Business Commons^™

Regulating Relationship Needs Via Joint Consumption: An Attachment Perspective, Jana M. Rosewarne

Doctoral Dissertations

Attachment style functions to regulate affect in relationships. I hypothesized that consumer decisions serve a similar purpose, producing distinct patterns of product preferences depending on people’s attachment goals. In a series of studies, I found that attachment avoidance predicted reduced preference for products framed as meeting closeness relationship goals and greater preference for products framed as meeting autonomy goals. The link between attachment anxiety and product preference depended on consumers’ emotions (S2) and relationship commitment (S3). Attachment style also predicted differences in the extent to which consumers thought about their partners when choosing products and their perceptions of how consumption …

May I Help You? How Stereotypes And Innuendoes Influence Service Encounters, Lauren Michelle Brewer

Doctoral Dissertations

"You only get one chance to make a good first impression." The dissertation focuses on marketing agents; among the most visible is the "service provider." Previous research establishes the important role of cognitive social schemata in determining the way consumers react to different types of marketing agents, including service providers. In the literature review, a classification schema is developed for service provider stereotypes derived from theory using social stereotypes. The development of the Service Provider Perception Framework (SPPF) creates a classification for the individual service provider along two main dimensions: competence and affect.

In services design (particularly situations involving a …