Marketing Commons^™

Gift Cards And Gift Giving: Research Notes From The Field, Melek Meral Meral Anitsal, Ismet Anitsal, Sara E. Taylor

AMTP Proceedings 2010

Gift cards are rapidly emerging as a trend in the retail marketplace. However, this emerging phenomenon of consumers’ preference of gift cards has not been explored thoroughly yet. The objective of the current study is to understand consumer reactions to gift cards in terms of their impact in gift giving and gift receiving relationships. Specifically, this research seeks to answer the following research objectives: (1) How gift givers and receivers perceive gift cards; (2) What roles of gift cards play in gift giving rituals; and (3) What meanings gift cards communicate for receivers and givers.

Why Do Shoppers Shop?, Ronald E. Goldsmith, Leisa Reinecke Flynn, Ronald A. Clark

AMTP Proceedings 2010

The purpose of the present study was to assess the relationships between three potential motivators of shopping behavior with a measure of attitude toward shopping. Data from 306 US student consumers were collected via an online survey. Reliable and valid scales operationalized the constructs. The results showed that shopping appears to be motivated in part by a desire for status, by materialism, and by brand engagement in self-concept. The results also showed women like to shop more than men do and that the relationships among the variables differed between men and women, suggesting that each gender is motivated to shop …

Spirituality: A Multidimentional Construct And Its Implications For Marketing, Emna Zouari

AMTP Proceedings 2010

The present paper deals with the spiritual value that controls the brain activity of many thinkers as well as with the various definitions and characteristics tied up with it. The ultimate scope throughout this essay is to point out the multi-facets aspect of spirituality. Indeed, spirituality encompasses a personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal context. It revealed thus to be a multidimensional construct, entailing four dimensions namely meaningfulness of life (the goal of one’s living), interconnectedness with people (the various relationships that one nourishes with others), transcendence (feeling of an inexplicable supernatural and divine power) and self-renewal (the relationship with one’s self)

Fitting X-Bar Chart To The Traditional Transaction Surveys Analysis, Usama A. Saleh

AMTP Proceedings 2010

Traditional transaction surveys such as service feedback cards (SFCs) are widely embraced by different service organizations to measure a service quality or to assess customer satisfaction with specific transactions. This paper pursues to apply the statistical quality control technique of -chart (X-bar) to analyze the scaled collected data of these SFCs. The proposed method establishes the control limits to what is being measured for meeting the managerial objectivity of monitoring, controlling, or improving a service performance.

Brand Engagement And Consumer Innovativeness, Ronald E. Goldsmith, Leisa Reinecke Flynn, Felipe Korzenny

AMTP Proceedings 2010

Brand engagement describes the tendency of consumers to make the brands they buy part of their self- concept. This new insight into consumer behavior offers marketers many ways to create relationships with their customers. An unexplored aspect of brand engagement is how it is related to consumer innovativeness, the tendency to be among the first buyers of new products. The present study used survey data from 2399 adult U.S. consumers to show that brand engagement is positively related to consumer innovativeness. This finding suggests that in addition to promoting the features of new products likely to attract innovators, showing how …

Business Literature: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach To Marketing Education, Nancy L. Bush

AMTP Proceedings 2010

This paper looks at a course for marketing majors developed to examine literature in

several areas of the business disciplines that are relevant to marketing professionals-to- be. The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) and potential

employers have increasingly suggested that the integration of learning rather than functional silo-oriented learning is the preferred andragogy for business schools, providing students with soft skills as well as technical expertise that are needed for the contemporary employment environment. In examining the then existing traditional General Education Requirements (GER) for Wingate University, the faculty assembly considered ways to increase such cross disciplinary …

Practitioner Implications On Sample Frame For Single Language Products, Joe Schwartz

AMTP Proceedings 2010

When a marketing research project is undertaken in a single language the potential for bias through misrepresentation of those who do not speak the language is always an inherent risk. That bias can greatly increase in a market with a significant population that does not speak that language. In practice there are a small number of U.S. markets that can be significantly impacted when addressing this concern. The author identifies the conditions under which this bias can be so great as to skew results. The author extends this to show how the bias can be a significant factor in marketing …

Ethics In Retail Buying And Sales: Perceptions Of Future Retail Personnel, David J. Burns

AMTP Proceedings 2010

Unlike many other industries, collegiately educated individuals pursuing a career in retailing often find themselves involved in both buying and selling activities and/or interacting with those who do during their careers. As a result, policies enacted by a retailer which affects one of these two environments will likely affect the other. Perceptions of potentially ethically troublesome situations and practices in buying were found to be strongly related to perceptions of potentially ethically troublesome situations and practices in selling. The only exceptions concern socialization between retail salespeople and their peers and/or management, and whether vendors service small accounts. It appears that …

Identifying Potential Student Blood Donors By Personality Traits, Harold Ogden, Brian Mascarenhas, Milen Minchev, Emilie Pelletier, Ryan Slanley

AMTP Proceedings 2010

A convenience sample of 149 university students was surveyed on their attitudes and behaviors toward blood donation and with a scale of twenty four personality trait items. These items reduced to a seven- factor structure. The data were divided into two groups of high and low-likelihood of blood donation which were compared on factor means. Differences were seen on the “Concern for Others” and the “Down to Earth” factors although not all items in a factor were different and differences were seen in some non- significant factors. Applications of these finding are suggested.

Prisoner Recidivism: A Question For Social Marketing, Joseph R. Stasio Jr.

AMTP Proceedings 2010

Our society is today grappling with a myriad of social, political and economic problems in a time of greatly reduced and very costly resources. All of these problems are connected, in some way, with each other. It is the very nature of societies and this interconnectedness must be understood and appreciated, because, if left unheeded, the consequences can be quite dramatic.

With the advent of social marketing, society now has proven methods of effectively attacking these problems to create many types of desired social changes. Prisoner recidivism is just such a problem. It has intense social, political and economic ties …

Are Nonprofits Choosing The Right Type Of Website, Dave Mcmahon, Samuel Seaman

AMTP Proceedings 2010

The authors review the issues confronting nonprofit organizations and describe the types of websites to consider by size of the organization and focus of the organization. An analysis is done on an initial population of 609 organizations. The managerial implications address possible ways to optimize the use of resources for small and larger organizations.

The Role Of Cognitive Dissonance In A Service Setting, Young (Sally) K. Kim

AMTP Proceedings 2010

While numerous studies used the theory of cognitive dissonance to explain consumer behavior, there is no study as of today that applied the theory to the service industry to investigate the role of cognitive dissonance in influencing important marketing-related variables such as perceived value and trust. This study examines the relationship between cognitive dissonance and relationship variables (trust and value) and proposes a model to understand how consumers process information facing a negative word-of-mouth message that is incongruent with their existing belief and how cognitive dissonance affects their behaviors. The proposed model is tested using data collected via mail survey …

College Students' Choice Criteria Of Retail Banks, Charles Blankson, Trang Phuc Tran

AMTP Proceedings 2010

The purpose of this research is to develop a scale identifying American college students’ choice criteria of retail banks. It is an exploratory study that complements extant studies on retail bank selection. The reliability of the scale was assessed using exploratory factor analysis and serves as a prelude to further empirical validation analysis. The results present four distinct factors important in the selection of retail banks, namely, "convenience", "competence”, “recommendation by parents" and "free banking - no bank charges". It concludes by discussing managerial contributions, limitations and future research directions.

Developing Complex, Business-To-Business Products: Issues And Implications, Sreedhar Madhavaram, Radha Appan

Business Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Film Marketing Action Plan (Fmap) For Film Induced Tourism Destinations, Noelle O'Connor

Doctoral

This research study examines the impact of film induced tourism and destination branding on locations featured in popular films and television series. It also investigates the characteristics of film induced tourism and determines if the key film and tourism stakeholders support the integration of film into Yorkshire’s (UK) tourism product. Yorkshire was selected as the case study area, as it has been the film location for many popular television series and is the subject of much location research within the tourism discipline. The need for a thorough investigation into the film induced tourism phenomenon was particularly evident from the literature …

The Village Voice: Masculine Identity Construction Within An Interpretive Community, Deirdre Duffy

Conference papers

This paper looks at how young Irish men construct their masculine self/identity/body keeping in mind the mediated world within which they find themselves, and considering their own more immediate social surroundings and influences, that is to say, their interpretive community. The research paper combines Foucault’s later writings on technologies of the self with literary theory, using critics such as Stanley Fish (1980) and his work on ‘Interpretive Communities’ to inform the study.

The Sales Organisation: Influencer Or Mere Implementer Of Business Strategy? Investigating The Evolving Role Of Sales Strategy And Processes In Attaining Overall Business Objectives And Goals In International Markets, Sarah Browne, Katrina Lawlor, Pamela Sharkey Scott, Laura Cuddihy

Conference papers

This research will attempt to empirically examine the evolving nature of the sales organisation from a mere tactical support function of marketing, to a strategic capability in its own right and one that perhaps has a salient role to play in attaining overall objectives and goals pertaining to the business level strategy for international markets. The foundations of this research stem from multiple strands of literature including, strategic marketing, strategic management, selling and sales management and business internationalisation. This proposal attempts to locate this early stage research within these important and growing strands of literature and address the under researched …

Threshold Lives: Exploring The Liminal Consumption Of Tweens, Kevina Cody, Katrina Lawlor, Pauline Maclaren

Articles

The intervening spaces of socio-cultural organisation have proved sources of fascination and powerful theory development in the fields of sociology, psychology and anthropology (e.g. Douglas, 1966; Van Gennep, 1961; Freud, 1950, Foucault, 1977). Consumer culture research has hitherto acknowledged the potency of studying transitional phenomena, spaces and places and the interactions of varied ontologies with the consumption experiences of the individuals or group in flux and evolution (e.g. Davies and Fitchett, 2004; Maldonado and Tansuhaj, 1999; Gentry, 1997; Schouten, 1991). But what of those whose reality is the threshold between two ordered and defined worlds, the centre of nowhere? This …

Does Service Matter? An Examination Of Donor Perceptions Of Service Quality In College Athletics, Stephen L. Shapiro

Human Movement Studies & Special Education Faculty Publications

Service quality has been recognized as a strategic tool for improving organizational performance. Many non-profit organizations have taken a market-based approach to fundraising, which enhances the importance of service excellence. The purpose of this investigation was to examine donor perceptions of service quality in college athletics. First, an adapted version of Sargeant's (2001) non-profit service quality instrument was examined to assess its appropriateness within the context of college athletic donors. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and validity and reliability analyses provided evidence of an adequate model fit. Subsequently, three multiple linear regression models were developed to examine the relationship between service …

Essays On Three Price Judgments: Price Fairness, Price Magnitude, And Price Expectation, Sandeep Bhowmick

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses three important price judgments: price fairness, price magnitude, and price expectation. Developed over three chapters, the main objective of this research is to determine underlying differences in these three price judgments. These differences are based on conceptualizing price fairness as a combination of affective and cognitive components, whereas price magnitude and price expectation reflect different cognitive aspects of price judgment. Chapter 1 provides a literature review and identifies several research questions related to these three price judgments; Chapters 2 and 3 provide testable hypotheses and conduct three pretests and two experiments to test the hypotheses. Using structural …