With the phenomenal growth of direct order marketing with the Internet and catalogs as alternative channels, customers increasingly face more choices of where to purchase goods and services. This paper develops a formal consumer model to explain channel switching behavior. Becker’s theory of...

Claims that, for many types of product, quality can be uncertain even after purchase and use, especially in services industries. Asks, if consumers cannot “learn” about the quality of a firm’s products, then what criteria will consumers use to judge product quality? Aims to develop a...

The trend towards internationalisation in many service industries has increased the need for both managers and academics to collect cross‐cultural/national consumer‐perceived service quality data. Failure to establish cross‐cultural equivalence and to detect differences in cross‐national...

In recent research on service quality it has been argued that the relationship between perceived service quality and service loyalty is an issue which requires conceptual and empirical elaboration through replication and extension of current knowledge. Focuses on the refinement of a scale for...

Describes a study performed in Canada to develop a reliable and valid scale for the measurement of the perceived service quality of bank services. A sample of retail banking customers was questioned. The proposed scale is called banking service quality (BSQ) and comprises 31 items which span six...

Examines service provider behaviors that influence customer evaluation of service encounters. Develops a list of service provider behaviors relevant to customer evaluation of a service encounter. Examines performance of these behaviors in specific restaurant and medical transactions. Then...

An equity theory‐based contingency framework is presented to further our understanding of customer evaluations of the service failure/recovery process. Six contingencies are presented that are proposed to influence the relative importance of interactional and distributive justice on...

Service quality has attracted considerable attention within the service marketing literature, but despite this, high profile consumer education has not been considered a valuable strategy. Argues that consumer education is a powerful quality strategy in a variety of service contexts and that it...

Research of existing literature reveals some models (sequence of steps) for companies that want to plan distribution channels. None of these models uses strong contributions from transaction cost economics, bringing a possibility to elaborate on a “distribution channels planning model”, with...

Alpert et al. ′s (1993) study on the relationship between objective product quality and price is both interesting and important. It continues the tradition of “borrowing” relevant theories from other disciplines to explicate problems faced in marketing. However, some issues raised...