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Services marketing research continues to be largely focused on firms’ reactive interactions for recovering from service failure rather than on proactive customer interactions that may prevent service failure from occurring in the first place. Building on previous studies that assess the efficacy of implementing proactive interaction in service provision contexts, the purpose of this paper is to compare the influences of proactive interaction to prevent service failure and reactive interaction to correct service failure on customer emotion and patronage behavior. Since proactive interaction for service failure prevention is a relatively underexplored and resource-intensive approach, the authors also assess the moderating influences of customer and firm-related characteristics.

The study hypotheses are tested with survey data from two scenario-based experiments conducted in a retail setting.

The findings reveal that customers prefer service providers that take the initiative to get to them before they have to initiate contact for themselves. The findings also identify the moderating influences of relationship quality, situational involvement, and contact person status and motive.

The research contributes to the development of service provision theory and practice by expanding on previous studies which report that proactive efforts to prepare customers for the adverse effects of service failure are favorably received. The results also shed light on moderating factors that may further inform the exploitation of resource-intensive proactive interaction for service failure prevention. An agenda is proposed to stimulate future research on proactive customer interaction to prevent service failure in service provision contexts.

The purpose of this study is to explore consumers’ overall attitude toward relationship marketing and to determine the influence of consumers’ overall attitude on consumers’ intentions and behaviors. Many services companies practice relationship marketing and customer relationship management. Although the benefits and drawbacks of relationship marketing for consumers have been established, little is known about whether consumers have a relatively positive or negative attitude toward relationship marketing practices.

This research investigates consumers’ attitudes toward relationship marketing using a national survey of 245 consumers and a survey of 417 consumers living in the southern region of the USA.

Although approximately 70 per cent of our national consumer sample had a somewhat positive attitude toward relationship marketing, about 30 per cent had a somewhat negative or neutral attitude. Furthermore, approximately 39 per cent of consumers in the study would choose a company that does not engage in relationship marketing over a company that does. The results also indicate that consumers’ overall attitude toward relationship marketing impacts their likelihood to respond favorably to specific relationship marketing tactics.

Some limitations should be noted. First and not uncommon to most survey research in marketing, the relationships between constructs in this study may be inflated because of common methods bias. Second, this research reports the results from two studies. Although one of the studies represents a national sample, additional research using the scales developed in this research is needed.

This research indicates that consumers’ attitudes toward relationship marketing impacts their willingness to engage in relationships with service companies and their response to specific relationship marketing tactics. Because consumer attitudes toward relationship marketing vary, companies should consider segmenting their customer base using this information.

This study extends previous research by using quantitative techniques to measure consumers’ overall attitudes toward relationship marketing and assessing the influence of those attitudes on intentions and behaviors.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of retailer service culture. A service culture is the customer‐centric culture aimed at exceeding customer expectations and creating superior customer value through the development of service and related performance competencies.

In this research, surveys were conducted with key decision makers in various retail positions across the USA to develop a customer service‐based measure of service culture and test it against traditional retail management performance outcomes.

The results of this research demonstrate that service culture is a unidimensional construct and is positively related to increases in market performance and customer perceptions of quality for the retailer.

Service culture provides retailers with a new perspective to examine their service orientation internally. Additionally, service culture extends to the relationships that retailers develop with their suppliers.

Examining retailing from a customer service perspective is becoming increasingly important as marketing research shifts its focus from being product‐centered to more service‐centered. In an increasingly turbulent economy, retailers have to create value propositions that provide customers with higher levels of customer service than ever before. This research develops a new construct that explores how retailers can incorporate service values in their overall culture. Additionally, this research validates the measure for future researchers to continue this path of study.

Shoppers often shop for and purchase products for other individuals during the course of routine shopping experiences. The purpose of this study is to investigate differences in the shopping trip based on whether the shopper is purchasing a product for him/herself, purchasing a product for someone else’s use that is not intended as a gift and gift purchases.

This research utilizes a survey of shoppers to test the proposed hypotheses.

The results of the study indicate differences in positive affect, flow, fantasy, satisfaction, hedonic shopping value and utilitarian shopping value across the three groups of shoppers. Individuals shopping for themselves generally have the lowest overall shopping trip outcomes, followed by those shopping for a non-gift product for another person. Those making gift purchases have highest shopping trip outcomes.

While existing shopping research generally assumes the shopper is making a purchase for him/herself, this study shows previous research by showing differences in the shopping trip based on who the shopper is making a purchase for, either him/herself or someone else. Additionally, this research also shows differences between shoppers making gift and non-gift purchases for another person.

This paper aims to revisit the 1998 paper (“Why do customers switch […]”) published in this journal with the goal of documenting research progress since then and identifying gaps still present in the knowledge base on the relevant key issues.

The method is literature review, theoretical scrutiny and critical reflections on the findings of the research studies over the past two decades that deal with customer satisfaction, loyalty and switching behaviors, with particular emphasis on service businesses.

The core issue of why satisfaction may not explain loyalty has been examined by positing other co-predictors and moderators of loyalty such as relationship quality, price value, trust, image, etc. These predictors have been found significant, implying that satisfaction is not the only driver of customer loyalty. Additionally, other drivers of switching and staying behavior have been established such as attraction of the alternatives and switching costs, respectively. This paper points out, however, that the gains of the new research literature are attenuated due to assumption of linearity in the loyalty effects of satisfaction and due to a lack of separate analyses of customer segments who defy the satisfaction–loyalty logic.

The relevant literature is so vast that any account of it within the scope of this paper had to be by design delimited. The paper not only sampled the literature selectively but also summarized the principal findings of the selected papers over-simplistically. Interested readers must get a firsthand read of the reviewed literature.

The spotlight on the nonlinearity implies that practitioners should analyze customer data separately for customer segments that experience low, moderate and high satisfaction, and also separately for segments that show the expected positive satisfaction–loyalty relationship versus those who would defect despite being satisfied.

Against the backdrop where most academic as well as industry research had presumed a positive loyalty effect of satisfaction, the 1998 paper drew attention to segments of consumers who exhibited the contrarian loyalty behavior. The present paper shines a light on that topic with even sharper focus, highlighting six unaddressed issues that must frame future research.

The purpose of this study is to explore decision-making of elementary teachers (n = 5) specific to US/American history content and curricular resources. More specifically for this study, the author asks the following broad research question: When presented with a collection of social studies instructional resources, how do elementary teachers describe the choices they do make/may make?

In this comparative case study, fifth-grade teachers were interviewed using verbal protocol methodology, they discussed their curriculum, teaching and instructional decisions as each was presented with history/social studies resources associated with newly adopted state standards.

Findings indicate these elementary teachers have professional freedom to make instructional decisions in the ways they interpreted the standards, design instruction and select materials for social studies.

This study contributes to and extends the research in elementary social studies. Teachers' voices and decisions are presented as intellectual and pedagogical actions associated with teaching elementary school social studies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how shoppers’ expectations regarding the amount of search and disconfirmation of these search expectations affect outcomes of the shopping trip.

A survey of shoppers is used to test the proposed hypotheses.

Survey results indicate that search disconfirmation is conceptually distinct from but related to search effort and search regret. The results show that negative search disconfirmation mediates the relationship between search effort and shopper satisfaction, hedonic and utilitarian shopping value, choice confidence, search regret and negative word-of-mouth intent.

The findings underscore that search effort itself is not negative for shoppers. However, when search effort is perceived as excessive compared to shoppers’ expectations, negative retail outcomes can occur. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

The current work reviews all retailing articles published in four prominent retailing journals – Journal of Retailing, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, and International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research – in the 2009-2015 period, picking up where Runyan and Hyun (2009) left off. The purpose of this paper is to identify leading authors and institutions in retailing research based on overall impact.

Content analysis/literature review/descriptive research.

In total, 1,392 articles were published during this time period, and through a procedure of weights and adjustments for author count, journal impact, journal quality, and journal publishing opportunity, the findings reveal that research collaboration is highly prevalent, as evidenced by the high number of multi-authored papers and cross-university/international partnerships. Additionally, some authors and institutions remain influential, while others have emerged as highly influential in the last seven years. This shows the dynamic nature of the field and the need to remain active in quality publishing.

Scholars must understand that several factors influence impact judgments, which cannot be assessed using raw counts alone. Journal quality, impact, and publishing opportunity as well as author counts are important elements to consider.

These reviews are vital to the field in that they provide status updates on scholarship, so these reviews should be done periodically. Additionally, the findings in this paper provide a more holistic understanding of research impact and permit better assessment for scholars and administrators.

This paper aims to propose an original model of cultural intelligence (CQ), global identity and consumer willingness to buy foreign products. Previous research has discussed the relationships between CQ and global identity but only in the context of multi-cultural management teams. The research presented here proposes a model that is applicable to consumer marketing.

Online surveys are used to collect data from the USA with a snowball sampling technique and from the UK with panel data. A structural equation model (SEM) is estimated in analysis of moment structures 25 and Hayes bootstrap mediation tests are used to test the hypotheses.

The SEM results show that global identity influences motivational CQ, motivational CQ influences cognitive, metacognitive and behavioral CQ and cognitive and behavioral CQ influence consumer willingness to buy foreign products. Results from Hayes Bootstrap mediation tests show that motivational CQ mediates the relationships between global identity and the other three CQ dimensions.

The findings imply that firms can gauge and enhance consumer CQ levels by investigating or influencing levels of global identity; managers can influence or gauge consumer metacognitive, cognitive and behavioral CQ through motivational CQ; and managers can target consumers with high cognitive and behavioral CQ levels when marketing foreign products.

This paper not only provides a deeper understanding of the relationships between global identity and cultural intelligence but also incorporates CQ in a consumer context. Previous research has only discussed CQ in the context of managers.

This paper aims to use utilitarian benefits, hedonic benefits and corporate social responsibility to influence the consumer’s sense of brand identity and brand trust in social enterprise products and, thus, favourably affect repurchase intention.

This study dispatched 430 questionnaires in Taiwan. The top six social enterprises in the organic food industry in Taiwan that accounted for 84.0% of total green organic stores and they were selected for field investigation. This study used structural equation modelling.

The main path indicates that corporate social responsibility has a largely positive effect going through brand identity and brand trust, and then affecting the decision to repurchase. Therefore, the image of` corporate social responsibility was the greatest driving force. The secondary path indicated that utilitarian benefits positively affected brand identity and brand trust, which, in turn, positively affected repurchase intention. Therefore, utilitarian benefits were the secondary driving force of repurchasing social enterprise products.

This study indicates that social enterprises need to carry out effective corporate social responsibility to create a sense of strong brand trust in consumers’ minds. Empirical results can benefit social marketers for their product launches and promotions. Social enterprises can realize consumer differentiation preferences. With the effective grasp the information of consumer perception, the social marketers can turn passive into active and catch the marketing opportunities by the brand identity and trust to the content of the marketing programs design.

The novelty of this study is to propose an identity-repurchase intention (IRI) model, based on consumer information processing lens and self-congruency theory, to investigate the social enterprise perspective.