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    "There and back again" : an examination of consumers' experiences of fantasy stories told through servicescape atmospherics : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Marketing at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2021) Sadeghzadeh Fesaghandis, Kousar
    The importance of fantasy as playful and imaginative consumption has been long noted by consumer researchers, often seen as the creation of extraordinary worlds that engage the consumers and provide them a pleasurable diversion and escape from the ordinary. While companies are increasingly coming to realise the value of fantasy and storytelling in engaging consumers and changing their emotions, behaviour, and brand perceptions, however, extant research in marketing are limited to brands and servicescapes that are marketed with an authentic story about the brand’s history or cultural stories. In addition, extant research focus on consumers’ engagement with stories presented in forms of texts, movies, and advertisements, with limited research conducted on the effects of storytelling through servicescape atmospherics. This thesis examined whether consumers experience narrative engagement in servicescapes that are designed based on fantasy stories, and how engagement with stories in servicescapes influences consumers’ emotions, behaviour, and brand personality perceptions. As consumers’ responses to a story differ depending on the story character they empathise with, this thesis, further, examined how empathy with positive (versus negative) story characters affects consumers’ subsequent responses in fantasy designed servicescapes. A sequential mixed-methods research design was employed in this thesis to address the research questions. Accordingly, the thesis begins by an exploratory qualitative enquiry conducting semi-structured in-depth interviews with retail design experts in Study 1 to understand circumstances in which implementing a fantasy story for design will be worth the effort, how the servicescape atmospherics are manipulated to present a given story, and the affective, behavioural, and brand responses designers aim to evoke in consumers in fantasy servicescapes. The researcher conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with consumers in Study 2 to understand their experiences of engagement with stories, and subsequent responses in a fantasy designed servicescape. Based on the findings from the first two qualitative studies, the extracted propositions, together with existing scales and constructs in the literature, were replicated as part of the survey in Study 3 to examine the relationships between the servicescape atmospherics and consumers’ experiences of narrative engagement, their emotions and behaviour, and brand personality perceptions in a fantasy servicescape. Study 3, also, examined how consumers’ empathy with positive (versus negative) story characters influences their subsequent responses. This thesis contributes to environmental psychology, storytelling, narrative engagement, empathy, as well as the branding literatures and the findings have strong implications for retailers, design practitioners, and brand managers in terms of why, when, and how to use fantasy stories for designing servicescapes. Theoretically, the current thesis is the first to examine consumers’ engagement with and affective, behavioural and brand experiences in servicescapes that are designed based on a fantasy story. Based on the perceptions of both, the design experts as well as consumers, the researcher integrated narrative engagement (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009) and empathy with characters (Van Laer, 2011) with Mehrabian and Russell’s (1974) SOR framework and brand personality (Aaker, 1997) and made a significant contribution by developing a framework that can help future studies examine consumers’ experiences of fantasy stories in servicescapes. The results of the three conducted studies were consistent in suggesting that consumers experience narrative engagement in servicescapes that are designed upon a fantasy story, and that the narrative presence dimension of narrative engagement can, by itself, explain the process underlying the effect of stories told through the atmospherics on consumers’ emotions, behaviour, and brand personality perceptions. Regardless of the character type (positive versus negative) the servicescape highlighted, consumers engaged to the same extent with the story, and experienced more positive and less negative emotions as a result of engagement with the story. Engagement with stories, further, positively affected consumers’ behavioural intentions. Higher levels of empathy with a story character, however, negatively affected consumers’ behavioural intentions, regardless of the character the servicescape highlighted. Accordingly, the design experts recommend using fantasy elements at a moderate level for design to attract not only fans but also non-fan consumers to the servicescape, enhance consumers’ engagement with the retailer’s offer, and increase return intention. Moreover, engagement with the story in the servicescape highlighting the negative character positively affected brand personality, with higher levels of empathy with the negative character strengthen brand personality. Featuring negative characters in a servicescape thus results in stronger brand experience. Finally, while product and service providing businesses both, benefit from using stories for their servicescape design, story-based designs were found to be most effective when the story is congruent with and therefore, supports the products or services offered.
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    Pressure selling or customer oriented selling : does Type A behaviour pattern in salespeople affect their selling style? : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University at Palmerston North
    (Massey University, 2002) Norriss, Tony Keith
    The current study empirically investigated the effect of type A behaviour pattern on their tendency for salespeople to use either pressure selling, or customer oriented selling. The indirect effect of two sources of Type A behaviour were considered. Firstly, dispositional characteristics in salespeople that seemed to elicit type A behaviour were considered. Secondly the effect of role overload on eliciting type A behaviours from type B salespeople were also considered. The data was analysed with structural equation modelling. Hierarchical regression was used to test for interactions. It was found that both dispositional and stress-related type A behaviours indirectly affected the selling style used by salespeople. Firstly, it was found that dispositional and stress-related aspects of type A behaviour could increase the tendency for salespeople to become depressed. Depression tended to decrease the tendency for salespeople to use customer oriented selling, and increase the tendency for salespeople to use pressure selling. Secondly, although both dispositional and stress related aspects of type A increased the tendency for salespeople to become impatient, only partial support was found for the effect of impatience on increasing pressure selling in salespeople. Thirdly, the "motivated achieving" aspect of type A behaviour tended to increase the likelihood that salespeople would use customer oriented selling, and reduced their tendency to become depressed. No support was found for an interaction between the dispositional and stress-related aspects of type A behaviour in salespeople. The implications of these results were discussed. Recommendations were made for interventions that may reduce the effect of antecedent variables on dysfunctional aspects of type A behaviour pattern in salespeople.
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    A comparative study of customer relationship management (CRM) : how strategies and applications vary across industries : a research thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master's in Logistics and Supply Chain Management at Massey University, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2015) Wang, Nanbing
    Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of interest in customer management (CRM) by both academics and executives. However, despite an increasing amount of published material, most of which is practitioner oriented, there remains a lack of agreement about what CRM is, what CRM means to different industries and companies and how CRM strategy should be developed. The purpose of this article is to develop a process-oriented conceptual framework that positions CRM at a strategic level by identifying the key cross-functional processes involved in the development of CRM strategy in retail, manufacturing and service industries. CRM is increasingly important to firms as they seek to improve their profits through longer-term relationships with customers. In recent years, many have invested heavily in information technology (IT) assets to better manage their interactions with customers before, during and after purchase (Bohling, Bowman, LaValle, Mittal, Narayandas, Ramami, & Varadarajan, R 2006). Yet, measurements returns from IT investment programs rarely arise from a narrow concentration on IT alone, with the most successful programs combining technology with the effective organisation of people and their skills (Bharadwaj, 2000; Piccoli & Ives, 2005). It follows that the greater the knowledge about how firms successfully build and combine their technological and organisational capabilities, the greater will be our understanding of how CRM influences performance. We have found through the study that CRM is best performed if it is designed to meet the specific needs of each company. And we have also found that for any CRM strategy to be successful it needs the support from the management team, from the top to the bottom, a customer-centric culture has to be incorporated into one's daily operation.
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    Engaging fans on Facebook : how New Zealand organisations are communicating on Facebook to build and maintain relationships with their publics : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Management in Communication Management at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2012) Gardner, Danae
    research examined how Facebook is being used as a communication tool by commercial organisations in New Zealand to build and maintain relationships with their publics. The research questions were produced by identifying a gap in public relations literature, which revealed a lack of an integrated framework to assess organisations’ communication with publics on social networking sites (SNS) from a relationship management perspective. The research questions explored how Facebook is being used as a communication tool by certain New Zealand organisations and their Facebook fans and how the findings of this study relate to specific relationship cultivation and outcome measures as identified in public relations literature. A content analysis was carried out on twelve New Zealand commercial organisations’ official Facebook pages. The main unit of analysis was a single Facebook post, and 21 days of material was collected. Results showed that organisations used a range of interactive and engaging communication activities/strategies such as conversation exchanges, asking and answering questions, compliments and positive reinforcements, which related to relationship cultivation strategies and relational outcomes. Communication activities such as traditional media-type relations like posting press releases or links to news stories were rarely utilised; however, communication activities such as text-based announcements appeared to substitute this. The results were discussed in light of the research questions and concluded with recommendations to conduct further research in the area of commercial organisations communicating on SNS and the effectiveness of that communication within the relationship management framework.
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    The link between customer profitability in business-to-business markets and the nature of business relationships : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Marketing, Massey University, Wellington campus
    (Massey University, 2012) Balasubramanian, Ravi
    Empirical studies on customer profitability in business markets have reported wide profitability variation and a skewed distribution, typically a small number of very profitable customers and a much larger number that are marginally profitable or unprofitable. While some studies have attempted to investigate the contribution of financial factors to this pattern, the contribution to customer profitability of non-financial factors, such as the nature of business relationships, has received very little attention. This gap exists despite the wide acceptance amongst practitioners of the importance of business relationship development with customers and of business relationships as a field of academic research. Business relationship development efforts are made with an expectation that they will result in improved financial results, but academic research has not established this based on objective financial measures of customer profitability. To investigate whether a link exists between business relationships and customer profitability, it was hypothesised that multiple facets of the business relationship should be represented and may necessitate adopting constructs from different theoretical frameworks. Thus the proposed theoretical model used behavioural and cognitive constructs based on relationship connectors, environment factors, communication quality, communication quantity, conflict, customer characteristics and commitment. The customer profitability measures were based on traditional financial data but were extended to include imputed costs of other resource usage such as delayed payments, documentation costs and shipment to multiple destinations. Since the research required matching customer profitability measured as a financial outcome with the nature of the business relationship with each customer, data was obtained from a single participating organisation. Relevance of the proposed theoretical constructs to the context of the participating organisation was checked through a qualitative investigation using in-depth interviews with key informants. The subsequent quantitative study used an online survey instrument to obtain data from the organisation’s sales persons on the nature of the relationships with customers. Financial data for computing individual customer’s profitability was obtained from relevant company records. Structural Equation Modelling was used to test and estimate the theorised relationships between constructs. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed the need to make some changes to the original model, but the constructs in the final model demonstrated good discriminant validity. The good fit of the proposed theoretical model to the actual data confirmed the relevance of constructs used in the theoretical model to represent the multifaceted nature of business relationships. The main finding of this research is that commitment to a business relationship with customers is adversely affected by customer profitability factors. An increase of 1 standard deviation in customer profitability variation factors results in a reduction in commitment levels of 0.28 standard deviation units. In this study, customer profitability factors are represented by four indicators: customer profit value, cost of goods, documentation cost and number of destinations. This construct reflects the relative impact of the revenue and cost indicators on individual customer profitability. Commitment plays a central role in linking the constructs representing the nature of business relationships and customer profitability factors. The indicators for commitment assessed expectations of continuity in a relationship and whether expected benefits were realised, and these represent the affective and calculative dimensions of commitment described in the literature. The calculative dimension reflects the expectation of economic returns as a result of commitment to a relationship. Reduction in profits from the customer will adversely affect the calculative dimension and may account for the negative value for the link with customer profitability factors. On the other hand, the affective dimension of commitment reflects the attitudes and beliefs and generalised regard about the relationship and can be linked to efforts to build the business relationship. The nature of the business relationship comprises four constructs; relationship connectors, communication quality, communication quantity and conflict, and represents facets of how a relationship is viewed; this may account for its link with commitment. Environment factors, which include competition and market price fluctuations for the product categories, represent the main set of factors outside the control of the firm and have an impact on revenue as well as commitment to the relationship with customers. The contribution of price changes to revenue and profitability represents an additional element in determining customer profitability. In this study, substantial price increases from products sold to the top decile customers helped offset cost increases and improved the profitability of these customers. From a practitioner’s perspective, the main utility of these findings lies in the importance of integrating customer profitability measures in relationship development efforts. For a more accurate assessment of returns, customer profitability measures should go beyond normal accounting data and include estimates of other resource usage such as documentation costs. Such improved customer profitability measures can help in differentiating customers based on objective outcomes and provide a basis for developing customer portfolios with appropriate relationship development strategies. The differentiation would also imply that commitment to a business relationship has to be contingent on obtaining the expected financial return from the business relationship.