Retailers are currently facing an ultra-competitive environment as consumers are foregoing 'brick-and-mortar' stores in favor of shopping online, taking advantage of discounts offered by Internet retailers. Retailers, in turn, are continually exploring how to increase patronage and spending in...

One of the critical areas in services marketing research is the role of the relationship between customer and service employee. However, how customer-service employee attachment affects customer-company relationships and corporate loyalty, such as through word of mouth, is unclear. Furthermore,...

Labels, certifications and endorsements signaling the quality of food have an impact on the purchasing choices of multiple segments of US consumers. At the same time, not much is known about the relationships between the sources providing information through these quality signals and consumer...

Growing segments of world consumers seek better quality, healthiness and larger variety in their food consumption (Verbeke, 2005; IDDBA, 2008). As part of this process, consumers’ attention for place-of-origin (POO) attributes as part of the demand of agri-food products is increasing (Grunert,...

Managing a global brand means developing its equity but also protecting it from global challenges (Shocker et al., 1994) and from the risk of negative shocks that may affect a brand (Okada and Rubstein, 1998), a multi-national company (Klein and Dawar, 2004) or a whole industry (Roehm and...

This article addresses Rönkkö and Evermann’s criticisms of the partial least squares (PLS) approach to structural equation modeling. We contend that the alleged shortcomings of PLS are not due to problems with the technique, but instead to three problems with Rönkkö and Evermann’s study:...