Clay Voorhees

• Michigan State University

User-generated content, such as word of mouth, traditionally has been immune to firm influences. However, companies have recently started developing content and encouraging consumers to post it rather than relying solely on organic consumer-generated content. Such firm-generated user content (FGUC), which consumers can share easily, potentially alt...

Customer reviews, price discounts, and free shipping are powerful drivers of online purchases. Prior research demonstrates their direct effects on consumer behavior, usually with the assumption that they operate independently. By examining the interplays of online reviews and marketing promotions, this study offers a richer, more comprehensive pers...

In response to increased avoidance of traditional banner advertising, publishers have turned to a subtler form of display advertising called native advertising. Unlike traditional banner ads, native ads are intentionally designed to be cohesive with editorial content and assimilated into the design of the publisher’s website. We examine the perform...

Purpose All hypothesized relationships were significant. Specifically, H1 was supported as disconfirmation and surprising consumption were significantly correlated. Moreover, arousal ( H2 ) and outrage ( H4a ) were functions of surprising consumption and negative affect ( H3 ) and outrage ( H4b ) were functions of arousal. H4c was also supported as...

Purpose In the competitive retailing environment, retailers who provide service experiences that stand out from the competition can gain a competitive advantage. Increasingly, an important aspect of the service experience involves product returns, in particular, the fairness of returns policies and procedures. Previous research studies support that...

Service failure and recovery (SFR) is a well-established area of research that has made considerable progress over the past 30 years. In this study, we used a combination of text mining, co-word analysis, and social network analysis (SNA) to explore the relationships among keywords in SFR research. We analyzed a dataset of 533 SFR articles publishe...

This research examines the antecedents and outcomes of organizational frontline employees’ (FLEs’) resilience. Developing a better understanding of resilience, defined as an employee’s ability to overcome or bounce back from adversity, has become critical, as managers increasingly are struggling to manage change on the front lines. The results from...

A majority of consumers resist switching brands when exposed to competitor sales promotions. Yet, in an effort to entice consumers to switch brands, firms spend more on sales promotions, in the form of price promotions such as discounts and coupons, than any other advertising and marketing expense. Interestingly, marketing research devotes much att...

Marketing practitioners and consumers can benefit from more efficient communication by using online chats for customer service. However, consumers desire a genuine experience and if the online chat experience is not believed to be authentic, it can detract from the benefits offered by using these new technologies. In four studies, including one ele...

Purpose Both online and brick and mortar retailers have invested heavily in developing omni-channel service offerings. Though seen as a competitive necessity, these omni-channel service offerings increase costs and complexities. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of strategies involving bundles of omni-channel services related to o...

We explore the complexity of salesperson competitiveness and the concept of self-oriented competitiveness (SOC). Study 1 develops and validates a measure of SOC within a nomological network of achievement-related and personality constructs. Study 2 leverages a field experiment with a corporate sales force to explore alternative financial incentive...

Product returns will soon cost firms a trillion dollars annually; e-commerce appears more at risk for these costs relative to offline channels. Retailers thus need strategic insights into which factors increase customers’ return propensity and when the short-term costs of returns might be offset by future customer purchases. This article reports tw...

This research examines the effects of service variability on consumer confidence and behavior across multiple transactions in a service relationship. This article integrates discussions of service relationships and models of service variability. Leveraging a field study, the authors track over 12,000 experiences across 3,084 consumers for a 2-year...

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the way services are delivered. In this editorial, we shine a light on how frontline service employees are coping with the changing work environment. Leveraging insights from a critical incident technique data collection, we identify challenges related to employee morale, interfacing with service consumers, and...

The phrase the “customer is always right” assumes that customers provide universal benefits for firms. However, in recent years, customer deviance is on the rise and the academic literature has provided little insight into the drivers of deviance, the actual behaviors, and strategies for how managers can better manage a customer base that cannot be...

Loyalty programs (LPs) are marketing investments designed to foster behavioral loyalty among a firm’s best customers and, ultimately, increase firm performance. Surprisingly, the effectiveness of introducing LPs on firm performance in the short- and long-term has not been thoroughly evaluated. This research examines the extent to which introducing...

Loyalty programs (LPs) are marketing investments designed to foster behavioral loyalty among a firm’s best customers and, ultimately, increase firm performance. Surprisingly, the effectiveness of introducing LPs on firm performance in the short- and long-term has not been thoroughly evaluated. This research examines the extent to which introducing...

The typical firm invests 20% of its promotional budget on sales promotions in an effort to drive short-term sales, Limited insight into the differential impacts of various sales promotions as well as the conditions under which they are most effective in lifting the sales of new products remain despite the rich body of research on sales promotions i...

Firm rebranding efforts are inevitable; however, we have a limited understanding of the nature and performance implications of those rebranding decisions. This research contributes to our understanding of this process by identifying two fundamental dimensions of rebranding decisions: brand identity change and brand strategy change. More importantly...

We propose a hybrid two-group classification method that integrates linear discriminant analysis, a polynomial expansion of the basis (or variable space), and a genetic algorithm with multiple crossover operations to select variables from the expanded basis. Using new product launch data from the biochemical industry, we found that the proposed alg...

Service researchers have emphasized the importance of studying the service experience, which encompasses multiple service encounters. Although the reflection on a series of service encounters has increased, the scope of research in this space remains narrow. Service research has traditionally concentrated on understanding, measuring and optimizing...

Rapid advances in mobile computing technology have the potential to revolutionize organizational research by facilitating new methods of data collection. The emergence of wearable electronic sensors in particular harbors the promise of making the large-scale collection of high-resolution data related to human interactions and social behavior econom...

Despite a long history of independent sales and service functions within organizations, customers are pressuring organizations to rethink their sales and service operations. Specifically, customers expect organizations to offer a “single face” of the firm rather than being forced to interact with multiple agents across both sales and service throug...

Up to sixty-five percent of satisfied customers have been found to abandon their current service provider and switch to a competing service provider (Reichheld 1996). This finding is troubling considering the widely held belief that satisfied customers are inclined to be loyal customers (Fornell 1992), where they are more likely to make purchases f...

In two studies (a longitudinal field experiment with an established business-to-consumer national chain, and a field experiment with a business-to-business software manufacturer), the authors demonstrate that starting a survey with an open-ended positive solicitation increases customer purchase behavior. Study 1, a longitudinal field experiment, sh...

The controls of customer contact employee behavior can be thought of as falling into one of two broad groups, formal and informal controls (Jaworski 1988). Under Jaworski (1988), formal controls are the written, management-initiated mechanisms that influence the probability that employees will behave in the manner desired by the firm and informal c...

Recent advances in the realm of service failure and recovery have shed new insight into the role of customer attributions in failed service encounters. While this new research focus is noteworthy and has expanded our knowledge of the relationships among many service constructs, few of these studies have expanded their analyses to investigate the ef...

Research shows that increased customer satisfaction with the service experience leads to increased customer loyalty, however, up to sixty five percent of satisfied customers defect. In an effort to further understand these defections, the authors use attributional theory to develop a conceptual framework to examine the relationship between customer...

The trade show industry attracts millions of attendees every year, offering enormous opportunities for buyer-seller interactions and potential revenues for exhibitors. Business-to-business firms invest more than 20 % of their marketing budgets on trade shows, with a heavy emphasis on pre- and at-show marketing efforts to generate booth traffic, as...

The results of this research suggest a new mandate for discriminant validity testing in marketing. Specifically, the authors demonstrate that the AVE-SV comparison (Fornell and Larcker 1981) and HTMT ratio (Henseler et al. 2015) with 0.85 cutoff provide the best assessment of discriminant validity and should be the standard for publication in marke...

Service innovation positions an organization to create and deliver anticipatory service that exceeds member expectations and ultimately strengthens relationships. However, service innovation remains one of the most under-researched topics in hospitality. This study begins to fill that gap by exploring the strategies and factors that drive service i...

In a quest for connecting with customers, the world's largest brands have gone online to develop communities to interact with consumers. Despite widespread adoption less is known about what motivates consumers to continually interact in these communities. Across six studies, we develop and test a typology of online brand community engagement (i.e.,...

Despite substantial investments in loyalty programs, hospitality industry managers and marketers are given little evidence regarding the loyalty programs’ overall effectiveness in driving consumer spending. This study of an airline’s loyalty program demonstrates the importance of brand power and the influence of customer characteristics on the valu...

The purpose of the current study is to analyze what we term as the agile service transaction; one where the exact needs of the customer is met by the front line service employee. Specifically in this study, we examine not only the qualities of the frontline employee, but additionally we examine the actions of their supervisors which inspire, suppor...

Whereas past research has focused on negative outcomes that can transfer from one firm to another, this paper examines conditions under which a service failure by one firm creates an opportunity to enhance customer evaluations of a different firm in a contiguous service experience. Thus, a new external service recovery phenomenon is demonstrated in...

The ability to break even faster on new product projects is becoming increasingly critical for firms in fast-moving industries where continually reinvesting in research and development efforts matters greatly for survival. However, most research to date has focused on studying the impact of two primary innovation outcomes: sales and profits. The ex...

Fostering attachment between consumers and organizations is developing into a cornerstone of relationship marketing strategy. However, little is known about how an organization can develop strong emotional ties with consumers. Our research addresses one aspect of this gap by showing that in atmosphere dominant service firms, sense of place leads to...

Innovation and new model development have been paramount in the U . S . automotive industry. The industry has invested around $16–18 billion annually to launch new models and improve existing ones in response to incessant evolution of consumer preferences, competitive pressures, and changes in safety and emission regulations. Although these investm...

When introducing new products to market, firms often leverage marketing signals in an effort to increase perceptions of product quality. While prior research mostly focuses on marketing‐controlled signals that firms can directly influence to affect consumer perceptions of product quality, the proliferation of nonmarketing‐controlled signals in the...

Purpose – This research aims to provide insight on the interactive effects of service quality and e-service quality on perceptions of retailer brand equity and also extend and test the efficacy of Baker ' s service environment typology in both offline and online service experiences. Design/methodology/approach – A within-subjects, simulated shoppi...

Consumers usually infer unobservable product quality by processing multiple-quality cues in the environment. Prior research considering the simultaneous effects of marketing cues on consumer quality perceptions is sparse. Despite the growing importance of third-party information, research examining its simultaneous effects with marketing cues on co...

Referral management for online retailers is a strategically important activity, as referrals offer a highly cost-effective method of customer acquisition. In fact, online customers mention referrals as the second-most common reason for choosing to shop at a particular retailer, second only to search engine suggestions. However, while online retaile...

During most consumer exchanges, particularly in service and retailing settings, customers are “in the factory” and, as a result, the presence of other customers can have a profound impact on customer experiences. Despite studies demonstrating the importance of managing the customer experience and customer portfolios, the marketing literature lacks...

This research is the first to examine service sweethearting, an illicit behavior that costs firms billions of dollars annually in lost revenues. Sweethearting occurs when frontline workers give unauthorized free or discounted goods and services to customer conspirators. The authors gather dyadic data from 171 service employees and 610 of their cust...

The findings of this research underscore the relative importance of loyalty to the salesperson, when compared with retailer trust and satisfaction, on outcomes such as loyalty to the retailer and a consumer's willingness to pay price premiums. This research also demonstrates that loyalty to the salesperson has a diminished effect on both outcomes w...

Etailers have been losing market share to brick and mortar retailers that also sell products online. Two related studies investigate means by which etailers can convey trustworthiness to consumers and thereby increase purchase intentions relative to hybrid firms. Study 1 examines whether consensus information (i.e., the extent of satisfaction agree...

Despite the proliferation of loyalty programs over the past three decades, evidence regarding their effectiveness in cementing customer loyalty remains mixed and often inconsistent. The current lack of understanding of what factors drive a successful loyalty program represents an important knowledge gap. Accordingly, this review (1) organizes curre...

When consumers have to wait, the service delivery process is frequently compromised. The literature suggests that reducing waiting time is beneficial, but for service firms faced with scarce resources this is not always an option. As an alternative strategy, this study identifies and tests the mitigating effects of three factors that moderate the w...

Net enabled organizations aim to satisfy the customer through service and technological excellence while delivering strong value proposition. This research integrates IT and services research to develop and test a comprehensive model of consumer decision making that includes complementary effects of value and satisfaction on intentions to reuse the...

The objective of the current study is to provide a preliminary look at the process by which consumers evaluate alliances between service providers. Specifically, the study demonstrates how the service quality of one partner can impact, or ‘spill over’ onto, consumers' evaluations of their transactions with a second partner, and how the performances...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate spill‐over effects from customer perceptions of trust in and satisfaction with a brand to customer evaluations of a retailer and, ultimately, repurchase intentions. Design/methodology/approach A conceptual model is developed and tested using structural equation modeling. Specifically, recent proc...

This study used a critical incident survey with both qualitative and quantitative sections to investigate noncomplainers. Noncomplainers are customers who experience service failures but do not voice complaints. The qualitative study (n=149) explored reasons why customers do not complain after experiencing service failures. In the quantitative stud...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to advance a new conceptualization of the service encounter that highlights the role of outcome valence as a key antecedent of customer satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach This study develops and tests a conceptual model using structural equation modeling. Specifically, it adopts recent procedures for ass...

This study assesses the effects of service evaluations in a failed service experience on complaining intentions in a future encounter. A model is developed and tested that investigates the relationships between service quality, satisfaction, social justice, and future complaint intentions. A sample of 525 dissatisfied customers across numerous serv...

The current research is undertaken to demonstrate the efficacy of segmenting consumer markets. In doing so, the current research reveals that the understanding of consumer behavior is greatly improved when service markets are segmented using clustering procedures. The effectiveness of these clustering procedures is tested across three studies and e...