Business Commons^™

Realizing The Good Despite Customer Mistreatment, Carissa Kim

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Unruly and rude customer behavior is on the rise. Estimates indicate that frontline employees experience ten episodes of customer mistreatment daily. Not only is customer mistreatment detrimental for the frontline employee (e.g., higher turnover, lower job satisfaction, lower well-being, and more), but also for customers that witness (e.g., emotional contagion) or engage (e.g., loss of morals) in these deviant interpersonal behaviors. Extending the body of research on customer mistreatment, my dissertation seeks to investigate silver linings or possible functional consequences of customer mistreatment. My dissertation draws from Emotions as Social Information (EASI) theory to investigate the outcomes of mistreatment in …

The Challenge Of Consumer Diversity In Servicescapes: An Investigation Of Consumer And Service Provider Experiences, Abigail Nappier Cherup

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

While consumer diversity continues to grow in importance, evidence suggests that firms have yet to align their thoughts and activities with diverse consumers’ needs. This is especially true for consumers who have a hidden stigmatized identity. On the one hand, consumers with such concealable stigmatized identities must make the decision to reveal or conceal their identity in a variety of situations, including service environments. On the other hand, many service providers are working to offer inclusive service environments yet struggle to do so. Therefore, this ethnographic dissertation has two objectives: to 1) conceptualize practices unique to consumers with a concealable …

Meaningful Consumption: A Eudaimonic Perspective On The Consumer Pursuit Of Happiness And Well-Being, Aditya Gupta

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Prior research indicates that consumers often pursue happiness through the market and that their purchase choices can vary depending on how they define happiness. However, while prior research has tended to use a hedonic lens to frame happiness in terms of pleasure, the current investigation is one of the first to use a eudaimonic lens to frame happiness in terms of personal meaning or meaningfulness. The central goal of this dissertation, therefore, is to arrive at a stronger understanding of eudaimonic consumption. In this regard, findings from six experimental studies reveal that eudaimonic consumption differs from hedonic consumption on a …

The Effects Of Immediate And Delayed Payments On Consumption Behavior, Arvind Agrawal

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Payment-timing is conceptualized as a payment instrument focal characteristic to explain differences in consumers’ purchasing behavior when they chose to pay-now versus pay-later. Payment-timing preferences represent consumers’ attitudes, beliefs, and motivation for delaying marketing transactions. Cash, debit cards, and online banking represented consumers’ preferences to pay-now, while credit cards and loans represented the inclination to pay-later.

There were two key findings: Firstly, I present payment-timing models that theorize consumers’ choice of payment types with differences in payment-timing and motivations to pay for purchases. Two models are presented that unify the following attitudes and motivations: (1) five attitudinal antecedents to consumers’ …

A Conceptualization And Empirical Examination Of The Effects Of Marketing Alignment On Franchising Relationships, Joseph Matthes

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Franchising is a widely utilized business format that continues to grow in popularity both domestically and abroad. Through the recruitment of franchisees as agents, franchisors are able to access additional resources and rapidly expand their networks. The marketing relationship between franchising partners presents unique opportunities and challenges due to this captive and codependent channel structure. In order to fill a gap in the literature and better understand franchisee-franchisor relationships, the author conceptualizes marketing alignment as being comprised of both agreement and cooperation across the dimensions of strategies, operations, and values. A conceptual model is developed that addresses the following research …

The Psychological Effects Of Perceived Scarcity On Consumers’ Buying Behavior, Shipra Gupta

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This research seeks to provide an understanding of consumers’ psychological responses to the scarcity environments that are strategically created by retailers. A mixed method design provides both qualitative and statistical understanding of this phenomenon. The findings across four studies define a new construct that captures consumers’ understanding of the product shortage that is strategically created by the retailer, differentiates it from scarcity situations where the retailer does not necessary limit the supply of the product, and suggests that consumers react differently in the varied conditions. The study suggests that strategically controlled environments, by creating product uncertainty, are able to motivate …

Effect Of Social Media On Crowdfunding Project Results, Alexey Moisseyev

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Crowdfunding is a form of collaborative social media. Even though crowdfunding can function without social media, this phenomenon has developed greatly with the advance of social media. The studies in entrepreneurship and finance established connections between startup projects and social ties. However, the impact of social media on crowdfunding is still lightly studied in academic literature.

The purpose of this thesis is to define the influence of social media on crowdfunding. In particular, this research studies the connections between social media assets such as the social media followers and the social media seals of approval and crowdfunding results such as …

The Implementation Of New Marketing Strategies By The Salesperson: The Constraining Factor Model, Jeffrey S. Johnson

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The implementation of marketing strategies has long been espoused as a key concern of academics and practitioners due to its importance to firm performance. Despite this fact, strategic implementation remains a perennial challenge for firms. This may be in part due to the focus placed on strategic formation rather than strategic implementation. Additionally, as the preponderance of empirical explorations into the implementation phenomenon have been conducted at the firm level, significant opportunity remains to understand implementation on an individual level. Of the organization roles germane to strategic implementation, that of the salesperson is arguably one of the most important. The …

What Brings You Pleasure? The Role Of Desire Within The Development Of Compulsive Purchasing, Justine Rapp

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This paper seeks to put forth two major contributions into marketing scholarship: (1) the role of desire within the development of compulsivity from impulsive consumptions, and (2) an assessment of compulsivity measurement scales. A mixed method design provides for both statistical and qualitative support for both contributions, for a deeper and replicated account of consumer behavior within the marketplace. First, we develop a possible path for the development of compulsivity, explaining impulsivity as an antecedent with consumer shopping desire as the driving factor. With this, we introduce the variable Consumer Shopping Desire as a quantified construct related to Belk et …

The Portrayals Of Family In Advertising: Children's Perspectives, Elise J. Johansen

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Children are exposed to over 25,000 advertisements each year just on television. Research has demonstrated advertising’s effect on children’s preferences and perceptions including gender roles. With the changing structure of family now including diverse family types such as same-sex parents, childfree couples, single-persons, and transracial adoptive families, we do not yet know if advertising is changing with the times and how children perceive these family groups. This study seeks to determine how children perceive family in advertising and its effect on their concept of family through a content analysis of children’s television advertisements and data collection from children in the …