Australasian Marketing Journal

Research on trust in business collaborations is generally founded on the premises that: a) cognitive trust is initially defined within contractual procedures; b) positive experiences lead to adjustments in contractual and/or informal arrangements, and c) cognitive trust is eventually supplanted by affective trust. This dynamic, process view of trust fails to capture the impact of trust experiences in external collaborations on trust emergence in a focal collaboration, and the complexity of trust co-evolution as each actor interprets and responds to the other's communication, behaviour and action. A complexity conceptualisation of trust as a self-organising, adaptive phenomenon can help us better understand the way trust develops. Through engaging with complexity theories as metaphors to enrich trust theory, trust is described as ‘self-organising’ as new cognitive, interpretive schema are evoked, and ‘adapting’ in response to trust experiences external to the collaboration. A complexity perspective evokes a new field of research questions and rich methodological opportunities.

This study examines the respective role of two constructs, love and trust, as drivers of customer loyalty in a business-to-consumer service context. A review of the psychology and marketing literature suggests prominent roles for both love and trust in relation to long-term interpersonal relationships. The likely interaction between love and trust foreshadowed in prior studies also suggests the need of studying both factors simultaneously. Yet, to the authors’ knowledge, the relative contribution of love and trust to loyalty has never been examined in the context of B2C service relationships. This study collected 293 valid consumer self-administered questionnaires in a personal care service setting. Analysis results, using structural equation modelling, show that customer experience of love, and trust, are both significant predictors of customer loyalty. However, love is a stronger driver of loyalty than trust. This study contributes to our understanding of consumers’ unspoken needs or wants for love and confirms their need for trust in service encounters, helping frontline employees and managers to perform better in their efforts to generate and maintain customer loyalty. The study also makes a cross-disciplinary contribution to the literature on loyalty, love and trust, in marketing and psychology.

This research aimed to identify the influence of Chinese consumers’ beliefs about dimensions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on self-congruity and their purchase intentions in the fashion industry. We examined the relationship between four dimensions of CSR (i.e., economic, legal, ethical, philanthropic) and purchase intention and hypothesised that basic responsibilities such as economic and legal responsibility affected purchase intention directly, while high-level responsibilities such as ethical and philanthropic responsibility affected purchase intention through the mediation of self-congruity. The results of our online survey supported our hypotheses. This finding implies that consumers’ self-concept is closely related to the higher-level CSR dimensions and less related to the basic duties of companies such as their economic and legal responsibility. We confirmed that fashion companies’ ethical responsibility and philanthropic responsibility could be more influential when it was self-congruous. We found that ethical responsibility is a relatively weak dimension in influencing purchase intention compared with other CSR dimensions. Based on this result, we suggest several implications for companies interested in the Chinese market.

Customer relationship management is a continually evolving domain that has been particularly affected by social media, which have revolutionised the way businesses and consumers interact. This paper on social CRM builds on a previous model of CRM prior to the growth of social media (Jayachandran et al., 2005). We present a new model for social CRM, including a new construct of customer engagement initiatives and adaptations of other constructs to cater for the impact of social media. An online survey was used to collect data from a population of marketing practitioners and partial least squares analysis was used to test the model. Findings show the importance of an underlying customer relationship orientation; how it impacts on social media technology use and customer engagement initiatives, and also directly on customer relationship performance. A relationship is also shown between engagement and relational information processes, which is viewed as a performance outcome of social CRM. Thus, from a managerial perspective, one recommendation we make is that organisations should utilise the rich customer information that is created with every customer engagement through social media to drive future marketing decisions.

This study provides insights into e-lifestyle of Internet users and their avoidance of Internet advertising. Determining the type of avoidance of each e-lifestyle aids the development of strategies for designing and publishing advertisements on the Internet, so that their effectiveness is enhanced and the negative trend of clicks on Internet advertisements is reduced. A survey was conducted with a group of 412 participants. The data were analysed through structural equation modelling (SEM) and multiple regression analysis both before and after adjusting the data by introducing the effect of average hours of Internet use on participant responses. The results obtained by analysing the main data reveal that e-lifestyle does not have a significant effect on Internet advertising avoidance (IAA). However, analysis of the modified data does indicate a significant effect. Also, in the analysis of the main and modified data, the type of avoidance from Internet advertising (cognitive, affective, and behavioural) varies according to each e-lifestyle. To the authors’ belief the present study is the first reporting an investigation of the effect of e-lifestyle on avoidance of Internet advertising adjusted by average hours spent online.

This article reports the results of research that investigated long-term strategic relationships between manufacturer and retailer brands, in the FMCG/supermarket industry, within New Zealand. The research utilised a multiple-case study methodology involving near-census samples of supplier and retailer managers drawn from several product categories. Data was collected via in-depth interviews and in-store category observation. The research found a clear perception among managers that manufacturer brands have a greater collective capacity for product innovation and marketing support than retailer brands. Retail managers believed that category dominance by retailer brands was not desirable, as retailer brands would then not be able to replicate the product innovation and related marketing activities of manufacturer brands, which would be detrimental to long-term growth and profitability of the categories studied. As excessively high retailer brand share in categories compromised overall product innovation and category support, respondents believed that varying optimum levels of retailer brand penetration existed for each category, and that these levels should be actively maintained over the long term. There was no evidence of retailer manager ambitions to either exceed these optimum points or to eliminate manufacturer brands.

This study examines the effect of fear intensity and type of fear on smokers’ recall of fear-based graphic stimuli. A 2 × 2 factorial design manipulates fear intensity (high vs. low) and fear type (physical vs. social). Results show high intensity messages promote superior recall, with recall heightening when the message also depicts physical harm. This study also shows that viewing time moderates the interaction effect of fear intensity and fear type on recall. Findings demonstrate that smokers report greater recall when exposed to highly intense messages that depict physical harm, with the effect only significant when viewing time is low. We argue that high intensity physical harm messages encourage greater message recall when viewed for only a short period due to shock arousal.

Investigated are the decision-making styles of Australian consumers for everyday products. Specifically, the applicability of Sproles and Kendall's Consumer Styles Inventory (CSI) is examined in relation to the purchase of everyday products. Based on a sample of 214 respondents who had recently purchased a confectionery product, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis is used to validate the CSI. Six decision-making styles are retained from the original CSI (‘perfectionist, high quality’, ‘confused by over-choice’, ‘impulsive’, ‘habitual/brand loyal’, ‘novelty/fashion’, and ‘recreation conscious’) and one new decision-making style is developed (‘rational, price conscious’). Marketing and managerial implications are discussed.

Culture related research in international marketing focusses largely on cultural relativism, that is, on cultural differences between countries. It examines the implications of national culture differences and how to manage the differences while doing business across national borders. These discussions are either framed within the emic versus etic debate, or under the rubric of national culture dimensions. Our paper addresses the equally important but largely ignored question of cultural universalism, that is, how nations are culturally similar. Using the GLOBE national culture dimensions data, we find significant similarities among the GLOBE nations. Our paper contributes to the cultural relativism versus universalism debate, and extends marketing theory with a “universal culture” approach that we believe can enhance understanding and cooperation among international business managers. Overall, our findings have important implications for scholars and practitioners.

The ecological fallacy is a common and little understood error in the interpretation of statistical data wherein inferences about individuals are based on the aggregate of the group from which they belong. This opinion piece overviews the importance of avoiding the error and illustrates the ease with which mistakes in inference can be made by examining some papers appearing in recent conferences and journals, and by demonstrating with artificial data representing Hofstede's cultural dimensions. It concludes with an appeal for caution when considering the combination of aggregate data with our surveys of individuals.