Customers play an active role throughout the marketing process. This dissertation concerns itself with customer's co-creation of value for self (co-production) and for other customers (co-consumption) during service production and delivery. With the servuction system as its overarching framework, this study explains how changes in the customer's perceived co-production and co-consumption, caused by a service innovation, influence her perceptions of service innovation characteristics and modify her adoption behavior. It draws on a multidisciplinary body of knowledge and develops a conceptual framework and a set of substantive propositions. The empirical research was contextualized in three services: self check-out at grocery stores, Build-A-Bear stores, and meal assembly centers. It focused on members of Generations X and Y who were familiar with these services. The qualitative investigations and pilot study helped adapt the extant scales and construct new scales. In line with prior works, the focal service encounters were simulated through a series of consumption scenarios. The exploratory factor analysis in the pilot study and the confirmatory factor analysis in the main study indicated that the instruments were culturally informed, internally reliable, and construct-wise valid. The results indicate that co-production and co-consumption play important roles in explaining innovation characteristics and adoption decisions. More …

Sales management researchers and practitioners give considerable attention to early employment expectations, attitudes, and behaviors primarily because of a desire to specify the cognition process leading to performance and retention of salespeople. While a massive body of literature exists concerning turnover of employees and determinants of employee performance, more empirical study specific to the sales force as a research population is needed to assess the nature of turnover and performance. Because the bulk of salesperson turnover occurs in early employment, particular attention needs to be devoted to the cognitive process of newcomers to the sales force. The present work examines expectation-based and perception-oriented models of performance and retention for sales force new hires. Interests of this investigation focus on the initial expectations of newly hired sales representatives and on how the degree of fulfillment of these expectations relates to subsequent performance and retention behavior. Extant research suggests that the degree to which expectations are met positively influences mediating variables such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and indirectly influences outcomes such as job performance and retention of newcomers. Alternatively, some researchers contend that these results are due to improper measurement of met expectations. A longitudinal research design and alternative measurement …

New product ideation is the transformation of a raw idea into a robust concept with consideration of fit and feasibility of technologies, customer benefits, and market opportunity. Although the ideation process often involves ambiguous processes, it is the most critical activity in new product development (NPD). As a creativity task, the ideation process is considered heuristic rather than algorithmic. However, managing the ideation process as either a completely heuristic or an entirely algorithmic procedure leads to just conventional outcomes. Rooted in cognitive psychology, this study proposes that ideation activities in NPD should be pursued as Simonton's "constrained stochastic behavior." An ideation task not only needs good componential factors but also requires constraint to frame the task by precluding unwieldy ideas while promoting high variability of ideas. Focusing on the inputs and attempting to strike a balance between algorithmic and heuristic ideation process may provide the mechanisms to manage the psychological perceptions with an aim to stimulate and orchestrate the ideation staff's cognitive efforts to generate the creative idea. To achieve this goal, new product idea creativity is considered as the ideas that could turn out to be products that are novel to and useful for customers, and appropriate to firms' …

The purpose of this research is to empirically investigate consumers' health care decision choices in a dynamic market setting. The unprecedented demands on the U.S. health care system coupled with the mounting controversies surrounding health care reform suggest that consumers' health care decisions warrant empirical research attention. Toward this end, this dissertation empirically explored (1) the characteristics of consumers who possess a willingness to use non-conventional treatments over conventional treatments, (2) the characteristics of consumers who elect self-medication in lieu of health care practitioner-directed medication, and (3) the salient dimensions of consumers' channel choice for the procurement of health care products. Each of these decision choice factors were tested across two U.S. generational segments to assess whether differences existed across Baby Boomers' and Gen Yers' health care decision choices. The conceptual framework for empirical assessment is Bandura's (1986) social cognitive theory. From Bandura's social cognitive theory, a general model of healthcare decision choice is proposed to assess consumers' states of mind, states of being and states of action (decision choice). Results indicate that social cognitive factors (e.g., self-efficacy, objectivism) play an important role in each of the decision domains explored in this dissertation. Moreover, health value was found to be …

Relevance has been applied to various conditions in the marketing literature but no single definition has been developed. A single clear definition will be helpful to researchers investigating relevance in the marketing and consumer behavior fields. Confusion also exists in the literature regarding to what extent a symbolic visual in an advertisement is relevant. Many researchers are also calling for empirical evidence of a linkage between relevance and response through a theoretical measure of relevance. The central theory used in this dissertation is Sperber and Wilson's (1995) theory of relevance (TOR). TOR can help researchers and marketing managers by explaining how consumers may interpret visuals in advertising. TOR explains why some visuals thought to be unconnected with the product become relevant in advertising. This study makes the assertion that TOR has been underutilized and even ignored by some researchers in past marketing literature. Thus, TOR is used to provide greater explanatory power of consumers' interpretation and response to advertising visuals than what is currently realized by researchers and marketing managers. A reliable measure of relevance was developed using TOR as a foundation. Experiments were conducted to empirically test TOR and support was found for most aspects of the theory. This …