Australasian Marketing Journal

The practical value of four service marketing concepts was examined for a professional legal service firm seeking to improve its service quality. Of particular value were designing blueprints, which highlighted the critical success and failure points, understanding the nature of the service, which provided strategic insights, and measuring customer expectations, which offered a focus for the firm's strategic direction. Of less value was gap analysis which provided limited insights.

A variety of legal issues can arise when a television commercial is alleged to constitute “misleading or deceptive conduct” in contravention of section 52 of the Trade Practices Act or equivalent legislation. One of these issues is whether the commercial conveys the implied claim that is alleged to be false.

Researchers in the field of consumer psychology have devised a variety of tests of the implied claims conveyed by a television commercial. However none of these researchers has shown that their test provides evidence that a judge would find persuasive.

This paper describes a method of assessing the weight that test results might be accorded in legal proceedings. The method involves an experiment in which 45 barristers are asked to predict the outcome of nine hypothetical court cases. Being hypothetical, no inference is intended that any company's advertising might be misleading or deceptive. The method is used to assess the impact of tests in which a representative sample of the viewing public is asked to respond to written questions after watching the commercial in a movie theatre.

The study shows that this type of test could provide highly persuasive evidence in legal proceedings of the implied claims in a television commercial.

Sales variance is a performance measure commonly reported by management accountants: it is the difference between the actual and the expected sales revenues. Given additional information, it can be decomposed into component variances arising from changes in price, sales volume, market size and market share. However, little guidance is provided to managers and marketers on the proper interpretation of these quantities. Further, the standard textbook analysis neglects the effect of price on sales volume and therefore may be misleading. Before an unambiguous interpretation of the causes of variance can be made, price-volume relationships must be either known or assumed. We present decompositions of the sales volume variance that incorporate the price-volume relationship and discuss their use, in order to help measure performance and formulate market strategy.

The SERVQUAL instrument, which measures customer perceptions of service quality, is applied to retail financial institutions in Brisbane. As in the original SERVQUAL study, five factors emerged: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. Consumers’ experiences failed to match their expectations on virtually all dimensions. The study also found some differences in consumer perceptions of service quality based on age, gender and type of financial institution, suggesting that more could be done by financial institutions to segment their markets.

The objective of this paper is to provide Australian business and marketing educators with ideas which may cause them to re-examine their curricula and pedagogy from a “zero base”. The paper principally attempts to do this by (a) providing examples of criticisms of the knowledge and skills of business school graduates, and of business school curricula, pedagogy and teaching staff, and (b) providing examples of innovative responses to these criticisms by USA business and marketing schools. Some European examples are also described, which allow a contrast with USA.

This paper may be especially pertinent at this time, given the recent mergers of CAE institutions with traditional universities in Australia, and the resulting tension between research and teaching foci. In addition, universities are being confronted by pressures to adopt “quality” and “customer service” philosophies in education, and to rely less on government and more on industry sources for funding.