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Owing to increased competition resulting from a decade of deregulation of the financial services industry, banks find themselves faced with the task of differentiating their product as a method for attracting new customers. The importance of bank image is examined as a competitive strategy for increasing customer traffic flow. A survey of 60 business undergraduates and 46 MBA students measured attitudes relating to bank size, atmosphere, innovativeness, and attributes relating to good service. Some significant differences in response by certain demographic characteristics were also measured. Implications of the findings and suggestions for further research are provided.

This paper develops from the constructivistic premise that our reality is a computation rather than a representation. Provides a constructive critique on the rigid psychopathological classifications used in mental health that end up creating a conditioned self‐confirming reality.

Proposes to present an approach, which moves away from the traditional rigid categorizing definitions of mental disorders, to a constructivist perspective that considers human problems as dysfunctional systems of perception and reaction to reality.

Provides literature that demonstrates how humans use interpretative tools to give order and definition to the world around them, but most often, end up forgetting that all their classifications, theories, tests and so forth, are mere human inventions. Presents various distinctive scientific research which evidence how those who are invested with the power of diagnosing mental sanity or insanity, are often trapped in their own theories and resulting diagnostic practice.

This paper puts forward the need in replacing a rigid deterministic model by an elastic and self‐corrective constructive‐strategic model of knowledge and intervention that guarantees the real efficacy and effectiveness of therapy.

Welcome to the new section of the Journal entitled News and Views. This section will include practitioner papers, news, events, conference reports, calls for papers, trend summaries, statistics, working papers etc. Submissions are invited from both academic and industry sources.

Existing research on demographic stereotypes of employees suggests that ethnicity and gender are important determinants of consumer perceptions and behaviors. Based on the Stereotype Content Model and the Role Congruity Theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of ethnicity and gender stereotypes on management-level service failures in a US context.

Adopting a 2 (ethnicity: Caucasian vs Hispanic) × 2 (gender: male vs female) between-subjects design, two studies were conducted with US consumers to test whether a double whammy effect of ethnicity and gender exists for management-level, but not line-level, service failures.

The results of this study suggest that Hispanic female managers suffer from a double whammy effect due to ethnic and gender-based stereotyping in the USA. Furthermore, the findings indicate that the serial mediation via competence perceptions and blame attributions are the underlying psychological mechanism of this effect. As predicted, occupational status functions as a boundary factor to the double whammy effect.

The findings of this paper contribute to the service management literature by examining the role of demographic characteristics in influencing US consumers’ responses to management-level service failures.

The proliferation of the internet and world wide web (WWW) in recent years has resulted in the creation of new social and marketing spaces, and a new form of interaction and identity formation. This paper aims to investigate this phenomenon.

Whilst cost benefits and profit derivation from the internet and other hypermedia mediated communication environments have been the focus of much research, the majority of these assessments have left many assumptions unarticulated. Questions of how contemporary communication content and interactivity is different from the singular “one‐to‐many” communication models have been avoided in this research. This paper investigates these deficiencies and goes on to suggest how academics and practitioners can realign their thinking in the light of these findings.

Computer mediated marketing environments provide organisations with a medium that can be used to deliver content in a variety of ways to consumers. This capability highlights the distinction between the information in marketing communication and the vehicle used to deliver the information: that is, content differs from communication.

The paper highlights how versatility of the internet as an instrument for mediated communication means that organisations can integrate different modalities of marketing communications into a strategy that combines on‐line and off‐line tactics to meet strategic objectives.

The adaptability of the theory of integrative levels to a generalised classification scheme is questioned in that its hypotheses have not been adequately developed and confirmed. Application to the humanistic disciplines seems particularly inappropriate. Relationships between nineteenth century philosophical systems are traced and the Classification Research Group's dependence upon James Duff Brown's classification scheme is emphasized. It is suggested that not enough cognisance has been taken of twentieth century relativistic thinking in which space‐time is treated as a continuum.

‘I now realize that the ability to manage a company is not enough by itself when you come up against the complexities you meet when a company's operations cross frontiers.’ So says Don Spencer, one of that rapidly‐growing new breed—the international managers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of salary raises and employees’ perception of these salary raises on their intended retention and turnover. By using a survey data set from a representative American public university, this study investigates a novel hypothesis that faculty perceptions of salary raises, relative to their perceptions of other faculty members’ assessments of the raises, influence their intended labor supply.

Using both ordered probit and OLS modeling frameworks, the authors focus on the impact of salary raises and the relative perception of these raises on intended labor supply behavior. They explore a hypothesis that a mismatch between one’s ranking of the salary raise and the perception of others’ rankings causes dissatisfaction.

The results provide evidence that salary raises themselves are effective monetary tools to reduce intended turnover; however, the results also suggest that relative deprivation as a comparison of one’s own perceptions of a salary raise with others affects employee intended retention. The authors find that employees who have less favorable perceptions of salary adjustments, compared to what they believe their colleagues think, are more likely to consider another employer, holding their own perception of raises constant. Conversely, more favorable views of salary raises, compared to how faculty members think other’s perceived the salary raises, does not have a statistically significant impact on intended retention.

This is the first study that explores an employee’s satisfaction with salary raises relative to perceptions of other employees’ satisfaction with their own salary raises, and the resulting intended labor supply in an American university. The results indicate that monetary rewards in the form of salary raises do impact faculty intended retention; however, perception of fairness of these salary raises is more important than the actual raises. Given the high cost of job turnover, these findings suggest that employers may benefit from devoting resources toward ensuring that salary- and raise-determining procedures are generally perceived by the vast majority of employees as being fair.

Reviews how children change from birth of eight years of age, in terms of perception, conceptual powers, memory and language, and relates this knowledge to responsible marketing. Deals with each of these cognitive development aspects in turn: perception and attention involve ignoring irrelevant stimuli, conceptual development involves seeing the similarities between, for instance Coke and Pepsi, memory development means faster processing capacity, and language development is much faster in terms of comprehension than of production. Applies these child development findings to child marketing: gaining children’s visual attention means giving them enough variety in images, product awareness depends on conceptual development, knowing that children understand more than they say means that quite complicated phrases can be used in adverts, and the difference between memory precision and recall requires that advertising messages must be recalled by children at the appropriate time.

Considers the interest shown by European retailers in the markets of South East Asia and places this interest within the wider context of East Asian markets. European retailers’ interest in the region has been a feature of recent developments in international retailing. Charts the growing interest in the region and the relative attractions of different markets and critically evaluates the assumptions that are made about East Asian markets and suggests that a far more rigorous set of criteria should be employed when evaluating markets in the region. Evaluates the implications of the recent financial and economic crises on European retail investment in the region.