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Consumers’ underlying motives to co-create value are important when determining their willingness to engage in co-creation activities. However, the importance of their motives may vary according to different service contexts. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the value co-creation research by investigating how the service contexts shape consumers’ motives to co-create.

This paper is based on a survey of 284 consumers. By focusing on professional vs generic services (context), based on differences in knowledge intensity and workforce professionalism, the paper pinpoints the contextual nature of consumer motives to co-create.

The results show that in professional services consumers are positively influenced to co-create by developmental motives, whereas empowerment motives have a negative impact. In turn, the positive effects of individualizing and relating motives are predominant in generic services. Willingness to co-create is a strong determinant of intended co-creation behaviors, regardless of the service type.

This study clearly shows the contextual nature of motives to co-create value, thereby questioning the generalizability of single-context studies.

This is the first paper to compare consumer motives to co-create across different service contexts.

This paper aims to examine communication channels for in‐home service provision. In particular, it aims to focus on the joint effect of two converging trends: the increase of in‐home services involving high degrees of customer participation;and the extension of the number of channels that service firms use to communicate with customers. It seeks to assess which benefits customers desire of communication channels across in‐home service production formats and how these benefit desires determine their communication channel consideration for in‐home services.

Based on a literature review a conceptual framework was constructed. Using the association pattern technique (APT), a survey of 383 customers of a Dutch energy company was carried out. The APT enabled the authors to quantify the relationship between participative in‐home service provision situations, desired communication channel benefits, and communication channel consideration.

Results show that customers focus more strongly on functionally‐ and economically‐oriented communication channel benefits in high customer participation service formats. In contrast, socially‐oriented communication channel benefits seem more appropriate when low customer participation in the provision of in‐home services is involved. The match between benefits desired by the customer and benefits provided by a communication channel is identified as a central mechanism behind communication channel consideration for in‐home services. Furthermore, evidence is found for customer heterogeneity in desired communication channel benefits and channel consideration, based on age, education, and past channel usage.

This paper contributes to the multichannel knowledge base by hypothesizing and demonstrating how specific benefit desires arise from allowing/requiring customers to participate in in‐home service provision. The study also provides valuable insight into the mechanism behind communication channel consideration by customers during in‐home service provision.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of Value Fusion to describe how value can emerge from the use of mobile, networked technology by consumers, firms, and entities such as non‐consumers, a firm's competitors, and others simultaneously.

The paper discusses the combination of characteristics of mobile devices that enable Value Fusion and discusses specific value and benefits to consumers and firms of being mobile and networked. Value Fusion is introduced and defined and set apart from related, other conceptualizations of value. Examples are provided of Value Fusion and the necessary conditions for Value Fusion to occur are discussed. Also discussed are the conditions under which the use of mobile, networked technology by consumers and firms may lead to Value Confusion instead of Value Fusion. Several research questions are proposed to further enhance the understanding and management of Value Fusion.

The combination of portable, personal, networked, textual/visual and converged characteristics of mobile devices enables firms and consumers to interact and communicate, produce and consume benefits, and create value in new ways that have not been captured by popular conceptualizations of value. These traditional conceptualizations include customer value, experiential value, customer lifetime value, and customer engagement value. Value Fusion is defined as value that can be achieved for the entire network of consumers and firms simultaneously, just by being on the mobile network. Value Fusion results from producers and consumers: individually or collectively; actively and passively; concurrently; interactively or in aggregation contributing to a mobile network; in real time; and just‐in‐time.

This paper synthesizes insights from the extant value literature that by and large has focused on either the customer's or the firm's perspective, but rarely blended the two.

Recent studies have explored the effects of e‐service quality on satisfaction and loyalty of online customers by extending and supplementing traditional service quality frameworks. This research proposes a combination of traditional service quality and e‐service quality frameworks. The central question focuses on how to assess the added value of the web as a service innovation for a traditional service. The setting of the study is a traditional‐style barbeque delivery service with a recently installed advanced web‐initiated order entry facility now used by a majority of the customers.

An empirical, survey‐based cross‐sectional study on web‐initiated customer experiences of an in‐home catering service, involving barbeque food items and cooking equipment.

Findings indicate that adding an innovative e‐channel to a traditional business process does not automatically translate to a higher customer satisfaction. Only limited significant effects were found from online ordering on overall satisfaction in contrast to the effect of traditional service dimensions.

Further research is needed on the joint analysis of e‐services and traditional services.

E‐service dimensions appear to have a limited impact on overall satisfaction in a traditional business context.

This is one of the first empirical studies combining both traditional and e‐service dimensions and relating them to customer satisfaction.

During service encounters, it has been suggested that emotionally competent employees are likely to succeed in building rapport with their customers, which in turn often leads to customer satisfaction and loyalty. However, these relationships have not been empirically examined. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the effects of customer perceived employee emotional competence (EEC) on satisfaction and loyalty. The paper also examines how and to what extent rapport mediates these effects.

Drawing on the theory of affect‐as‐information, suggesting that emotions inform human behavior, the paper develops a structural model and tests it on a sample of 247 customers in a personal service setting.

Customer perceptions of EEC positively influence customer satisfaction and loyalty. Rapport partially mediates both effects.

The extent to which customers perceive employees as emotionally competent is related to the development of rapport, customer satisfaction, and loyalty. Managers of high‐contact services should therefore pay attention to emotional competence when hiring new employees, and/or encourage and train existing employees to develop this type of competence.

Previous studies have used employee self‐reports or supervisor reports of EEC, both of which have significant limitations when used in service encounters to predict customer outcomes. Furthermore, they essentially capture an employee's potential to behave in an emotionally competent way while service managers are interested in the actual display of emotionally competent behaviors as perceived by customers. Accordingly, to overcome these issues, this study adopts a customer perspective of EEC and uses customer perceptions of EEC to predict customer outcome.

As with all relationships, it is commonly agreed on that partners in business must have a high degree of commitment towards their relationship. If commitment is lacking, the relationship will soon come to an end. Affective commitment, that is commitment based on attraction between partners, is to be preferred over calculative commitment. The latter form of commitment is based on constant weighing of the benefits of a relationship with a partner against the costs of that relationship. Relationships based solely on calculative commitment are also most likely not to last for an extended time. This paper identifies theoretical antecedents and consequences of commitment in relationships in a services context. The results of an empirical study reveal that affective commitment is related to trust in the partner’s honesty and benevolence, quality of the outcome of the service process, and customer satisfaction with the service being delivered. The quality of the service process has an indirect effect on affective commitment, as it is related to satisfaction. Furthermore, it is shown that affectively committed customers have a much stronger intention to stay in a relationship with a service provider than calculatively committed customers.

This article investigates the role that brands play in influencing the behavior and purchase decisions of compulsive buyers and whether this role differs for noncompulsive buyers, resulting in four research propositions.

In-depth interviews, conducted with ten compulsive and ten noncompulsive buyers, reveal several interesting differences between the groups.

The findings reveal several interesting differences between compulsive buyers and noncompulsive buyers. Noncompulsive buyers seem to appreciate and focus mainly on functional benefits of branded products and avoid buying unbranded products, whereas compulsive buyers value emotional and social benefits but often decide to buy “more and cheaper” items to achieve variety in their purchases. Noncompulsive buyers develop brand trust in, attachment to and higher willingness to pay for their favorite brand than for other brands, whereas compulsive buyers even struggle to name a favorite brand. Furthermore, compulsive buyers engage in more brand switching than noncompulsive buyers.

While this research provides the first, in-depth findings, a large-scale survey research is called for to provide statistically valid tests of the authors ' propositions.

The findings indicate that compulsive and noncompulsive buyers seek different benefits of brands. Stressing the good quality should be particularly effective for noncompulsive buyers, whereas compulsive buyers will be triggered more effectively by claims about the emotional benefits. This finding has obvious implications for brand communication strategies but also raises an important ethical dilemma. The findings further indicate that compulsive buyers react to branded products in ways that may hurt brands with high brand equity. These, therefore, have an incentive to help compulsive buyers overcome this problem, rather than encouraging them in their buying behavior.

Considering the harmful effects of compulsive buying behavior on a person’s well-being, manufacturers and retailers should take corporate social responsibility in this situation and help society deal with it, using both proactive and reactive methods. For example, to facilitate the early identification of this type of behavior, retailers might stimulate customers to think about their purchasing motivations and inform them about the risks of compulsive buying. They could initiate the development, support or sponsorship of a “Shop Responsibly” campaign to help customers avoid such buying behaviors. Not only would these efforts increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, but they could boost the public image of the firm as a responsible organization that cares for societal well-being.

This is the first study to investigate how compulsive buyers approach brands and whether they approach brands differently from noncompulsive buyers. It can draw attention to and encourage future research in this important area.

In this paper, the contaminating role of socially desirable responding (SDR) in the investigation of “dark-side” aspects in international services marketing is examined. The main question to be answered is whether or not relationships between consumer ethnocentrism towards international services and its antecedents are biased by SDR, manifesting itself as impression management by respondents. The results of an empirical study confirm that conscious impression management indeed is likely to represent a serious threat in this type of consumer behavior-related research. The relationship between cultural openness and consumer collectivism on the one hand and consumer ethnocentric tendencies towards foreign services on the other hand was found to be biased by SDR. Such bias, however, could not be found for the other antecedents, namely patriotism and conservatism. This suggests that whether or not respondents engage in impression management depends on the conceptual character of the constructs being studied in international services research. Accordingly, the results have several implications for international services research practice.