Search results

This paper aims to document how AI has changed the way consumers make decisions and propose how that change impacts services marketing, service research and service management.

A review of the literature, documentation of sales and customer service experiences support the evolution of bot-driven consumer decision-making, proposing the bot-driven service platform as a key component of the service experience.

Today the focus is on convenience, the less time and effort, the better. The authors propose that AI has taken convenience to a new level for consumers. By using bots as their service of choice, consumers outsource their decisions to algorithms, hence give little attention to traditional consumer decision-making models and brand emphasis. At the moment, this is especially true for low involvement types of decisions, but high involvement decisions are on the cusp of delegating to AI. Therefore, management needs to change how they view consumers’ decision-making-processes and how services are being managed.

In an AI-convenience driven service economy, the emphasis needs to be on search ranking or warehouse stock, rather than the traditional drivers of brand values such as service quality. Customer experience management will shift from interaction with products and services toward interactions with new service platforms such as AI, bots. Hence, service marketing, as the authors know it might be in decline and be replaced by an efficient complex attribute computer decision-making model.

The change in consumer behavior leads to a change in the service marketing approach needed in the world of AI. The bot, the new service platform is now in charge of search and choice for many purchase situations.

The purpose of this paper is to create a framework for broadly understanding categories and motivations behind purchasing different counterfeit products.

Focus groups provided qualitative data from 509 counterfeit purchases incidents by 95 informants.

The most frequently mentioned motivation was the utility (35 percent) received from the good over the genuine article. The second, but negative, motivation was the perceived risk involved in the purchase (22 percent), whether it is physical or social risk. Social norms, confusion, and ethical concerns each represented about 10 percent of the motivations toward the purchase of counterfeit items. The least mentioned motivations to purchase, at less than 4 percent each, were culture, habit, and desire to explore. These factors were evident across a variety of 15 product categories, headed by electronics, such as DVDs and computer software.

Through targeting negative motivations, such as perceived physical and social risks, businesses can devise strategies from a demand side perspective to overcome the problem of counterfeit consumption.

Qualitative responses, over many product categories, provide a unique overview to the perception of counterfeit consumption. The finding that consumer ethics may depend on whether the activity benefits the society as a whole is worthy of additional discussion. The authors learn that when consumers thought their counterfeit consumption caused little or no harm, they do not see much ethical concern in their actions.

Service robots are now an integral part of people's living and working environment, making service robots one of the hot topics for service researchers today. Against that background, the paper reviews the recent service robot literature following a Theory-Context-Characteristics-Methodology (TCCM) approach to capture the state of art of the field. In addition, building on qualitative input from researchers who are active in this field, the authors highlight where opportunities for further development and growth lie.

The paper identifies and analyzes 88 manuscripts (featuring 173 individual studies) published in academic journals featured on the SERVSIG literature alert. In addition, qualitative input gathered from 79 researchers who are active in the service field and doing research on service robots is infused throughout the manuscript.

The key research foci of the service robot literature to date include comparing service robots with humans, the role of service robots' look and feel, consumer attitudes toward service robots and the role of service robot conversational skills and behaviors. From a TCCM view, the authors discern dominant theories (anthropomorphism theory), contexts (retail/healthcare, USA samples, Business-to-Consumer (B2C) settings and customer focused), study characteristics (robot types: chatbots, not embodied and text/voice-based; outcome focus: customer intentions) and methodologies (experimental, picture-based scenarios).

The current paper is the first to analyze the service robot literature from a TCCM perspective. Doing so, the study gives (1) a comprehensive picture of the field to date and (2) highlights key pathways to inspire future work.

Even though there is a noticeable market value in the mobile gaming apps industry, there has been limited research examining experiential value of gamers with respect to in-game ads in gaming apps. This study fills the void in the literature by examining factors associated with “experiential value of gamers through ads in gaming apps” as well as investigating its antecedents (cognitive and affective involvement) and consequences (positive word of mouth and intention to continue playing the mobile game).

A total of 600 valid responses from gamers was used to test the model fit, measurement and structural models, conditional probabilistic queries, and nonlinearity.

This study found that experiential value of gamers through ads in gaming apps is a second-order factor of four constructs: escapism, enjoyment, social affiliation and entertainment. Most of the structural paths between cognitive/affective involvement and dimensions of experiential value are supported. Surprisingly, only social affiliation and entertainment values predict positive word of mouth and intention to continue playing the mobile game, in a nonlinear way.

This study is the first to introduce “experiential value of gamers through ads in gaming apps”. The findings have important implications for companies to develop brand and communication strategies by leveraging specific advertisement formats and present their ads to the right audience in the right gaming apps and at the right time.

Since Islamic markets are growing substantially, there is an urgent need to gain a better understanding of how Muslim consumers perceive products from a religious perspective. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the brain responses of Muslim consumers to Halal and non-Halal products using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology.

The research model is a simplified version of the theory of planned behavior. The initial experiment began by asking participants to divide a set of images into two groups: Halal and non-Halal products. The fMRI experiment uses a blocked design approach to capture brain activities resulting from presenting the two groups of images to participants, and to record the strength of their attitudes toward purchasing the products.

Across all participants, the level of brain activation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex increased significantly when Halal images were presented to them. The same results emerged when the Halal images showed raw and cooked meat. The variations in the results may be due to the high emotional sensitivity of Muslim consumers to using religious products.

This study uses a unique approach to monitor brain activity to confirm that consumers from specific market segments respond differently to market products based on their internal beliefs. Findings from this study provide evidence that marketing managers targeting Muslim markets should consider the sensitivity of presenting products in ways that reflect religious principles, in order to gain higher acceptance in this market segment.

Although the literature reports considerable research on Muslim consumers’ behavior, most of the previous studies utilize conventional data collection approaches to target broad segments of consumers by using traditional products. This paper is the first to track the reactions of the Muslim consumer segment to specific types of market products.