This article presents an empirical test of organizational identification in the context of customer-company (C-C) relationships. It investigates whether customers identify with companies and what the antecedents and consequences of such identification are. The model posits that perceived company characteristics, construed external image, and the perception of the company's boundary-spanning agent lead to C-C identification. In turn, such identification is expected to impact both in-role behavior (i.e., product utilization) as well as extra-role behavior (i.e., citizenship). The model was tested in a consultative selling context of pharmaceutical sales reps calling on physicians. Results from the empirical test indicated that customers do indeed identify with organizations and that C-C identification positively impacts both product utilization behavior and extra-role behavior even when the effect of brand perception is accounted for. Second, the study found that the organization's characteristics as well as the salesperson's characteristics contributed to the development of C-C identification.

The authors conceptualize and empirically examine professional associations’ relationship-building efforts (core services performance, rewards for contributions, dissemination of organizational knowledge, member interdependence enhancement activities, and reliance on external membership requirements) that are theorized to enhance their membership's commitment to the relationship as well as the membership's relationship behaviors. Three components of commitment—affective, continuance, and normative—are theorized to mediate differentially the correlation between the associations’ relationship-building efforts and their members’ relationship behaviors (membership retention, exchange-based participation, and cooperatively based coproduction). Confirmatory factor analysis validates the commitment measures, and structural equations analysis indicates that normative and affective commitment partially mediate the effects of selected relationship-building efforts on coproduction and member participation. Core services performance was the only construct in the model found to affect member retention.

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With all the hype around efficient consumer response (ECR) and the brave new world of technologies, one would believe that retail out‐of‐stocks have gone down over the last ten years. That is wrong. Retailers have been struggling with considerable out‐of‐stocks for decades – with little evidence of improvement. A similar wrong belief is that shoppers are also still unwilling to accept low service levels. In fact, increasingly, consumers switch brands when they do not find the brand they wanted. But retailers must be wary, because the results of our research show that increasingly shoppers switch stores quickly and may never come back. So, who is to blame? The supply chain. And where to tackle it? On the shop floor. Over the past two years, we have conducted a major, worldwide study of the extent, causes, and consumer responses to out‐of‐stocks in the fast‐moving consumer goods industry. In this article, we report these findings and provide insight to solving this chronic industry problem.

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