Abstract
Background and Objectives
Aging is one of the key future challenges for global life. Of particular interest is the consumption-related decision-making of older people, as its better ...understanding would enable the effective influence of behavior, which would help to secure the economic well-being and ensure a better quality of life for this population. This article explores the respective literature and identifies gaps for future research.
Research Design and Methods
We conducted a holistic review of peer-reviewed literature that examined the decision-making of older consumers. Using a structured approach based on the consumer decision process model, we present the findings of 45 years of research (a total of 42 articles) and identify further research areas.
Results
The review reveals that the literature on older consumers’ decision-making is fragmented, and that the findings are mixed. In particular, results on the role of emotions are controversial. While emotions have been shown to be better controlled by older individuals, emotions are also found to be highly influential in commercial advertisements. Similarly, the literature contains a lively debate on the relevance of price, service and store quality, and provider choice.
Discussion and Implications
These results call for a more holistic view of the decision-making of older consumers, and the review highlights numerous opportunities for future research. For instance, little is known about how older consumers deal with need recognition and the reasons they search for particular information. Moreover, understanding is lacking with respect to online purchase and feedback behavior.
In many sectors of the entertainment industry, a few employees attract the public spotlight when performing the core service. For example, in professional team sports, a team of players competes in ...games, and in TV shows, a cast of artists acts in different episodes. These employees, coined “spotlight personnel,” are an essential but expensive element of ongoing service delivery. Despite their importance and cost, very little is known about how changes in spotlight personnel affect service performance and demand. To address this gap, this article uses unique data on professional German soccer teams, tracking the quantity (number of players) and quality (average transfer price) of spotlight personnel hiring (incoming transfers) and turnover (outgoing transfers), objective service performance (winning percentage), and demand (ticket sales) across four decades, using both traditional and novel time series methods. The results show that service performance and demand are primarily affected by spotlight personnel hiring rather than by turnover. Hiring quantity decreases service performance yet increases demand, whereas hiring quality benefits both service performance and demand. The analysis further uncovers that these effects are subject to dynamic interactions and nonlinearities. Investment scenarios showcase how understanding these effects can substantially improve managerial decision making.
A central question for firms releasing successive generations of a product is whether they should pursue a market-driven approach and align own product releases to existing industry-level patterns. ...While an alignment with industry patterns enables firms to capitalize on general market receptivity, it may also entail dilution and competitive interference effects. Using data on the consumer electronics and automotive industries, we show that the effectiveness of such alignment depends on two additional timing-related decisions: the firm’s release regularity for successive product generations and its preannouncement timing. Firms benefit from alignment to the industry only if they release successive generations in a regular manner (to create anticipation) and refrain from early preannouncements (to avoid competitive counteraction). For all other combinations of release regularity and preannouncement timing, not aligning to the industry rhythm leads to higher levels of firm performance. Taken together, our findings enable a nuanced view of the interplay of timing-related launch decisions that provides actionable guidance for managers.
Emotional eating, the tendency to regulate negative mood through unhealthy food intake, has been widely recognized as one source of today's obesity epidemic. However, empirical evidence suggests that ...this phenomenon is not universal but subject to psychological, situational, and biological determining factors. To date, little is known about the relative importance of these determinants of emotional eating behavior, as no research has investigated these factors simultaneously. This study aims to close this gap and reports the results of a laboratory experiment with 179 participants from a university environment (mean age = 23.15 years, ranging from 17 to 63 years; 56.98% male), in which real food choice was observed after manipulating participants' mood states (either negative or positive) while simultaneously assessing potential determinants of emotional eating. Binary logistic regression analysis revealed that the biological determinants (e.g., weight status) tend to loose in relative importance while psychological (i.e., restrained eating) and situational (i.e., stress) factors tend to be more relevant in explaining food choice in response to a negative affective state. These results have important implications for both research and public health practice.
This research explores the relationship between brand equity and on-field performance in professional sports. Based on data from 1,781 German soccer matches, the result of this exploratory study ...suggest a positive but diminishing impact of brand equity on performance; that is, increases in brand equity stimulate on-field performance more at lower levels than comparable improvements at higher levels of brand equity. The findings help managers and marketing executives of sports clubs justify financial branding investments to their shareholders. However, they also call for a careful evaluation of investments to achieve high levels of brand equity.
Shopping is sometimes a source of stress, leading to avoidance coping behavior by consumers. Prior research suggests that store-induced stress makes shopping an adverse experience and thus negatively ...affects consumers’ purchase likelihood. We propose that consumers’ response to shopping stress depends on their motivational orientation. The greater the in-store stress, the more likely task-oriented consumers are to abandon the trip without making purchases. However, recreation-oriented consumers will be, up to a point, less likely to end the trip. The results of four studies show that the functional relationship between shopping stress and purchase abandonment changes from monotonic and positive for task-oriented consumers to an inverted U-shape for recreation-oriented consumers. Evidence of goal changes provides a process explanation for the differing functional relationships. The results offer an alternative explanation for why people buy or not and suggest approaches to structuring the shopping environment to appeal to both types of consumers.
Purpose
This study aims at developing and testing a conceptual model that shows the antecedents of the recall of a former sponsorship.
Design/methodology/approach
Primary (n = 1,146) and secondary ...data from German professional soccer build the empirical base for this research. Multilevel logistic regression is used for data analysis.
Findings
The results show that retroactive interferences in the form of replacement sponsors for the same object reduce the recall of a former sponsorship, while the mere passage of time does not have a significant main effect. To counteract such forgetting, the empirical analysis shows that sponsor managers can influence recall of a former sponsorship positively after sponsorship termination by switching to a lower-level sponsorship for the same object or by engaging in subsequent sponsorships with other congruent objects in the same context.
Research limitations/implications
The focus on one type of sponsorship (sport sponsorship) in one country (Germany) is the main limitation of this research.
Practical implications
The findings of this paper should encourage managers to consider the long-term consequences of sponsorship engagements beyond the duration of the sponsorship contract. Managers can influence the recall of a sponsorship not only prior to and during an engagement, but also after the loss of sponsorship rights.
Originality/value
Previous research on former sponsorships has mainly focused on the phenomenon of former sponsor recall per se, without considering the determinants of the construct. This paper contributes to sponsorship literature by showing that the number of replacement sponsorships, a construct unique to the former sponsorship context, dominates the time since sponsorship ending as the main driver of forgetting. Moreover, it provides managers with new post-sponsorship strategies that help maintaining the recall of a former sponsorship at a high level.
Although professional sports are a major interest for consumers and a soaring contributor to economic growth, very little is known about how sports brands are built over time and what makes some ...sports clubs’ market performance so much stronger than others. Based on a unique dataset of 40 German professional soccer brands tracked from 1963 through 2014, this research studies how the value drivers recruitment, winning, and publicity feed sales-based brand equity (SBBE) and attendance. One of the novel findings is that not only do strong brands benefit from higher levels of SBBE, but they are also able to leverage SBBE more effectively the longer they are on the market, which widens the gap between strong and weak brands across time. We also find that the effect of the value drivers on attendance evolves from direct to indirect via SBBE. Overall, the increasing brand leverage effect yields important implications for marketing theory and for sports brand management.
This article analyses the relationship between CEO succession events and German firms’ internationalization processes, which is represented by the degree of internationalization (DOI) growth and ...internationalization rhythm. Based on a theoretical framework combining elements of agency theory, institutionalism and upper echelons approach, we propose a longitudinal model to examine the relationships of both process variables with the number of CEO changes and succession type (internal vs. external succession), respectively. The results of our study of 102 German firms over 23 years (1990–2012) show an inverted U-shaped impact (no impact) of the number of CEO changes (succession type) on the DOI growth and a positive (negative) monotonic effect on the rhythm of internationalization.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine causal attribution in interactional service experiences. The paper investigates how triggers in the environment of a customer-employee interaction ...influence customer behavioral response to employees’ negative and positive affect. Additionally, it studies the role of sympathy and authenticity as underlying mechanisms of this relationship.
Design/methodology/approach
Two scenario-based experimental designs (N1=162; N2=138) were used. Videotaped scenarios served as stimulus material for the manipulation of two focal variables: the employee’s emotional display as either negative or positive and the availability of an emotion trigger in the interaction environment to convey the attribution dimension of cause uncontrollability. The emotion trigger’s visibility was varied in the two studies. Customer response was captured by buying intentions.
Findings
Customer responses are more favorable for both positive and negative interactional experiences when customers have access to information on cause uncontrollability (i.e. notice triggers in the interaction environment). Analyses reveal that these effects stem from feelings of sympathy for negative experiences and authenticity for positive experiences.
Originality/value
This research supports the relevance of causal attribution research on interactional service experiences, which have high-profit impact. Moreover, the findings underline the importance of the experience of fact in service interactions and thereby provide a more nuanced view on the discussion of whether service providers should use impression management strategies to engender customer satisfaction even when this behavior is “faked.”
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