise, thereby calling into question the credibility of indicating grape variety for a wine brand, and finally on the wine market’s capacity to control the selection of varietal wines.

With the increasing focus on customer relationships and profound impact that customer’s evaluative judgements exercise on customer loyalty, it is important to uncover the directional as well as moderating influences on customer loyalty formation. A complete understanding of type and strength of the relationship and their influencers would contribute in developing a comprehensive model that may not just clearly define the form and structure of relationship for future researches but also help industries in building loyalty and rationalize marketing expenditure. The present study aims to delineate the concept and significance of customer loyalty and offers a conceptual framework involving service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. A comprehensive survey of literature explored that customer satisfaction provides a directional influence to the relationship of service quality and customer loyalty and a mediation model integrating the relationships among service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty is proposed for investigation. Furthermore, moderating effects on the service quality and customer loyalty link have been examined and four moderating variables namely, customer knowledge and expertise, price perceptions, service convenience and switching costs have been extracted from the literature. These variables need to be investigated to assess their role and strength in moderating the relationship between the two constructs. An Investigation of Mediating and Moderating Variables in Service Quality – Customer Loyalty Relationship: A Research Agenda

While there has been research on the diffusion of a particular type of innovation, few if any studies have examined the acceptance of a set of innovations (behavioral innovativeness) over time. This study using the Rasch methodology found evidence that computer hardware innovations are adopted in a particular order. The same could not be said for computer software, whose acceptance may be application based. This study applied a theoretical framework based on the diffusion of innovation literature (See Rodgers 1995). Data was collected via a telephone survey of 302 computer users. Scores obtained from Rasch analysis were used as the dependent variable (that of behavioral innovativeness) in a regression analysis, against factors such as overall innovativeness, use innovativeness, opinion leadership/acceptance, product class knowledge and use of sources of information. Determinates of the level of behavioral innovativeness were found to be personality traits of innovateness, (a willingness to trial new technology) and use innovateness (how innovatively existing information technology was used). The level of recent purchases in the last month of information technology items, a measure of leading edge use was also positively associated with acceptance of new technology. The research findings suggest that computer hardware manufacturers can assume that there is an order of acceptance of new technology and so can predict from the knowledge of existing hardware the acceptance of innovations in the future. Computer manufacturers can also effectively target early adopters of their technology given the results of this study. Rasch modeling can also be beneficial for organizations wishing to market diverse computer packages to users, as it allows a numerical scoring of a users acquisition profile or use of information technologies. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-687-7.ch013

While there has been much debate in the reference pricing literature on the most appropriate conceptualization of internal reference price used by consumers in evaluating deals, the question of whether consumers may use different internal reference prices at different stages of the purchase process has not been addressed. In this article, we hypothesize that consumers may use one type of internal reference price to form their deal attitude and another to determine their purchase intentions. We also show that different dimensions of internal reference price are used to determine deal attitude and purchase intention and that price uncertainty moderates the relationship between these internal reference prices and deal evaluation.

While pressured to release new software to market, software development organization often find themselves choosing between quality and timeliness. From a business perspective, success is determined to a significant extent by the perceptions of quality exhibited by consumers with respect to the software product being offered. In this context, we propose taxonomy of software users and design a user-centered software evaluation framework to support software quality assessment processes. An online survey is conducted for exploring software users’ perceptions of quality and the results are used to define three categories of software users. The findings of this study shed new light on the way software development organizations should perceive the relationship with their consumers and, consequently, on the way they should manage development projects. The contributions to both research and practice stem from the proposing of a new and more detailed approach to defining and measuring software system quality and its associated assessment processes.

While perceived consumer effectiveness (PCE) has consistently been linked to socially conscious attitudes, the concept appears to have been confounded with other related constructs in the empirical studies measuring its effects on behavior. In addition, the few studies which have considered the effects of PCE on reported behavior have done so only in aggregate. This research demonstrates that PCE is distinct from environmental concern and contributes uniquely to the prediction of certain pro-ecological behaviors. In addition, differences in PCE are shown to be associated with differences in demographics and political affiliation. The results suggest that motivating consumers to express their concern through actual behavior is to some extent a function of increasing their perception that individual actions do make a difference.

While many electronic commerce (EC) companies are adopting one-to-one marketing approaches using various personalization technologies to make their products and services unique for the purpose of attracting and retaining customers and improving their completion edges in the EC ecosystem, which, nevertheless, has low entrance barriers for new players to join and further intensify the competition, none or few of them consider a fundamental issue-the user's product-specific knowledge. Our research proposed to add this new domain of the customer's knowledge on appropriate target products into the personalization process as a part of the overall EC strategy for businesses. In this paper, we present our initial design for assessing the user's product-specific knowledge using the proposed innovative method for detecting it directly in a non-intrusive way without asking users to answer or fill out any types of questionnaires. Our method is based on customer's on-line navigation behaviors by analyzing their navigation patterns through pre-trained artificial neural networks. An empirical study designed for a case of EC store selling digital cameras was conducted in our research to prove the concept, and a good preliminary result was derived from the study. For the purpose of comparing the performances between the conventional approach of using questionnaire and the proposed innovative approach of navigation pattern mining, a questionnaire based approach for evaluating the user's product-specific knowledge was designed and incorporated into our knowledge level assessment system (KLAS). Our study result shows that although the pure questionnaire-based KLAS is intrusive and may not be accepted by some users, for those users willing to complete the questionnaire, the proposed navigation pattern approach can be combined with the questionnaire-based approach to create a hybrid KLAS which has a significantly improved accuracy rate in detecting the customer's product knowledge level.

While fixed price offers are quite common in the marketplace, there is limited empirical evidence that documents the effectiveness of these offers in comparison to price discounting tactics. Drawing on information processing theory we provide a conceptual framework that explains the differential impact of fixed price and price discounting tactics. The empirical study shows that consumers’ perceptions of quality and value for the product were higher when price information was presented in a fixed format (versus a discount). Furthermore, perceptions of sacrifice were higher in the discount format than the fixed price format. Overall, this study finds empirical support for the notion that fixed price formats may be more effective than price discounts.

When managers launch a new product line into a category already served, they must decide whether to launch this as a line extension or as a second brand. This research seeks to identify how this decision is influenced by the position of the original product and the options available for positioning the new product. A model of the influences on brand and line extension success is developed and used to formulate a series of competing hypotheses about the factors that influence the decisions of managers. These hypotheses are tested using survey data from producers in the Australian wine industry. The results suggest managers seek to exploit the benefits available from the transfer of attributes to the new line, and minimise the risk of cannibalisation.

What political candidates say during their campaign and when they say it are critical to their success. In three experiments, we show that abstract, “why”-laden appeals are more persuasive than concrete, “how”-laden appeals when voters' decision is temporally distant; the reverse is true when the decision is imminent, and these results are strongest among those who are politically uninformed. These effects seem to be driven by a match between temporal distance and the abstractness of the message that leads to perceptions of fluency, and the ensuing “feels right” experience yields enhanced evaluations of the focal stimulus.

We examined the issues of when, and how, consumers' prior beliefs or “theories” might bias their judgments of the association between price and quality using a task that involved taste testing orange juices. When the task was manipulated so that subjects had difficulty in comparing and contrasting the taste quality of the juices, their covariation judgments tended to be theory driven: while these judgments were somewhat sensitive to the actual price-quality relationship in the “data,” they were biased by individuals' prior beliefs about the covariation. Follow-up studies indicated that this effect was not due to an encoding bias in that subjects' prior beliefs about price and quality did not significantly distort their taste perceptions per se. Instead, when subjects found it difficult to discriminate among the stimuli with regard to taste quality, they appeared to have formed their covariation judgments by making heuristic use of their prior beliefs. Implications are discussed for the covariation judgment process and consumer learning.

We conducted a quasi-experiment through an online survey to investigate the effects of information security knowledge on users' adoption of security technologies. We found that knowledge can affect adoption decision in multiple ways. On the one hand, knowledge tends to increase a user's self-efficacy in using the technology, which in turn increases the perceived usefulness of the technology, consistent with the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). On the other hand, users who are knowledgeable about information security are less likely to come up with a poor adoption decision. These findings suggest that firms may need to use different strategies when trying to market security technologies to users with different knowledge levels. Furthermore, a firm that produces useful security technologies may wish to spend resources to educate users in order to increase their self-efficacy and their perceived usefulness of the technologies.

WARRANTY AND PRICE AS QUALITY SIGNALS: THE EFFECT OF SIGNAL CONSISTENCY AND UNEXPECTEDNESS ON PRODUCT PERCEPTION Sultan Alaswad Alenazi Old Dominion University, 2011 Co-Directors: Dr. Kiran Karande Dr. Mahesh Gopinath This dissertation investigates the effect of signal consistency/inconsistency and signal unexpectedness on a consumer's evaluation of a product. It consists of two studies. Study One examines the effect of signal consistency/inconsistency on product quality, where consistent signals are those of the same valance. Prior research has found that a positive cue not only was unable to improve product quality perception, but also had a negative effect on perceived quality when a positive cue was combined with a negative one. The results of Study One indicate that when signals are inconsistent, consumers engage in an attribution process to explain inconsistency. If consumers attribute inconsistency to persuasive motive, then perception of quality decreases. If no persuasive motive is perceived, then consumers tend to discount inconsistent signals and perceived product quality is not affected by those signals. Study One contributes to the literature in three ways. First, the study adds to our knowledge of multiple signals as it increases our understanding of the interaction among extrinsic cues, which is an under-researched area (Purohit and Srivastava 2001). Second, current literature provides adequate explanations of the disappearance of signals' effects on product quality perception; however, no explanation is available for the negative effect of signals on product quality perception, an effect documented by Boulding and Kirmani (1993). This study offers such explanation. Third, the study provides the first empirical examination of the effect of extrinsic cues on the use of persuasion knowledge. Study Two examines the effect of signal unexpectedness on perceived quality. In current literature, credibility is assumed to be based only on the existence of a bond of some kind (Boulding and Kirmani 1993). Using a reputable firm or manipulating a firm's reputation was assumed by previous research to be the primary way to obtain signal credibility (Boulding and Kirmani 1993; Price and Dawar 2002; Agarwal and Teas 2001; Miyazaki, Grewal, and Goodstein 2005). Current findings, therefore, cannot be generalized to new firms that have not established a reputation of any kind. To overcome the problem of basing signals' credibility solely on a firm's reputation, Study Two examines the effect of some signals on the credibility and effectiveness of other signals. The results of Study Two indicate that when faced with a diagnostic cue with ambiguous credibility, consumers use other cues to reach a conclusion about diagnostic cue credibility. When the diagnostic cue is determined to be credible, consumers use that cue when evaluating the product. When the diagnostic cue is determined to not be credible, consumers do not use that cue in evaluating the product. Study Two contributes to the literature in two ways. First, the study provides the first empirical examination of the effect of warranty on perceived quality when warranty is unexpectedly long. Second, this study adds to the literature by building credibility, using signals other than the firm's reputation.

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. February 2010. Major: Education, Rec/Park/Leisure Studies. Advisor: Dr. Stephen D. Ross. 1 computer file (PDF); ix, 158 pages, appendices A-D.

Tourists may rely on external information to make various decisions. By understanding the relation between information source characteristics and decision making, tourist operators can improve their communication performance and marketing efforts. Some businesses use corporate blog as a communication platform to engage their customers with the companies. Researches about the causal relationship between corporate blog and business marketing performance, yet, are scant. A theoretical model was built based on a set of distinct characteristics of corporate blogs identified from existing literature. A questionnaire survey was conducted to test this model. Based on 143 samples collected, this study found that vividness, interactivity of the blogs impact B&Bs’ lodging intention via the mediation of the sense of intimacy; and that direction of product reviews posted in the blogs directly impacts the lodging intention. Finally, managerial and academic implications are offered. Keywords—corporate blog; lodging intention; bed and breakfast

Today service providers need to mobilize all the internal energies in order to face the increasing competition and a changing market environment. Knowing the customer and the ability to provide flexible services has become crucial to building customer loyalty. With regard to technology-intensive services, Parasuraman [57] proposed that customer technology readiness (TR) has an impact on the perception of the market offering and thus has profound implications for the marketing practice of high-tech products. Focusing on employees of the semiconductor industry this study intends to investigate the following five proposals: (1) the relationship between TR and demographic traits. (2) the relationship between TR and service quality perceptions. (3) the relationship between TR and value perceptions. (4) the relationship between TR and customer loyalty. (5) the impact of TR in the quality-value-loyalty chain. Findings show that most of semiconductor industry employees are pioneers and skeptics. Pioneers place emphasis on price while explorers value quality. Education and gender are significantly related to Technology Readiness which, in turn, significantly impacts service quality and value perceptions as well as customer loyalty.

To shed further light on the correlation between consumer product involvement and consumer product knowledge, the authors examined such correlation by treating product type and product knowledge type as moderating variables. The results show that the correlation between a consumer's product involvement and objective product knowledge is higher in a utilitarian product than in a hedonic product. On the contrary, the correlation between a consumer's product involvement and subjective product knowledge is higher in a hedonic product than in a utilitarian product. The implications of these results are discussed. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

To analyze the importance of social media in consumer purchase situations, we conducted conjoint analysis on consumer decision‐making in collaboration with a fashion retailer that uses Facebook as part of their promotional and commerce system. The study involved the comparisons of consumer preference for different marketing attributes by placing them on a comparable pricing scale, or pricing out non‐monetary stimuli (e.g., ordering type, shipping, size, pictures, donation to charity, and guarantee). The research framework adopted was the Behavioral Perspective Model of consumer choice. The results of the conjoint study (Pearson's R=0.998, p>0.05) showed an inverse relation between price and utility, with higher prices corresponding to lower utility. This inverse relationship for utility also holds true for other attributes, such as shipping cost. In line with behavior analytical focus on individualization and increasing emphasis on personalized marketing, we show partial utility scores from different consumers based on altered interventions for decision‐making with scenario testing and a demand curve. We discuss the implications of conjoint analysis as an experimental survey technique for decision‐making in managerial economics and its role as an efficient pre‐testing for more direct measures on behavior in online experimental analysis of behavior. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This study tested whether, among consumers in developing countries, brands perceived as having a nonlocal country of origin, especially from the West, are attitudinally preferred to brands seen as local, for reasons not only of perceived quality but also of social status. We found that this perceived brand nonlocalness effect was greater for consumers who have a greater admiration for lifestyles in economically developed countries, which is consistent with findings from the cultural anthropology literature. The effect was also found to be stronger for consumers who were high in susceptibility to normative influence and for product categories high in social signaling value. This effect was also moderated by product category familiarity, but not by consumer ethnocentrism. The results, thus, suggest that in developing countries, a brand's country of origin not only serves as a “quality halo” or summary of product quality (cf. Han, 1989), but also possesses a dimension of nonlocalness that, among some consumers and for some product categories, contributes to attitudinal liking for status-enhancing reasons.