Knowledge that Transforms

The popular press has recently reported that managers of retail and service outlets are diffusing scents into their stores to create more positive environments and develop a competitive advantage. These efforts are occurring despite there being no scholarly research supporting the use of scent in store environments. The authors present a review of theoretically relevant work from environmental psychology and olfaction research and a study examining the effects of ambient scent in a simulated retail environment. In the reported study, the authors find a difference between evaluations of and behaviors in a scented store environment and those in an unscented store environment. Their findings provide guidelines for managers of retail and service outlets concerning the benefits of scenting store environments.

If service quality relates to retention of customers at the aggregate level, as other research has indicated, then evidence of its impact on customers’ behavioral responses should be detectable. The authors offer a conceptual model of the impact of service quality on particular behaviors that signal whether customers remain with or defect from a company. Results from a multicompany empirical study examining relationships from the model concerning customers’ behavioral intentions show strong evidence of their being influenced by service quality. The findings also reveal differences in the nature of the quality-intentions link across different dimensions of behavioral intentions. The authors’ discussion centers on ways the results and research approach of their study can be helpful to researchers and managers.

Charitable organizations play a vital role in our society, as is evidenced by their enormous economic and social impact. Yet, for many of them, soliciting adequate resources to carry out their mandates is a continuing struggle. Confronted with a growing need for their services, fierce competition from other charities, and shrinking support from government agencies, charities may turn to marketers for help in developing effective promotional strategies. Unfortunately, marketing literature is unable to provide meaningful guidance because scant research attention has hampered a fuller understanding of why people help. The authors integrate relevant research in marketing, economics, sociology, and social psychology to advance theoretical understanding of helping behavior. They develop research propositions regarding specific promotional strategies that charitable organizations can employ to elicit help.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) is a new type of market-based performance measure for firms, industries, economic sectors, and national economies. The authors discuss the nature and purpose of ACSI and explain the theory underlying the ACSI model, the nation-wide survey methodology used to collect the data, and the econometric approach employed to estimate the indices. They also illustrate the use of ACSI in conducting benchmarking studies, both cross-sectionally and over time. The authors find customer satisfaction to be greater for goods than for services and, in turn, greater for services than for government agencies, as well as find cause for concern in the observation that customer satisfaction in the United States is declining, primarily because of decreasing satisfaction with services. The authors estimate the model for the seven major economic sectors for which data are collected. Highlights of the findings include that (1) customization is more important than reliability in determining customer satisfaction, (2) customer expectations play a greater role in sectors in which variance in production and consumption is relatively low, and (3) customer satisfaction is more quality-driven than value- or price-driven. The authors conclude with a discussion of the implications of ACSI for public policymakers, managers, consumers, and marketing in general.

The authors address the role of marketing in hypermedia computer-mediated environments (CMEs). Their approach considers hypermedia CMEs to be large-scale (i.e., national or global) networked environments, of which the World Wide Web on the Internet is the first and current global implementation. They introduce marketers to this revolutionary new medium, propose a structural model of consumer navigation behavior in a CME that incorporates the notion of flow, and examine a series of research issues and marketing implications that follow from the model.