Anssi Tarkiainen

• D.Sc. (Econ & Bus. Adm.)
• Lappeenranta – Lahti University of Technology LUT

This paper investigates ambivalence in the buying process. The existing literature has rarely studied ambivalence in longitudinal processes and has therefore not been able to capture its dynamics. Those studies that have studied ambivalence longitudinally have focused on general attitudinal ambivalence rather than its subtypes (cognitive, affective...

This research explores how word-of-mouth (WOM) changes consumers’ attitudes and choice behavior in a high-involvement service (higher education) context. Hypotheses are tested by means of structural equation modeling. The main results indicate that different forms (normative and informational) of WOM affect two components of attitude change (creden...

Strategic management researchers have long been fascinated with company performance in terms of underlying managerial cognition and its interpretation. This paper presents a methodology to examine the linkage between the cognition of individuals and company performance. We link cognitive maps with fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA)...

Driven by the rapid technological development and adoption of augmented reality (AR) in retail, academic research has grown rapidly. Our purpose is to understand the reasons why consumers use augmented reality in retail and what outcomes retailers can expect. This study presents a systematic literature review and summarizes the current empirical kn...

Research on technology adoption in organizations traditionally assumes that these organizations follow rational, strategic and planned adoption processes. However, a gradually emerging view is that the adoption of technology is also characterized by entrepreneurial or effectual reasoning, primarily due to technological and market uncertainties that...

Sales influence tactics (SITs) are critical in persuading buyers, shaping their perceptions, and ultimately securing business deals in today's complex B2B sales landscape. This systematic review of 53 peer-reviewed articles synthesizes the current state of knowledge on SITs, highlighting the key themes, arguments, and emerging practices in sales in...

Sustainable consumption became an inalienable part of our life. Building on it, a large share of consumer behavior research is focused on green buying as a part of sustainable consumption. Most existing literature considers sustainable actions and green buying as conscious and planned processes. However, there is recent evidence that green buying m...

Virtual try-on applications use augmented reality to virtually display products on consumers' faces or bodies. That is, they simulate a believable try-on experience by means of psychological presence, whereby the virtual experience feels real to the consumer. Grounded in social cognitive theory, this study is the first to investigate spatial presen...

This book chapter discusses the impulse buying of sustainably motivated consumers (i.e., sustainable consumers). The authors empirically investigate cases when sustainable consumers buy things impulsively and deal with the negative outcomes of such behaviour. Analysis of qualitative interview data reveals insights on five main themes, namely, susta...

Although impulse buying has been studied for decades, prior research mostly focuses on reasons for impulse buying rather than its outcomes. In recent years this trend has changed, due to the emerging sustainability agenda and the attention to impulse buying as one of the main antecedents of overconsumption. However, existing research on the outcome...

To efficiently manage and (re)design the education events, it is necessary to determine what their effect on student’s learning is. Even though there are tools to reflect the level of knowledge of students on the output, the usability of such information for course design and optimization is limited. This paper presents an open-access set of tools...

As modern business-to-business (B2B) sales have become more complex; recruiters are turning to business schools to find educated and motivated sales professionals to fill the employment demand gap that has risen. This study provides important information about business students’ intentions regarding pursuing careers in B2B sales, as there are no up...

This study proposes an application of cognitive maps in the representation of cognitive structures of the experts and assessment of their development/modification as a result of a (computer or expert system-assisted) learning process. It strives to identify information needed for the guidance of the process of creation and management of expert know...

Purpose Virtual try-on (VTO) technology offers an opportunity for fashion and beauty brands to provide enriched self-explorative experiences. The increased popularity of VTOs makes it urgent to understand the drivers and consequences of the exploration of styles in VTO contexts (herein called self-explorative engagement). Notably, little is known a...

Contemporary approach to understanding consumer behaviour is to view it as a customer journey, in which the consumers interactions with brands and firms occurs through touch-points in multiple channels and media. While quantitative approaches, such as attribution modelling, are seen as effective methods to map these customer journeys and to attribu...

Driven by the rapid development of augmented reality (AR) in retail and e-commerce along with the unique ability of AR to add virtual content in a highly contextual and controllable manner, academic research has recently grown rapidly. This study is a systematic literature review and proposes a holistic view on the current knowledge on AR in retail...

This study investigates cause and effect relationships in cognitive maps and the coexistence of pairs of such relationships in cognitive maps of a chosen group of decision-makers. We call the existence of a pair of causal relationships shared by the group of decision-makers in their cognitive maps inter-causal relationship. We investigate the coexi...

The visual (imagery) perspective represents the angle from which people imagine (i.e., form a mental image) themselves in a scenario (Libby and Eibach 2011). People from the actor’s (also called first-person) perspective view the scene as the main character (i.e., themselves) through their own eyes. People holding an observer’s (also called third-p...

Sustainable development is an overwhelming topic for modern research in most scientific areas, and marketing is not an exception. Sustainability assumes reasonable and conscious consumption. Being a sustainable consumer means consuming as little as possible. Concurrently, impulsive buying is supposed to be excessive and needless. Paradoxically, the...

This chapter introduces an implementation of gamification for the simulation modeling of agricultural heavy machinery. The objective of this study is to demonstrate how adding a gamification platform can both streamline the development process for a complex machine and enhance its marketing. To achieve this objective, a farm tractor is described wi...

Increasing pace of technological change in the energy sector towards more sustainable solutions has raised the importance of managers’ abilities to notice and interpret changes in their environments, and translate those perspectives into strategic choices. Consequently, this study aims to examine managerial interpretation on changing business envir...

The dynamic capabilities theorem posits that rapidly changing operating environments necessitate dynamic capabilities (i.e. sensing, seizing and reconfiguring) for success. Dynamic capabilities reconfigure existing asset positions and create organizational renewal. We contend that higher performance outcomes can be achieved when dynamic capabilitie...

This study investigates the influence of word-of-mouth (WOM) on consumers' attitudinal ambivalence in the context of higher education decision-making. Construal level theory (CLT) is combined with attitudinal ambivalence literature to generate hypotheses about how different types of WOM (i.e., praise and activity) received during the decision-makin...

Despite the significance of ambivalence in consumer research, the concept suffers from a lack of clarity. This study thus aims to develop an improved conceptual understanding of consumer ambivalence based on the analysis of existing definitions. A number of challenges are observed and addressed through key premises that characterize the concept of...

Despite the importance of ambivalence in consumer behavior, its varying and fragmented definitions have made it challenging to understand what ambivalence really means to consumer researchers. This is problematic because the lack of precise conceptualization hinders scientific progress (Teas and Palan 1997) and leads to validity and measurement iss...

The objective of this study is to shed further light on the occurrence of unethical behaviour within the salesforce. While it is accepted effective marketing fosters relationship building and added-value to customers, problems with unethical selling behaviour still concern managers and academics. The antecedents of ethical judgments and behaviour h...

The purpose of this paper is to assess the effect of service values on the processing of word-of-mouth (WOM) information, and their impact on a complex belief in a high-involvement service context. Hypotheses are tested on survey data collected from 378 respondents facing a high-involvement service choice. The results suggest that two distinct info...

This study explores alternative configurations of causes to customer knowledge utilization using a set theoretic approach with fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. The study uses a previous empirical dataset of Salojärvi, Sainio, and Tarkiainen (2010) to assess organizational factors that enhance customer knowledge utilization. The results s...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on the case where – by design – one needs to impute cross-country cross-survey (CCCS) data (situation typical for example among multinational firms who are confronted with the need to carry out comparative marketing surveys with respondents located in several countries). Importantly, while some work d...

Word-of-mouth (WOM) can be a powerful, persuasive source of information, but relatively little is understood about how consumers utilize information in service evaluations and how the source of WOM (e.g. friends, family) affects attitudes. The importance of WOM is acknowledged in the services context; however, the research field of higher education...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of cognitive diversity on strategic issue interpretation among the boards of directors making sense of sustainability management. The study also investigated the centrality of the corporate sustainability issues to identify common interpretative patterns in the shared cognitive maps among the...

The purpose of the current study is to provide first insights into two broad research questions: what is the relationship between role stress and sales force unethical activity? And how can management act to shape this relationship, if at all? Despite the important theoretical advances made in the last decades with regard to antecedents to unethica...

Research Question 1: Can consumers be segmented by their multiplatform newspaper consumption patterns?

This study proposes refinements to the conceptualization of field sales management control systems by examining the control concept at two distinct levels of analysis, namely sales managers and salespersons. Past research on sales management has revealed that various job related issues are characterized by perceptual incongruence between sales mana...

Psychological ownership has emerged as an important predictor of workplace motivations, attitudes, and behaviors. While components of psychological ownership theory have been recently adapted to marketing contexts as well, much remains to be done. With a more comprehensive application and use of psychological ownership theory in marketing, addition...

Sales call cycle refers to defined number of sales calls that a salesperson needs to perform in order to cover particular accounts and/or prospects adequately over a given period of time. Planned sales call cycles may be defined separately for different customer types, which are classified by, for example, their sales volume or sales potential, pro...

Increasing number of innovation and organisational researchers have suggested more emphasis on socio-psychological aspects of innovation and management processes such as managerial attitudes and beliefs, sense-making capabilities, and individual and shared representations affecting organisational management processes. Researchers have become increa...

The purpose of this study is to examine loyalty towards print magazines and magazine websites among magazine website audience. We assess whether the market position in the printed magazine markets is transferred into the internet. We base our hypotheses on double jeopardy (DJ) phenomenon, and we test whether it holds for 'true loyalty', which refle...

It is generally accepted that sales managers and salespeople perceive many job-related constructs differently. However, this perceptual gap has received little attention in the context of sales management control systems. This study hypothesizes that there are, potentially, differences between how sales managers’ believe they are controlling the sa...

For years, magazine publishers have been developing their online presence, pursuing a range of different goals and strategies for their websites. One of the key questions in creating online presence is whether to allocate resources on developing the offline print brand and expect brand equity transfer to the online environment or to allocate resour...

Many newspapers are struggling to convert their online news into profitable products, and one of the means to this end is to charge fees for using online news services. At the same time, however, consumers have not been willing to pay for online news services. According to recent findings, consumers do not choose between online news and printed new...

This study examines how an experienced sense of virtual community affects relationship-marketing-related outcomes. Based on social identity and relationship marketing theories, a research model is developed and structural equation modelling is used to test the relationships between a sense of virtual community, brand-loyalty intentions, brand-commu...

Our study explores the functioning of dynamic capabilities during the strategic renewal in a non-profit organization, hereby contributing to the young tradition of the dynamic capability approach in the non-profit context. The analysis focuses on how the sensing, seizing and reconfiguring capacities of dynamic capabilities relate to the organizatio...

Sense of virtual community (SOVC) reflects the feeling that individual members have of belonging to an online social group. Yet there is a lack of investigation focusing on its individual-level antecedents. We argue that in order to enhance understanding of how SOVC develops we first need to distinguish between the individual expectations, actions,...

Customer knowledge has become an important topic for both academicians and practitioners in recent years. However, there has been little academic research on the utilization of customer-specific knowledge. This study adds to our understanding in focusing on the relationships between various intra-organizational factors and customer knowledge utiliz...

The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of magazine Web site usage on print magazine loyalty and word-of-mouth intentions. Thus, the key question is whether active Web site visitors are more likely to buy the magazine in the future. The research framework builds on the literature on relationship marketing and brand relationships, and is...

The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of website visits and virtual community participation on the development of brand relationships. Building on the literature on relationship marketing, we model brand trust as a mediator and brand loyalty and Word-of-Mouth (WOM) as the final outcomes in our research model. The hypotheses are tested...

This study assesses the level of consumers' felt involvement in four distinct product categories of organic food (coffee, bread, fruit, and flour), and examines the role of felt involvement in the broader context of organic food shopping behavior. It is shown that the reason why consumers do not buy organic food regularly despite their positive att...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to increase understanding of the effects of web site extension on the parent‐magazine brand in the context of experiential goods, and to identify factors that are related to success. Design/methodology/approach – The paper focuses on the relationship between consumers' experiences on magazine web sites and th...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a model of the role managers and peers play in shaping salespeople's ethical behaviour. The model specifies that sales manager personal moral philosophies, whether sales managers themselves are rewarded according to the outcomes or behaviours of their salespeople, sales team job security, i...

Purpose – The objective of this paper is to examine online brand relationships, and the linkage between satisfaction, trust, and loyalty on the web site level. The web site is considered to be an extension of the parent brand. It also seeks to explore the effects of offline experiences on web site‐level experiences. Design/methodology/approach – H...

Researchers have proposed that consumers are more likely to use online services from the brands they already know and trust. This study explores the impact of brand trust on consumer online behaviour. An online survey (n=876) of a magazine website was conducted to test a model of brand trust, website usage, consumer online involvement in virtual co...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to test the extension of the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) in an organic food buying context. Design/methodology/approach The relationships between subjective norms and attitudes and intention to buy organic food were studied by applying structural equation modelling. Findings The proposed modified model o...

Several researchers argue that the ability of the firm to utilize customer-specific knowledge should be recognized as a potential source of competitive advantage (e.g., Campbell, 2003; García-Murillo and Annabi, 2002; Zahay, 2008). At the same time however, it has been found that, in general, firms tend to be better at acquiring customer knowledge...