Abstract/Summary:In the global university sector competitive funding models are progressively becoming the norm, and institutions/courses are frequently now subject to the same kind of consumerist pressures typical of a highly marketised environment. In the United Kingdom, for example, students are increasingly demonstrating customer-like behaviour and are now demanding even more 'value' from institutions. Value, though, is a slippery concept and has proven problematic both in terms of its conceptualisation and measurement. This article explores the relationship between student value and higher education and, via study in one United Kingdom business school, suggests how this might be better understood and operationalised.Adopting a combined qualitative/quantitative approach, this article also looks to identify which of the key value drivers has most practical meaning and, coincidentally, identifies a value-related difference between home and international students.

Service research suggests homes are becoming increasingly connected as consumers automate and personalize new forms of service provision. Yet, large-scale empirical evidence on how and why consumers automate smart domestic products (SDPs) is lacking. To address this knowledge gap, we analyze 13,905 consumer-crafted, automated combinations of SDPs, totaling 1,144,094 installations, across 253 separate service providers on the web service IFTTT.com . An exploratory network analysis examines the topology of the network and an interpretive coding exercise reveals how consumers craft different styles of human-computer interaction to cocreate value. The results reveal that the SDP network is disassortative, is imbalanced, has a long-tailed degree distribution, and that popular services have high centrality across all product category combinations. We show that popular combinations of SDPs are primarily motivated by utilitarian value-seeking enacted through a preference for automated tasks outside of conscious attention, though more individualistic combinations are slightly more likely to be hedonistically inclined. We conclude by showing how these consumer-crafted forms of service provision within domestic environments reveal design redundancy and opportunities for service innovation.

No abstract

The debate around ethical consumption is often characterised by discussion of its numerous failures arising from complexity in perceived trade-offs. In response, this paper advances a pragmatist understanding of the role and nature of trade-offs in ethical consumption. In doing so, it draws on the central roles of values and value in consumption and pragmatist philosophical thought, and proposes a critique of the ethical consumer as rational maximiser and the cognitive and utilitarian discourse of individual trade-offs to understand how sustainable consumption practices are established and maintained. An in-depth qualitative study is conducted employing phenomenological interviews and hermeneutic analysis to explore the consumption stories of a group of ethically minded consumers. The research uncovers the location of value within a fluid, yet habitual, plurality of patterns, preferences, morals, identities and relationships. Its contribution is to propose that consumer perception of value in moral judgements is represented by an overall form of aggregate personal advantage, which lacks conscious reflection and delivers a phenomenological form of value rooted in habits, reflecting a pragmatist representation of value unified as a 'consummatory experience'.

Purpose: The relationship between service quality, the service encounter and the retail experience is explored within a changing UK retail environment. \ud Design: Data was gathered from forty customers and twenty staff of an established UK health and beauty retailer with a long standing reputation for personal customer service. A qualitative analysis was applied using both a service quality and a customer value template. Findings: Customers focused more on the utilitarian features of the service experience and less on ‘extraordinary’ aspects, but service staff still perceived that the customer encounter remained a key requisite for successful service delivery. \ud Research implications: Recent environmental developments - involving customers, markets and retail platform structures - are challenging traditional service expectations.\ud Practical Implications: Retailers may need to reassess the role of the service encounter as part of their on-going value proposition.\ud Originality/value: There has been limited research to date on the perception of shoppers to the service encounter in a changing retail environment and to the evolving notions of effort and convenience

We are presently at a point of unique circumstantial convergence where recession, an increased emphasis on business ethics, and marketer's reluctance to accept shifting social agendas have combined to identify the need for a new approach to marketing. Using concepts from the human resources, marketing and psychology literatures, and especially Erich Fromm's ideas concerning economic character, this paper posits that marketers -as a professional community -are driven to promote consumerist outcomes; victims of an automaton amalgam of calling and character. The analysis suggests the vulnerability of both marketer and consumer are mutually reinforcing and that we need, somehow, to break this damaging cycle of dependence. We know little, however, about how marketers think and feel about their discipline, so this paper also promotes an agenda for marketer behaviour research, as a countervailing balance to a currently disproportionate focus on the consumer.

No abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate, in one emerging Arab economy (Libya), the strategic and tactical choices of MNE (multinational enterprise) domestic appliance brands and, also, the attitudes of local consumers towards those choices. Various choice characteristics are investigated -including marketing mix standardization/adaptation -and, also, country-of-origin brand (COB). To establish extant organizational choices, local representatives of four established brands were interviewed and survey responses from 609 consumer were analyzed. No statistically discernible relationship between standardization/adaptation choices and consumer attitude towards marketing programs was found, but the study identified one especially successful brand that appeared to owe its achievements to an especially holistic approach to marketing that demonstrated 'fit' with the market concerned. Coincidentally, findings also address the conventional country-of-origin wisdom, and this is investigated/speculated upon accordingly. This is one of few marketing studies concerning Libya, and it adds to the limited literature on an increasingly relevant region. KeywordsLibya, standardization/adaptation, marketing tactics, marketing strategy, country-of-origin (brand), major domestic appliances 2 IntroductionMarketing insight regarding the Arab world has only recently accrued (earliest studies include Djursaa and Kragh, 1998;Elbashier and Nicholls, 1993;Michell, Lynch and Alabdali, 1998;Souiden, 2000) and most has inevitably focused on countries that are more clearly aligned with the West, such as Kuwait (e.g., Al-Wugayan, Pleshko and Baqer, 2008), Jordan (e.g., Zabadi, Shura and Elsayed, 2012) and the United Arab Emirates (e.g., Khraim, Khraim, Al-Kaidah and Al-Qurashi, 2011). Further, although studies addressing consumer issues in Arab contexts have recently increased (e.g. Al Ganideh, 2012;Ghanem, Kalliny and Elgoul, 2013;Tolba, 2011) literature in this area, generally, is limited (see Ellis and Zhan, 2011;Birnik and Bowman, 2007), and this is especially surprising given that the Arab market is becoming increasingly materialistic and that the collective Arab economy is now estimated to be the world's eighth largest, with a GDP approaching $2.5 trillion (Mahajan, 2013). Our understanding, especially, of how international firms approach such markets and how local consumers respond to these approaches is sparse, especially in those countries perceived to represent a more capricious business environment (e.g. Syria, Algeria and Libya: Dinnie, 2011).This study is applied in a setting that, for reasons of recent social and political turbulence, represents a particularly interesting context for research. In the decade leading up to recent conflicts, and following a period of relative isolation, Libya actively encouraged international trade (Porter, 2007), yet there is a relative lack of research addressing either period (US & FCS, 2006), and this alone makes Libya an intriguing context for investigation. Recent events, clearly, mean th...