Search results

This paper describes the personal history and intellectual development of Morris B. Holbrook (MBH), a participant in the field of marketing academics in general and consumer research in particular.

The paper pursues an approach characterized by historical autoethnographic subjective personal introspection or HASPI.

The paper reports the personal history of MBH and – via HASPI – interprets various aspects of key participants and major themes that emerged over the course of his career.

The main implication is that every scholar in the field of marketing pursues a different light, follows a unique path, plays by idiosyncratic rules, and deserves individual attention, consideration, and respect … like a cat that carries its own leash.

In the case of MBH, like (say) a jazz musician, whatever value he might have depends on his originality.

This paper aims to trace the origins, development and future of the consumption experience as a concept in marketing and consumer research.

The author relies on subjective personal introspection to describe his involvement in the introduction and elaboration of the consumption-experience concept.

The author finds that the concept of the consumption experience has extended to many areas of marketing and consumer research, with widespread applicability in the creation of brand-related promotional messages.

The consumption experience is central to our understanding of consumers and deserves full exploration in the work of consumer researchers.

Working with Professor Elizabeth Hirschman, the author played a pioneering role in understanding the consumption experience and is happy to see that their contribution has encouraged others to pursue related themes.

In the fertile line of research on consumer value from the services literature, a gap exists between theoretical and empirical knowledge, in particular regarding Holbrook’s conceptual value framework. The purpose of this paper is to find construct validity for a multidimensional value scale based on Holbrook’s proposal.

Based on a literature review, a qualitative phase, and consultation with an expert, eight value scales (efficiency, service quality, play, aesthetics, status, esteem, ethics, and escapism as an adaptation of spirituality) are tested on a sample of 585 hotel customers and are further analyzed with simple and partial correlations, multiple regressions, and structural modeling.

Following the literature on the merits of Holbrook’s value typology, results are presented in three concatenated phases: validation of Holbrook’s eight value scales corresponding to his eight value types; interrelationships between these value types showing a predominance of the extrinsic-intrinsic and self-other dimensions; and construction of six indices based on the 2×2×2 matrix (self, other, extrinsic, intrinsic, active, and reactive) and a value index as a higher-order representation. The results support Holbrook’s typology, thereby supporting construct validity for the multidimensional scales.

Implications for further conceptual research on value are presented. Meanwhile, the empirical study is context-specific, i.e. related to a hospitality experience.

Although Holbrook’s typology has gained widespread attention, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous research has tested all eight value types simultaneously in the same empirical work.

A crisis, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a decisive moment”, “a turning point”, “a time of great difficulty”. If this is the case, then marketing cannot possibly be in crisis. Crises are temporary states of heightened anxiety, whereas marketing is in a semi‐permanent philosophical pickle. Or so scholarly commentators would have us believe. This paper argues that there is no crisis of representation in marketing. There are more, and more varied, representations of marketing than there have ever been. Representationally speaking, marketing is living in a golden age, a time of Croesus and King Midas. The real problem is that many of these representations are not very good, albeit for understandable reasons. We need to raise the quality rather than increase the quantity of our “experimental” endeavours and this paper makes five recommendations to that end.

Despite the diversity of all those involved within the marketing discipline, all have a stake in maximizing the advancement of marketing knowledge. Without a specific analysis it is difficult to reflect on where a field has been or where it might be heading. The purpose of this chapter is to examine who and what marketing scholars have been researching over the period 1977–2002 using content analysis. This chapter provides longitudinal benchmarking of the “inputs” (authors and institutions) and “outputs” (articles) examining the marketing literature in the four major marketing journals: the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Consumer Research, and the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.

Examines the extent to which a variety of widely utilized consumer behavior concepts are systematically related. States that within marketing, consumer behaviour research appears to lack structure and direction.Attempts to determine the nature of the interrelationships which exist between different widely examined classical consumer concepts and provides some discussion regarding the findings including areas for further comparison.

The context of marketing and service research is rapidly changing as a result of advances in academic research and business practice. This has implications for our understanding of customer value. The purpose of this paper is to provide an update on customer value given today’s context (including recent advances such as technologies, human contact, collaborative consumption, service ecosystems and transformative service research); to revise Holbrook’s value typology; and to propose a research agenda.

This paper uses a conceptual approach that is rooted in the service and marketing literature.

The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, this paper presents an evolved view on customer value which accounts for recent advances in academic research and business practice. Second, this paper updates Holbrook’s value typology by revising existing value types as well as identifying additional value types; and offers guidelines for measuring and modeling customer value. Third, this paper proposes a research agenda to guide and stimulate future value research.

This paper provides an update on customer value, which is one of the most fundamental concepts in service and marketing research. This updated perspective has been approved and applauded by Morris B. Holbrook, one of the founding fathers of value research.