ServiceFriday: What’s Your Type? – Online Consumer Typologies and Their Shopping Behaviors

Black Friday shopping used to be a more chaotic and entertaining experience than it is nowadays and a large reason why things have changed has been the steady decrease in physical consumers showing up to stores. This is largely due to the soaring popularity of e-commerce which allows consumers to buy goods and services from online retailers over the internet. Despite the change from physical stores to online entities, consumers have been and will continue to be broken up into groups to better understand their shopping habits and behaviors.

ServiceFriday: Cold as Ice: When Cold Temperatures Increase Product Evaluation

The English language sure can be confusing, especially when it comes to the United States. Take the word “cold” for example. I don’t know of any other place where cold can be used to describe the temperature as well as be used as an adjective in multiple contexts. “That’s so cold” can mean you are being direct and without care for others’ emotions while it also can mean something is stylish and attractive.

ServiceFriday: Lead The Way – How Leadership Styles Impact Organizational Change Capacity

“Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” That quote belongs to Warren Bennis, a renowned scholar and author who immersed himself in the field of leadership studies for nearly the entirety of his life. Bennis wrote several books about leadership and later became a consultant to companies looking for guidance in terms of leadership. In the context of the service industry, leaders most often mean managers and, for the purpose of this blog, the focus is on upper management and not the middle manager.

ServiceFriday: Trending Up – The Differences Among Trendsetter Groups

The year is 2020 and being an Instagram model is now a profession. While it might seem that everyone is attempting to be an influencer or trendsetter in some capacity nowadays, not everyone can be. One’s identity in terms of which trendsetter group (i.e. trendsetters, early adopters, late adopters and reluctant adopters) they fall into can be of crucial importance for retailers to better comprehend. Specifically, the money attitudes and the phenomenon known as consumer tendency to regret (CTR) differentiate between the groups.

ServiceFriday: “That’s On Me.” – Consumer Reaction to Service Failures in Self-Service and Full-Service Settings

IKEA is a furniture retailer that has become world renowned for many reasons, including the frequency in which customers get lost in their stores which are known to be as expansive as the Palace of Versailles. One of the main reasons that IKEA has stood apart from other furniture outlets is that, by designing and selling ready-to-assemble furniture, they are a key player in the self-service industry. Self-service settings have begun to proliferate the modern world and with them a new plethora of challenges have been brought forth to the service research community.

ServiceFriday: Social Exclusion’s Impact on Consumer Behavior in Crowded Retail Environments

If it’s true that nobody likes to be left out, then this author really wishes tomorrow’s date, February 29, could talk because just imagine everything that that particular date has missed out on. Being excluded from every person’s calendar for 3 years straight does sound rough, but one form of exclusion that people experience, social exclusion, is a tough battle in its own right. While there is research that has examined socially excluded people’s behaviors and practices in service settings, there is still work to be done when exploring their behavior in other consumer settings.

ServiceFriday: Service Reform: Why Service Employees Engage in Sabotage in Refugee Encounters

According to the UN Refugee Agency, in 2019 there were 70.8 million people forcibly displaced worldwide. 25.9 million of these people, over half of whom are under the age of 18, were forced to become refugees and that number is only growing. Refugees often face a litany of challenges including language barriers, finding employment and gaining access to basic services such as health care or banking services.

ServiceFriday: Don’t Doubt Displays – How Display Formats Affect Consumer Evaluations

According to the Chinese zodiac, 2019 was the year of the pig. This is ironic seeing as how the U.S.’s 2019 can be seen as the year of the hard seltzer, a time when people everywhere pigged out on spiked seltzer water. Last year, seemingly every alcohol company on the market attempted to chase the newest craze spurned by hard seltzer heavyweight White Claw Hard Seltzer.

ServiceFriday: Sense of Humor – Humor’s Impact on Consumer Behavior

Rodney Dangerfield, Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock all have one thing in common – other than being some of this author’s all-time favorite stand-up comedians – and that commonality is that people flock(ed) to them. But even more recent comedians such as Kevin Hart have also had droves of people come see them. In fact, Hart performed in-front of a sold out crowd at Lincoln Financial Field (home to the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles) which was staggering considering that show marked the first time a comedian ever headlined an NFL stadium.

ServiceFriday: Refrain from Referral? Behavior in Referral Rewards Programs

Referral reward programs (RRPs) are applied by firms to use existing customers to recommend a firm’s service to friends, family and potential new customers. Having become ubiquitous among the service industry, current research on RRPs is far from exhaustive as most studies on them focus on customers’ intention to refer instead of their actual referral behavior. RRPs are only effective when a referral is completed by an inductor and a new customer has purchased the service and subsequently become an inductee.