Search results

This paper explores the moderating effects of four personal cultural orientations or PCOs (independence, interdependence, risk aversion and ambiguity intolerance) on the relationships among counterfeit proneness, subjective norms, ethical judgments, product evaluation and purchase intentions for counterfeit products.

A field study with 840 consumers in Hong Kong using a self-administered structured questionnaire is used to test all the hypotheses.

Consumers with high (low) scores on interdependence (independence) show stronger positive effects of counterfeit proneness on subjective norms and its effects on the counterfeit evaluation and purchase intentions. In contrast, consumers with high (low) scores on independence (interdependence) show stronger positive effects of counterfeit proneness on ethical judgments and its effects on counterfeit evaluation and purchase intentions. Consumers with higher scores on risk aversion and ambiguity intolerance show negative moderating effects on most of the relationships in the unified conceptual framework.

The authors collected data in Hong Kong, which is predominantly Chinese in culture. Hence, future research in other parts of the world with more diverse cultural values would help test the validity and generalizability of the results.

The findings would be useful for managers of genuine brands to learn more about the process that explains deliberate counterfeit purchase behavior.

The authors extend the unified conceptual framework for deliberate counterfeit purchase behavior by incorporating four PCOs to explore cultural differences in the socio-psychological decision-making process underlying this behavior.

This paper aims to explain the discrepancy between pro-environmental intentions and behaviors with moderating effects of two socio-cultural values (espoused individualism and faith in others) on the link between intentions and actual behaviors to save electricity.

An online survey of 303 consumers in Hong Kong with a structured questionnaire was used to collect the data to test all the hypothesized relationships.

Attitude toward saving electricity has a significant positive effect on the intentions to save electricity, but subjective norms and perceived behavioral control have no such effect on intentions but do positively affect the actual electricity saving behavior. Finally, the link between intentions and behavior to save electricity is negatively moderated by espoused individualism and positively by faith in others.

This study was conducted with a sample of consumers in Hong Kong; hence, its findings may not be generalizable to other countries.

This study provides new insights into the link between pro-environmental intentions and behaviors by looking beyond the theory of planned behavior and exploring the moderating role of socio-cultural values on the intention-behavior link.

This study aims at proposing and testing a model delineating how and when the quality of a special B2B professional service, investment relations (IR), would drive corporate intangible value.

This study employs a proprietary dataset on voting records of an annual investment relations (IR) awards event and the corresponding company-level archival data for analysis. Regression analysis is used to test hypotheses.

IR service quality not only directly enhances corporate intangible value, but also indirectly boosts it via information transparency. While competitive intensity does not moderate the relationship between IR service quality and corporate intangible value, its moderating effect on the relationship between information transparency and this value is negative.

The findings advance academic understanding of the mechanism and boundary conditions underlying the complex and dynamic relationships among IR service quality, information transparency, corporate intangible value and competitive intensity. Future research endeavors to verify the present findings in other service and/or geographic settings would help establish their external validity.

The findings advise companies to expand the traditional role of IR by taking it as a powerful communication and relationship marketing tool to improve their visibility and attract investors.

The findings suggest that superior IR service would strengthen the company’s social bonding with institutional investors and effectively signal to them its commitment to good corporate governance practices.

Matching a proprietary dataset on IR voting records with the corresponding company-level archival data over a five-year period to investigate the performance implications of IR service quality within the Hong Kong context rectifies methodological limitation and geographic confinement of prior IR research.

The purpose of this study is to explore how different types of environmental claims may affect the communication effectiveness of environmental advertising. Two two moderating variables include the perceived eco‐friendly image of the originating country and consumer involvement.

The examination involves the analysis of the responses of 1,200 subjects in Shanghai, China, to mock advertisements containing environmental claims using a 2 x 3 factorial design.

Environmental claims enhance the communication effectiveness of advertisements for both high‐ and low‐involvement services. For high‐involvement services, substantive environmental claims generate more favorable attitudinal responses than do associative environmental claims.

This research focused on a single Chinese city and on two service categories with contrasting degrees of involvement. While such a confinement can enhance the internal validity of the findings, their external validity has yet to be established.

These findings suggest that marketers should adopt a situational perspective by taking into account environmental claim type, country disposition, the degree of environmental consciousness of their target consumers, and service type when designing their environmental advertising campaigns.

Although a number of previous studies have focused on the application of environmental claims to advertise products, similar investigation into how these claims may help advertise services is virtually non‐existent. In this respect, the present study can be viewed as the first empirical work devoted to closing this research gap.

Examines the influence of cultural values, ecological affect and ecological knowledge on the green purchasing behavior of Chinese consumers. Using structural equation modeling to assess the significance that ecological affect and ecological knowledge have on green purchase intention and actual green purchase, the results demonstrate that a strong positive relationship exists. However, other important findings suggest that Chinese people’s level of ecological knowledge is low and actual green purchase behavior minimal. Yet in contrast, Chinese consumers express a positive ecological affect and green purchase intention. In relation to the hypothesis that the Chinese strongly adhere to the cultural value of living in harmony with nature, the relevant descriptive statistic shows that today’s Chinese only pay moderate allegiance to this “man‐nature” orientation. Moreover, this cultural value is only found to exert significant bearing on ecological affect but not ecological knowledge.

This study incorporates two Chinese cultural variables guanxi (personal relationship) and xinyong (personal trust) with other relational variables that are well defined in the west, i.e. supplier competence, commitment, conflict handling and satisfaction to see how they generate partnership relationship in a sino‐western relationship marketing context.

Research objectives are achieved through a combination of model building, quantitative design, testing of hypotheses using AMOS and analysis of findings. The subject scope is imbedded within cultural impact on relationship marketing in a sino‐western context.

This study finds that Western suppliers must be competent in product knowledge, market development, and adaptation to buyers' requirements to resolve conflicts in order to establish their xinyong with the buyers. Competence allows suppliers to show psychological commitment and establish guanxi with the buyers. It also shows that guanxi has a stronger influence on xinyong than on satisfaction. Suppliers should use guanxi to generate buyer's perception on xinyong whilst maintaining a reasonable level of buyer satisfaction with their products and services. Also, relationship between xinyong and satisfaction is not significant. A buyer's satisfaction on the supplier's product and services does not necessarily mean that this buyer perceives the supplier having xinyong because Chinese mix (up) business with personal relationships together and sometimes they make trade‐off between them!

This relationship study was conducted in a single‐product relationship context within the clothing industry in the PRC environment and therefore, its findings may not be generalised to other industry. Future Chinese relationship study should increase the sample size so as to cover more industries to allow comparison across industries. This is especially valid between a manufacturing and a service‐based industry. A service‐based industry may even emphasize more on guanxi and xinyong because of its intangible aspects! Future research should include the xinyong constructs, the concepts of face and reciprocity. To what extent these important Chinese cultural values affect satisfaction and xinyong have not been determined.

Effective conflict handling skills and guanxi are vital to formulate a xinyong positioning strategy. A supplier must be competent in product knowledge, market development skills, and adapt to a buyer's requirements to resolve conflicts with the buyer to establish xinyong.

This research is an initial attempt to establish the relationship between guanxi, xinyong and partnership relationship and generates a new research area in Chinese relationship marketing.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the impact of the antecedents of the exchange domain (use of coercive influence, ideational favor exchange, calculative resource‐dependence, and decision uncertainty) on relationship building. The paper examines the link between the two mediating dynamics of embedded trust and relationship‐specific customization and loyalty by developing a model of vulnerability‐based commitment.

The links between the model elements are tested using data from a survey of clients in the Hong Kong insurance service. Structural equation analysis is used to test research hypotheses and to examine the extent to which vulnerability‐based commitment leads to the development of loyalty.

The degree of embedded trust between parties is enhanced by the use of coercive influence, favor, and resource‐dependence. Embedded trust has a negative relationship with decision uncertainty. The antecedents of coercive influence, favor, and resource‐dependence have positive impacts on relationship‐specific customization. Vulnerability‐based commitment is positively affected both by trust and customization whilst commitment has a positive impact on loyalty.

A vulnerability‐based commitment model is developed as an analytical and managerial tool for understanding the benefits and hidden vulnerabilities of client loyalty and for implementing effective service strategies.

By understanding the implications of the benefits/costs in commitment vulnerabilities, the findings can help in the design of a loyalty quality system. A new measurement tool is provided to enable researchers to perform more vigorous scale development of commitment.

The green movement in newly industrialized countries often lags behind the West. While the green awareness has started to rise rapidly in some of these countries, the ability of attitudes to predict behaviour for environmentally sensitive products is questionable. A survey of 552 Hong Kong citizens was conducted to examine how consistent consumers’ actions were with their attitudes towards seven environmentally sensitive products. The results have shown that consumers’ environmental concern is not reflected in their purchasing behaviour. This calls for more education and initiative from both the government and businessmen to induce people to channel their attitudes into actions.

This paper introduces a unified conceptual framework for deliberate counterfeit purchase behavior by combining its diverse economic, ethical and socio-psychological perspectives using cognitive dissonance theory. Specific hypotheses are put forth about the interrelationships among counterfeit proneness, ethical judgments, subjective norms, counterfeit product evaluation and purchase intentions.

A field-survey with 380 shoppers (who had ever purchased a counterfeit product) in Hong Kong across four frequently counterfeited product categories (backpack, luxury watch, software and movie DVD) with varying levels of involvement, usage context and purchase motivation.

As hypothesized, counterfeit proneness positively influences ethical judgments and subjective norms about buying a counterfeit product, which in turn positively affect counterfeit product evaluation and purchase intentions. All these effects are fairly stable across the four product categories, which suggests robustness of the proposed unified model.

Using Hong Kong as the research setting and a relatively younger sample of ethnic Chinese consumers helps ensure high internal validity but it may also restrict the generalizability of the findings. Future research with a more diverse sample of consumers would help replicate the results reported in this paper. The conceptual framework may also be extended by including variables such as consumer innovativeness, risk-taking and change-seeking as antecedents of counterfeit purchase behaviour and usage.

Findings show that consumers are influenced by a combination of individual and sociological factors when they decide whether to buy and use counterfeit products. Hence, marketers and authorities need a multi-pronged strategy to curb the growing demand and usage of counterfeit products, especially among ethnic Chinese consumers. These results may also help identify consumer segments more prone to counterfeit purchase behavior and to develop special communication to target them more effectively.

Past studies mostly explore the ‘direct’ and ‘independent’ effects of consumer attitudes, ethical judgments and subjective norms on their counterfeit purchase behavior, ignoring their impact on each other and the roles of ‘counterfeit proneness’ and ‘product evaluation’. This paper addresses all these gaps with a unified conceptual framework that incorporates all these constructs using cognitive dissonance theory and provides useful insights about their direct and indirect effects on each other.

Information has created a new segment of knowledgeable customers. Marketers should pay attention to the reversed information sharing by this active group of customers. The major aims of this article are to provide the results of an in‐depth investigation of the relationship between antecedents of information diffusion and perceived cyber segments in the financial services industry and to discuss the importance of the perceived positioning of different segments. This study investigates how information diffusion antecedents and consequences affect the interconnectedness between customers and financial services providers.

This study analyzes corporate attitudes towards using the internet to share information and identifies the major factors behind the information diffusion process. An investigation into information competence and information sharing was undertaken to examine how information was related to six factors, i.e. relevancy, readiness, response, recklessness, reliance and reciprocity. The research tool for this study is a questionnaire‐based survey carried out in Chinese financial services. The questionnaire is designed to investigate how Chinese practitioners perceive the benefits of using the internet to share information with their customers.

A theoretical framework abstracts three major elements of cyber marketing development, i.e. antecedents, information diffusion and consequences. The positioning of different cyber segmentation is reported. The adoption of any mass customization will require an important commitment of corporate resources in two critical disciplines. First, database marketing requires mass marketers to become direct marketers to constantly retarget and tailor their relevant messages. Second, creating the middleware necessary to tailor personalized messages to customers' ever‐changing needs and situations will be the key for building new databases and upgrading legacy systems at the right time.

This study will be most valuable in assisting corporations to understand what specific elements are required to implement effective customer targeting programs and what substantial advantages a long‐term CRM program can bring to them, because attracting new customers and turning them into loyal customers are critical to increasing profits and market share.