Nominal definitions of concepts specified in marketing theories are vulnerable to problems involving conceptual ambiguity and vagueness when they are defined using natural language systems. The authors present a framework that researchers can use to assess the theoretical meaningfulness of conceptual definitions and to improve theoretical meaningfulness using the specification of formal language systems. Although the framework is applicable to any conceptual definition, the authors use several consumer expectations and related concepts to demonstrate the contribution of this framework to the improvement of conceptual definitions and to the process of theory formalization.
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