Springer Science and Business Media LLC

This research examines the effects of relationship quality (RQ) on customers' desires to retaliate after service failures. We posit that the effects of RQ are contingent upon the attributions customers make about the firm’s controllability over a service failure. Two competing hypotheses are examined and reconciled. The “love is blind” hypothesis posits that when low controllability is inferred, high RQ customers experience a lesser desire for retaliation than low RQ customers. On the other hand, the “love becomes hate” hypothesis specifies that when high controllability is inferred, high RQ customers experience a greater desire for retaliation than low RQ customers. The hypotheses are tested with a survey-based design and a partial least squares (PLS) model that incorporates a multiplicative latent construct.

We examine whether the unethical actions of marketplace brands (e.g., the Volkswagen emissions scandal) hurt the ethical perceptions of competing brands (e.g., Ford, BMW). Across two studies, we find evidence for this unethical spillover effect and show that it can negatively affect consumers’ liking and purchase intentions for a competing brand. The results show that the spillover effect (1) only occurs for similar competitors and (2) is moderated by construal level (CL). Specifically, the spillover effect is more likely to occur when consumers focus on the finer details of the unethical brand’s transgression (i.e., low CL) but not when they focus on the bigger picture of the transgression (i.e., high CL). Thus, while it is intuitively appealing to assume that brands may benefit from a competitor’s foible, this research indicates that competitors may be hurt by a similar brand’s wrongdoing.

Recent research in psychology suggests that people's causal attributions for an occurrence may not reflect the entirety of their beliefs about how the event transpired but rather which subset of this information has “explanatory relevance” given the context of the causal question. The present research examines the implications of this proposition for causal judgments about product failure and manufacturer responsibility. An experiment is presented which shows that consumers' attributions for product failure — to manufacturer-related vs. consumer-related factors — may vary with the “causal background” or reference case against which the occurrence is considered. These findings are discussed in light of previous research in marketing which suggests responsibility judgments should be related to the locus of consumers' attributions.

This article proposes an international segmentation of consumers based on their attitudes toward luxury. We perform a two-stage empirical study with a data set that combines samples from 20 countries. We provide a substantive interpretation of the results to show that three attitude segments dominate in a Western cultural context. We discuss several directions for future research based on the findings.

This research presents a replication and extension of the Dickson and Sawyer study (1986, 1990) of point-of-purchase price recall. We study the coffee and soda categories and estimate a multivariate model of the determinants of price recall. We find, as did Dickson and Sawyer, that consumers spend an apparently short time at the point of purchase and that in the coffee category only roughly half of purchasers can recall the exact price of the item they have purchased only seconds after having purchased it. However, we also find, differently than Dickson and Sawyer, that price-recall accuracy is significantly related to promotion status of the brand and category purchase frequency of the consumer. In addition, we find that recall accuracy is related to consumer self-report of price-comparison activity and is not related to time spent at the point of purchase or to a behavioral measure of brand loyalty. We interpret these findings and discuss the implications for future research and for managers.

Full factorial designs have long been used in designing multiattribute stimuli (e.g., hypothetical job applicants) for use in policy capturing and functional measurement models. More recently, marketing researchers have employedfractional factorial designs in multiatribute preference models, such as those used in conjoint analysis. Occasions arise where the researcher also desires the stimulus profiles to be Pareto optimal. This paper addresses some conceptual and methodological issues associated with Pareto optimal choice sets. In particular, we discuss the problem of determining the expected number of dominant-entry pairs. We then consider the task of deriving Pareto optimal choice sets from fractional factorial designs. A heuristic for accomplishing this is described and applied to an illustrative set of main effects and main effects plus interactions designs.

The attraction effect illustrates a violation of the regularity assumption in consumer choice. This effect increases the share of a target brand, relative to a competitor, when a third alternative is added to the choice set such that the target dominates the third alternative completely but the competitor does not. The effect has important marketing implications for design and presentation of choice sets to consumers. This paper studies the influence of sequential product entry and exit on the attraction effect; specifically, it focuses on the differences among simultaneous entry, delayed product entry, and product exit. Using two experiments, the paper shows that even sequential actions, such as entry or exit of products, predictably produce the attraction effect.

This paper reviews recent scholarship on the topic of consumer durables replacement behavior. Much of this research demonstrates the value of expanding a rational consumer decision-making perspective on replacement decisions to accommodate insights from consumer behavior. These insights are especially relevant for understanding voluntary replacement decisions that are not motivated strictly by economic trade-offs. Unfortunately, while broad in scope, this scholarship is limited in depth, and lacks a comprehensive model for portraying the relationships among the constructs that have been examined. This paper attempts to integrate the existing research base by offering a framework for conceptualizing the replacement decision process. Additionally, a suggested research agenda for validating and clarifying the hypothesized relationships in the framework is presented.