Anita Whiting, David L. Williams and Joe Hair
The purpose of this study is to investigate motives for engaging in electronic word of mouth (eWOM) about organizations on social media sites. This study explores motives for…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to investigate motives for engaging in electronic word of mouth (eWOM) about organizations on social media sites. This study explores motives for posting positive eWOM and motives for posting negative eWOM. It also investigates whether existing WOM frameworks adequately capture consumers’ motives for spreading eWOM within the context of social media. This study seeks to confirm established motives in literature while also identifying new motives specific to social media.
Design/methodology/approach
A qualitative study was conducted using the critical incident technique. In all, 64 positive incidents and 60 negative incidents were analyzed.
Findings
This study provides a typology for understanding consumers’ motivations for engaging in positive and negative WOM within the context of social media. Four new motives for sharing eWOM are identified; eight established WOM motives are re-confirmed; and new subcategories for eWOM motives are proposed. The study also finds that further refinement of WOM motives and scales within a social media context is needed.
Research limitations/implications
An integrated conceptual framework of both positive and negative motives is developed to illustrate a more comprehensive model of motives of eWOM within social media. Managerial implications for managing negative eWOM and amplifying positive eWOM are discussed. A limitation is that the study is exploratory in nature.
Originality/value
This study identifies new motives for sharing eWOM, re-labels existing WOM and eWOM motives with more descriptive and comprehensive titles and confirms established WOM and eWOM motives within the context of social media. This study is conducted across multiple firms and industries, leading to more generalizable results.
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Rawi Roongruangsee, Paul Patterson and Liem Viet Ngo
The inherent characteristics of professional services (i.e. high in credence properties, customized and featuring information asymmetry) often cause difficulties for clients to…
Abstract
Purpose
The inherent characteristics of professional services (i.e. high in credence properties, customized and featuring information asymmetry) often cause difficulties for clients to confidently evaluate technical outcomes before, during or even after service delivery. This results in considerable client psychological discomfort. This study aims to blend a revised social interaction model and uncertainty reduction theory to investigate the role that service provider’s interpersonal communication style plays in establishing client psychological comfort and satisfaction in a health-care context.
Design/methodology/approach
The study draws on cross-sectional data collected from 355 hospital patients following visiting a physician plus an experimental design in an Eastern culture (Thailand).
Findings
The study reveals three key findings. First, an affiliative communication style is positively associated with psychological comfort, but not so a dominant communications style. When both styles are presented, the high-affiliative style overshadows the low-dominant style and creates the highest psychological comfort. Second, clients’ perceptions of professional’s affiliative and dominant styles influence psychological comfort differentially under varying conditions of clients’ cognitive social capital, collectivist value-orientation but not service criticality. Third, a competing model suggests psychological comfort acts as a partial mediator between affiliative communication style and satisfaction.
Research limitations/implications
To generalize the findings, further studies might be conducted in other professional services and in individualist Western cultures.
Practical implications
The findings have important managerial implications for the appropriate use of communication style to build psychological comfort and engage clients of professional services firms.
Social implications
The findings shed light on the important role of an everyday social function – interpersonal communications and how this impacts client psychological comfort and satisfaction.
Originality/value
This is one of the few studies in a services context that examines the impact of professionals’ communications style. Moreover, it examines the impact of cultural value-orientation, cognitive social capital, service criticality in moderating the communications style – client psychological comfort relationship.
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Cesare Amatulli, Matteo De Angelis, Giovanni Pino and Sheetal Jain
This paper investigates why and when messages regarding unsustainable luxury products lead to negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) through a focus on the role of guilt, need to warn…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper investigates why and when messages regarding unsustainable luxury products lead to negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) through a focus on the role of guilt, need to warn others and consumers' cultural orientation.
Design/methodology/approach
Three experiments test whether messages describing unsustainable versus sustainable luxury manufacturing processes elicit guilt and a need to warn others and whether and how the need to warn others affects consumers' NWOM depending on their cultural orientation.
Findings
Consumers experience guilt in response to messages emphasizing the unsustainable (vs sustainable) nature of luxury products. In turn, guilt triggers a need to warn other consumers, which leads to NWOM about the luxury company. Furthermore, the results suggest that two dimensions of Hofstede's model of national culture – namely individualism/collectivism and masculinity/femininity – moderate the effect of the need to warn others on NWOM.
Practical implications
Luxury managers should design appropriate strategies to cope with consumers' different reactions to information regarding luxury brands' unsustainability. Managers should be aware that the risk of NWOM diffusion may be higher in countries characterized by a collectivistic and feminine orientation rather than an individualistic and masculine orientation.
Originality/value
Consumer reaction to unsustainable luxury, especially across different cultural groups, is a neglected area of investigation. This work contributes to this novel area of research by investigating NWOM stemming from unsustainable luxury manufacturing practices in different cultural contexts.
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Yam B. Limbu, C. Jayachandran, Barry J. Babin and Robin T. Peterson
Previous studies that examined the role of empathy and nonverbal immediacy on business-to-business (B2B) salesperson performance is limited in scope and yielded inconclusive…
Abstract
Purpose
Previous studies that examined the role of empathy and nonverbal immediacy on business-to-business (B2B) salesperson performance is limited in scope and yielded inconclusive evidence. Grounded in Plank and Greene’s (1996) framework of salesperson effectiveness, this paper aims to empirically investigate the mediating role of adaptive selling behavior through which empathy and nonverbal immediacy influence sales force performance and the form of empathy (cognitive or affective) that has the most beneficial role in improving relationship (versus outcome) salesperson performance.
Design/methodology/approach
Using cross-sectional data that were collected from 422 pharmaceutical sales representatives, this study used structural equation modeling to test the hypothesized relationships.
Findings
Adaptive selling behavior mediates the effect of perspective taking empathy and empathic concern on relationship performance. However, the impact of empathy on outcome performance is not significant through adaptive selling behavior, but perspective taking empathy has a direct influence on outcome performance. Contrary to expectations, nonverbal immediacy is not mediated by adaptive selling behavior but has a direct and positive impact on relationship performance.
Research limitations/implications
The results of this study have several implications for recruitment, training and assessment of salespeople in a B2B context. Based on the empirical evidence, it is highlighted that firms may use different forms of empathy and nonverbal cues to promote adaptive selling behavior that impact sales force performance (i.e. outcome or relationship).
Originality/value
To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study which simultaneously examines the mediating role of adaptive selling behavior in the relationship between three antecedent variables that relate to sales force empathy and nonverbal communication (i.e. perspective taking empathy, empathic concern and nonverbal immediacy) and two aspects of B2B sales performance (relationship and outcome).
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Cynthia Webster and D.S. Sundaram
This study aims to examine the relationship between service providers' communication style and customer satisfaction and how service criticality and nature moderate this…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to examine the relationship between service providers' communication style and customer satisfaction and how service criticality and nature moderate this relationship.
Design/methodology/approach
The methodology included systematic sampling of consumers of professional services.
Findings
Although a service provider's communication style significantly relates to customer satisfaction, the relationship is moderated by service criticality and service nature. To enhance customer satisfaction, communication characterized by high affiliation is more important in high‐ than in low‐critical situations. Low dominance in communication is more important in low‐critical situations, but the level of dominance is unimportant in high‐critical situations. On the other hand, high affiliation is more important for credence services, but the level of affiliation is unimportant for experience services. Low dominance is more important for experience services, and high dominance is more important for credence services.
Research limitations/implications
The findings imply that service firm managers need to train their employees to consider the criticalness and the nature of the service being sold and then how to adjust their communication style accordingly. Because the research reported here focuses on professional services, future research needs to determine the effects of communication style on customer satisfaction for other types of services.
Originality/value
In conclusion, the findings generally support the theoretical orientations of the social interaction model and script theory in that there is a positive relationship between customers' satisfaction with service providers' communication style and with the service rendered. However, service criticality and the service nature need to be considered when deciding on the optimum service employee communication style.
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Silvia Ranfagni and Massimo Rosati
The chapter proposes to investigate online reputation of hospitality brands and its measurements. Brand reputation is generally defined as an overall appraisal of a company by its…
Abstract
The chapter proposes to investigate online reputation of hospitality brands and its measurements. Brand reputation is generally defined as an overall appraisal of a company by its stakeholders, which is the result of the company's past actions and predictions about the company's future (Ferguson, Deephouse, & Ferguson, 2000). Being viewed as the opinion shared among a group of stakeholders (Dowling, 2008), it plays an important role in the tourism industry. With the progress of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), reviews and user-generated contents of destinations and of hospitality companies together with the related emerging brand reputation can influence consumers' behaviors and choices. Brand reputation analysis could be more useful in the hospitality brand management when integrated with brand image and brand identity analysis, mainly because in tourism businesses and destinations, brands are typically affected by an inherent fragility determined by the service nature of products (Casarin, 1996). According to Biel (1991), the meanings that consumers assign to a brand are synthesized into brand associations formed by the components perceived to underlie the brand's image. As well as brand reputation, strong, positive and unique associations reinforce a brand and increase its equity that requires significant internal brand identity efforts, which should create a corresponding brand image through integration in overall marketing programmes (Keller, 2003). It makes sense to develop an analytical research approach that compares online brand reputation (OBR) with brand association matching as a measure of the alignment between brand identity and brand image in hospitality companies. This comparative analysis emerging from brand reputation, brand image and brand identity analysis can reveal divergent situations (i.e., high brand reputation and low brand association matching) and orient brand managers in reviewing online brand communication. Brand reputation and brand image analysis will be contextualized in an online community as a social setting that is considered to be a new type of market (Muniz & O'Guinn, 2001). We focus on hospitality online communities populated by consumers and other actors such as influencers and bloggers: their brand perception could be separately compared with brand identity that we will extract from company communications including presentational information and brand-related press releases found on websites, nonfinancial narrative from annual reports, and interviews with managers published in mainstream media sources. In our analysis we will focalize on a cluster of luxury hospitality companies integrating a netnographic and text-mining techniques. We will use both the techniques in order to (1) extract and study brand associations in terms of brand reputation, brand image, and brand identity; (2) develop indicators of brand reputation and brand association matching; and (3) discuss their utility in the management of the hospitality company brands.
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D.S. Sundaram and Cynthia Webster
Although the verbal components of service encounters have been investigated, the nonverbal aspects of employee‐customer interactions have remained virtually unexplored in the…
Abstract
Although the verbal components of service encounters have been investigated, the nonverbal aspects of employee‐customer interactions have remained virtually unexplored in the marketing literature. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to explore the importance of service employees’ nonverbal communication during service interactions. Specifically, a conceptual model is presented that links nonverbal communication (kinesics, paralanguage, proxemics, and physical appearance), customer affect, and consumers’ evaluations of service providers (with respect to credibility, friendliness, competence, empathy, courtesy, and trustworthiness). Further, the importance of nonverbal elements is discussed and managerial implications are given.
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Nika Mozafari, Welf H. Weiger and Maik Hammerschmidt
Chatbots are increasingly prevalent in the service frontline. Due to advancements in artificial intelligence, chatbots are often indistinguishable from humans. Regarding the…
Abstract
Purpose
Chatbots are increasingly prevalent in the service frontline. Due to advancements in artificial intelligence, chatbots are often indistinguishable from humans. Regarding the question whether firms should disclose their chatbots' nonhuman identity or not, previous studies find negative consumer reactions to chatbot disclosure. By considering the role of trust and service-related context factors, this study explores how negative effects of chatbot disclosure for customer retention can be prevented.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper presents two experimental studies that examine the effect of disclosing the nonhuman identity of chatbots on customer retention. While the first study examines the effect of chatbot disclosure for different levels of service criticality, the second study considers different service outcomes. The authors employ analysis of covariance and mediation analysis to test their hypotheses.
Findings
Chatbot disclosure has a negative indirect effect on customer retention through mitigated trust for services with high criticality. In cases where a chatbot fails to handle the customer's service issue, disclosing the chatbot identity not only lacks negative impact but even elicits a positive effect on retention.
Originality/value
The authors provide evidence that customers will react differently to chatbot disclosure depending on the service frontline setting. They show that chatbot disclosure does not only have undesirable consequences as previous studies suspect but can lead to positive reactions as well. By doing so, the authors draw a more balanced picture on the consequences of chatbot disclosure.
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Hongxia Lin, Meng Zhang and Dogan Gursoy
This study aims to examine the relationship among nonverbal customer-to-customer interactions (CCIs), positive and negative emotions, customer satisfaction and loyalty intentions.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to examine the relationship among nonverbal customer-to-customer interactions (CCIs), positive and negative emotions, customer satisfaction and loyalty intentions.
Design/methodology/approach
The conceptual model that was developed using the stimulus-organism-response theoretical framework was tested using a sample of 583 consumers.
Findings
The results show that kinesics and paralanguage positively affect customers’ positive emotions while proxemics, paralanguage and physical appearance negatively influence their negative emotions. Further, both positive and negative emotions are found to have significant impacts on customer satisfaction and loyalty intentions.
Research limitations/implications
Theoretically, this study not only contributes to the existing servicescape and customer experience literature but also expands nonverbal interaction research in the hospitality management field. However, results may have limited generalizability to other service settings and other cultural contexts.
Originality/value
This study is one of the first to investigate the impact of nonverbal CCIs on service experiences.
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Vasim Ahmad, Lalit Goyal, Tilottama Singh and Jugander Kumar
This chapter explores the significance of blockchain technology in protecting data for intelligent applications across various industries. Blockchain is a distributed ledger that…
Abstract
This chapter explores the significance of blockchain technology in protecting data for intelligent applications across various industries. Blockchain is a distributed ledger that ensures the immutability and security of transactions. Given the increasing need for security measures in industries, understanding blockchain technology is crucial for preparing for its future applications.
This chapter aims to examine the use of blockchain technology across industries and presents a compilation of existing and upcoming blockchain technologies for intelligent applications. The methodology involves reviewing research to understand the security needs of different industries and providing an overview of methods used to enhance multi-institutional and multidisciplinary research in areas like the financial system, smart grid, and transportation system.
The findings highlight the benefits of blockchain networks in providing transparency, trust, and security for industries. The Responsible Sourcing Blockchain Network (RSBN) is an example that utilizes blockchain's decentralized ledger to track sustainable sourcing from mine to final product. This information can be shared with auditors, corporate governance organizations, and customers.
The practical implications of this chapter are significant, serving as a valuable resource for industries concerned with identity privacy, traceability, immutability, transparency, auditability, and security. Understanding and implementing blockchain technology can address the growing need for secure and intelligent applications, ensuring data protection and enhancing trust in various sectors.