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This paper aims to examine how external marketing messages, which are generally used to convey company and product information to external target audiences, influence job attitudes and behaviors of salespeople.

The study is conducted based on survey data on 348 salespeople working at regional banks in the Midwestern USA. The relationships among salespeople’s perceptions of marketing messages (i.e. in terms of value incongruence and claim inaccuracy), organizational cynicism, job attitudes (i.e. organizational commitment and job satisfaction) and behaviors (i.e. extra-role performance) are empirically tested.

Salespeople’s perceptions of value incongruence and claim inaccuracy of marketing messages heighten organizational cynicism, which in turn negatively impacts on organizational commitment, job satisfaction and extra-role performance. Also, inaccurate claim directly decreases job attitudes and behaviors.

The results are limited to salespeople in financial institutions, and future research should investigate perceptions of non-customer contact employees in other industry contexts. Future investigation may also include objective performance metrics and consumer satisfaction ratings.

Service firms should strive to align salespeople’s perceptions of marketing messages with firms’ intended goals from those messages.

Drawing on attitude theory and perspectives from sales literature, social psychology and organizational behavior literature, in the first of such investigations, the authors studied the impact of external marketing messages on salespeople’s cynicism, job attitudes and behaviors.

The purpose of this research is to investigate differences in customer perceptions of quality between credence and experience industries. The paper expands on the implications of national versus local firms and does so within a franchise context.

Based on a sample of 349 consumers, three core SERVQUAL dimensions (reliability, security and tangibility) were analyzed to determine customer perceptions of quality. A mixed-factorial designed was used to evaluate different scenarios of purchasing intentions, measuring the main and interactive effects of service type and criticality among franchised and local brands.

Significant differences were found in customer perceptions of quality between experience- and credence-based services. A significant moderating effect of the level of criticality was shown to play an important role in customers’ perceptions.

This experimental laboratory study highlights the importance for managers to understand the differences in perceptions of customers when dealing between service types and acting under conditions of varying criticality. This holds true for both franchised and non-franchised businesses.

This study offers one of the first investigations of customer perceptions of quality in specific industry types (i.e. credence and experience) within a franchise system. Depending on the industry type, customers have different expectations of quality. The authors offer several specific ways in which managers can use this knowledge to their advantage.