Service organizations try to control the service behavior of employees using formal guidelines, training and instructions. However, the specific actions that are performed during the service encounters are predominantly under the discretion of the individual frontline employee. Therefore, the...

While single-brand reward programs encourage customers to remain loyal to that one brand, coalition programs encourage customers to be “promiscuous” by offering points redeemable across partner stores. Despite the benefits of this “open relationship” with customers, store managers face...

Introduced in 2003, net promoter score (NPS) very quickly gained popularity, as a customer loyalty measure, among companies and a part of researchers, due to its simplicity, the ease of interpretation, low costs of calculation, and, overall, its assumed impact on future growth and profitability....

In the current research, we study relationship norms in a word-of-mouth marketing context. The presence of a financial incentive for a recommendation implies that the word-of-mouth behavior may be driven by ulterior motives. This setting triggers both friendship (Equality Matching; EM) and sales...

Over the last decade, mass customization has emerged as an effective approach to customer centricity, i.e. to regard customers as individuals, to proactively develop products and services according to the individual customer’s preferences, and to efficiently produce and distribute these...

The idea of mass customization is to turn customers' heterogeneous needs into an opportunity to create value, challenging the “one size fits all” assumption of traditional mass production. In this paper, we explore the characteristics of successful mass customization implementation at the...

We study the optimal customer-acquisition and customer-retention decisions of the representative firm in a dynamic competitive industry. We find that the optimal per-customer retention effort depends positively on customer profitability and is constant over time. The endogenous effective...

Today, people are living in the digital environment. Earlier, internet was used as the source for information sharing, but now life is somewhat impossible without it. Everything is linked with the World Wide Web, whether it is business, social interaction or shopping. Moreover, the changed...

Digitalization is the core driving force of the fourth industrial revolution. This new era will result in paradigm shift in production and in marketing of products and services. The smarter production can make value creation easier with reducing the cost of manufacturing and with producing...