No abstract

Do w nlo a d e d fro m: h t t p://i n si g h t. c u m b ri a. a c. u k/i d/ e p ri n t/ 4 9 5 1/ U s a g e o f a n y i t e m s f r o m t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f C u m b r i a' s i n s t i t u t i o n a l r e p o s i t o r y 'I n s i g h t' m u s t c o n f o r m t o t h e f o l l o w i n g f a i r u s a g e g u i d e l i n e s .

No abstract

No abstract

While the debate on online service failure and recovery strategies has been given considerable attention in the marketing and information systems literature, the evolving Covid‐19 pandemic has brought about new challenges both theoretically and empirically in the consumption landscape. To fully understand customers' responses to service failure during a crisis we asked 70 millennials from three European Countries—Italy, France, and the UK—to describe their responses to service failure during the Covid‐19 pandemic (30 completed a 4‐week diary and 40 completed a 4‐week qualitative survey). Drawing on phenomenological, constructivist, and hermeneutical approaches, and utilizing an actor–network theory perspective, the current study proposes a new framework for understanding customers' responses to online service failure and recovery strategies during the Covid‐19 pandemic. Conclusions highlight implications for theory, policy, and management practice through extending comprehensions of service failure recovery processes by examining how marketing policies generate different social impacts during a crisis situation which facilitate the achievement of customer satisfaction and positive outcomes.

Conceptualizing how customers construe online negative word‐of‐mouth (nWOM) following failure experiences remains unsettled, leaving providers with inconclusive recovery strategy programmes. This empirical study recognizes online nWOM as a co‐created encounter between the complainant (i.e., the initiator of the online nWOM) and the recipient (i.e., the consumer who engages with the online nWOM), examining their idiosyncrasies to discern their understanding of the experience. It introduces frustration–aggression theory to online WOM literature, recognizing that it can support a higher‐order understanding of phenomena. Through phenomenological hermeneutics, interviews and focus groups, data were collected from millennials in Albania and Kosovo that provided accounts of nuanced and distinctive online nWOM realities. The emerged insights extended extant theory to a three‐fold online nWOM typology (i.e., lenient online nWOM, moderate online nWOM and severe online nWOM) recognizing the negative impact customers have on a provider, which is controlled by frustration–aggression tags. Frustration–aggression variations across online nWOM led to the construct of three types of customers that engage in online nWOM, namely tolerable online nWOM customers, rigorous online nWOM customers and confrontational online nWOM customers. Findings culminated with satisfactory recovery strategies aligned to customer inferences regardless of the nWOM context.

PurposeThe proliferation of the internet and world wide web (WWW) in recent years has resulted in the creation of new social and marketing spaces, and a new form of interaction and identity formation. This paper aims to investigate this phenomenon.Design/methodology/approachWhilst cost benefits and profit derivation from the internet and other hypermedia mediated communication environments have been the focus of much research, the majority of these assessments have left many assumptions unarticulated. Questions of how contemporary communication content and interactivity is different from the singular “one‐to‐many” communication models have been avoided in this research. This paper investigates these deficiencies and goes on to suggest how academics and practitioners can realign their thinking in the light of these findings.FindingsComputer mediated marketing environments provide organisations with a medium that can be used to deliver content in a variety of ways to consumers. This capability highlights the distinction between the information in marketing communication and the vehicle used to deliver the information: that is, content differs from communication.Originality/valueThe paper highlights how versatility of the internet as an instrument for mediated communication means that organisations can integrate different modalities of marketing communications into a strategy that combines on‐line and off‐line tactics to meet strategic objectives.

Usage of any items from the University of Cumbria's institutional repository 'Insight' must conform to the following fair usage guidelines.Any item and its associated metadata held in the University of Cumbria's institutional repository Insight (unless stated otherwise on the metadata record) may be copied, displayed or performed, and stored in line with the JISC fair dealing guidelines (available here) for educational and not-for-profit activities