Colleen Harmeling

Florida State University | FSU · Department of Marketing

Current research often relies on narrowly focused experimental methods that address just a few independent variables or correlational designs, despite calls for future research to take big-picture perspectives that offer real-world applicability and causal evidence. This disparity likely reflects the constraints imposed by the need for extensive re...

Morality, appraisals of right and wrong, is central to consumers’ identities and decisions. Even everyday consumption choices can be subject to moral judgments and require moral justifications. When and how do consumers moralize formerly taken-for-granted consumption practices? Considering self-care consumption in the United States, which includes...

Emojis, or pictographs that supplement or replace written language, have become ubiquitous in contemporary communication, including emoji marketing. Drawing on insights from linguistics and sign theory, the current research proposes an emoji marketing framework in which emoji symbolism (symbolic vs. iconic emoji use) affects consumers’ message appr...

Consumers seek out online user-generated content to inform their purchase decisions because they perceive content created by other consumers as more believable than marketing communications. This research provides a theory of consumer digital trust in which consumer trust in user-generated content requires a digital environment that minimizes consu...

Although calls for inclusiveness in services are becoming more vigorous, empirical research on how to design and implement service inclusion for stigmatized consumers remains scant. This paper draws on key questions of personalization (i.e., who personalizes what for whom?) to tailor the (a) source and (b) content of marketing messages in order to...

Services and relationship marketing are inextricably linked, such that the intangible, heterogeneous, inseparable, and perishable nature of services renders strong relational bonds between companies and customers particularly critical. Four high-level strategies observed in current business practice bear the potential of fundamentally altering how...

In 2019 the CEOs of more than 180 of the largest U.S. firms signed a statement of corporate purpose indicating that corporations are responsible for providing economic benefits to all stakeholders, not just shareholders. Although stakeholder theory states that there are several stakeholders (internal and external) whose continuing participation aff...

This article introduces the consumer job journey as a more holistic perspective by which to understand consumption journeys undertaken to acquire and use goods and services. It aids scholars and managers by helping make evident some key consumer decisions and behaviors that otherwise would be invisible. Four tenets lay the foundation for the concep...

Inertia might secure consumers’ continued patronage, but it also can stunt potential expansion. By examining the psychology underlying inertia, this research informs managers about whether to engage inertial consumers proactively. In the proposed conceptual model, an inertia mindset orients a customer toward status quo consumption. This mindset eme...

As online and digital transformations disrupt their business, retailers are aware of the crucial role of collecting, analyzing, and translating consumer data into competitive advantages. Underlying these disclosures of data from consumers to firms are, often implicit, terms that guide consumers’ expectations regarding the data exchange. This manusc...

A consumer’s personal attribute (e.g., disease, body weight) can assume the qualities of a stigma (i.e., become a source of devaluation by others) in the presence of certain audiences, which can affect consumption and represent a major hurdle to marketers in many industries (e.g., healthcare). Two field experiments—manipulating the marketing commun...

Creating effective online customer experiences through well-designed product web pages is critical to success in online retailing. How such web pages should look specifically, however, remains unclear. Previous work has only addressed a few online design elements in isolation, without accounting for the potential need to adjust experiences to refle...

In the conclusion chapter, we summarize the book and present a practical guide for implementing customer engagement marketing, where the firm attempts to motivate, empower, and measure customer contribution to marketing functions beyond financial patronage. The chapter discusses how to use engagement tools and design engagement platforms to facilit...

This book provides a synthesis of research perspectives on customer engagement through a collection of chapters from thought leaders. It identifies cutting-edge metrics for capturing and measuring customer engagement and highlights best practices in implementing customer engagement marketing strategies. Responding to the rapidly changing business l...

Group marketing uses the psychological mechanisms underlying group influence to drive customer behaviors that are beneficial to the firm. It is predicated on the firm’s ability to guide two necessary and sufficient conditions: a customer’s awareness of an affiliation with the focal group and exposure to group norms. By examining what it means to be...

Customer engagement marketing—defined as a firm’s deliberate effort to motivate, empower, and measure customer contributions to marketing functions—marks a shift in marketing research and business practice. After defining and differentiating engagement marketing, the authors present a typology of its two primary forms and offer tenets that link spe...

While extant research on relationship development suggests relationships evolve through incremental change over long periods of time, a single event between exchange partners can ignite dramatic (positive or negative) transformational change. Evidence of transformational relationship events (TREs) is presented to support this premise. Related resea...

As technology such as DVR, television subscription services (e.g. Hulu), and video streaming (e.g. Netflix) continues to change the advertising game, more and more marketers are turning to sponsorship of live or interactive events to capture their target market (Schultz 2013). North American firms will spend nearly $14 billion on sports sponsorship...

Exchange events are fundamental building blocks of business relationships and essential to relationship development. However, some events contribute to incremental relationship development, as predicted by life cycle theories, whereas others spark "turning points" with dramatic impacts on the relationship. Such transformational relationship events...

Grounded in cognitive-affective theories of emotion, an extended conceptual framework of consumer animosity is developed that (1) distinguishes between consumers’ cognitive appraisal of the international dispute and the resulting emotional response, (2) expands from a valence-based approach to consider the differential effects of agonistic (i.e., a...