Francis Arthur ButtleMacquarie University · Macquarie Graduate School of Management
Francis Arthur Buttle
BSc, MA, PhD
About
163
Publications
764,076
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8,887
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Researching word-of-mouth communication among customers, using social network analysis, survey methods and qualitative methods.
Additional affiliations
September 2001 - August 2014
September 2001 - April 2014
September 1997 - February 1998
Education
January 1987 - January 1992
September 1972 - August 1973
August 1967 - July 1970
Manchester Business School (UMIST)
Field of study
- Management Sciences
Publications
Publications (163)
This exploratory study investigates how executive-level and functional managers in three large organisations understand and respond to negative word-of-mouth (NWOM). The findings, based principally on analysis of 54 interviews over 3 years, show that organisations devote far more resources to the management of NWOM than they do to the promotion of...
Marketing practitioners and theorists routinely cite the power of the personal referral on customer behaviour. However, relatively few companies have tried to harness the power of word of mouth (WOM). Scholars have been pondering WOM over 2400 years, although modern marketing research into WOM started only relatively recently, in the post-war 1940s...
Since its launch in 1985, SERVQUAL has become a widely adopted technology for measuring and managing service quality. Recently, a number of theoretical and operational concerns have been raised concerning SERVQUAL. Reviews these concerns and proposes a research agenda.
We review and critique the research literature on sales force automation (SFA). SFA involves the application of information technology to support the sales function. SFA software provides functionality that helps companies manage sales pipelines, track contacts and configure products, inter alia. The paper is organized into four main sections. Firs...
The ideal person to write a review of books is definitely someone who has written a textbook himself. Bowie and Buttle indeed have made a promising effort to disseminate an important perspective on a subject related to hospitality. One might be quick to conclude that this text is just a dime a dozen and a window dressing of the first edition since...
The ideal person to write a review of books is definitely someone who has written a textbook himself. Bowie and Buttle indeed have made a promising effort to disseminate an important perspective on a subject related to hospitality. One might be quick to conclude that this text is just a dime a dozen and a window dressing of the first edition since...
This updated introductory text is suitable for hospitality and tourism students studying marketing at undergraduate or postgraduate level.
We investigate how word-of-mouth marketing campaign participants select communication partners, content and channel. Rules Theory, which we adopt from the interpersonal communication literature, indicates that socially constructed contextual rules explain participants’ choices. Our analysis suggests that campaign participants are sensitive to the s...
Agencies routinely report word-of-mouth marketing (WOM) campaign results in terms of reach but do not deliver insight about the people who are reached and the types of conversation in which the WOM message is embedded. Using a specially designed Facebook app and social-network analysis, the current authors revealed that approximately half of campai...
We explore the motivations of collectors of contemporary art. Data from a number of sources, including semi-structured interviews with collectors, participant observation, netnography, and introspection on a six year personal history of participation in the Artworld, suggest that collectors experience one or more of four forms of value from their c...
Customer relationship management's definition is also its ambition: the development and maintenance of mutually beneficial long-term relationships with strategically significant markets. The focus is on creating value for the customer and the company over the longer term. The value perceptions of the customer serve as bonds, or exit barriers, which...
Word-of-mouth marketing agencies typically report campaign results in terms of the numbers of people receiving the brand message from campaign participants. These reports say nothing about the types of conversation in which the WOMM message is embedded. Using a custom-developed Facebook app and Social Network Analysis we reveal that half of offline...
There have been many attempts to form an explanatory theory of how advertising works, but no one has yet postulated a theory of merchandising. Drawing heavily on the developing science of environmental psychology, which studies the effects of physical environments on human behaviour, a theory of merchandising is established. The theory proposes tha...
A key aspect of many services is that they require the customer to participate in coproducing the service product. While customers' involvement is often indispensable for the completion of service production and delivery processes, the degree of involvement varies between categories. In many instances, the customer's contribution to coproduction in...
A customer's lifetime value (CLV) is an estimate of the present value of the future cash flows associated with a particular customer or group of customers. CLV is a forward-looking concept that takes a long term perspective on a supplier's relationship with a customer and is the same unit of measurement that creates customer equity. The aggregated...
Customer equity is defined as the sum of the discounted lifetime values of all of the firm's current and potential customers. The customer equity concept recognizes customers as the primary source of both current and future cash-flows and thus as one of the firm's most valuable assets. As such, customer equity is a forward-looking concept that meas...
Word-of-mouth marketing agencies typically report campaign results in terms of the numbers of people receiving the brand message from campaign participants. These reports say nothing about the types of conversation in which the WOMM message is embedded. Using a custom-developed Facebook app and Social Network Analysis we reveal that half of offline...
Purpose
– The paper aims to provide a theoretically informed critique of current measurement practices for word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) campaigns.
Design/methodology/approach
– An exploratory field study is conducted on a real-life WOMM campaign. Data are collected from two generations of campaign participants using a custom-built Facebook app a...
This case study reports results from three research studies conducted over 12 weeks as
part of a product seeding campaign. Partnering with a word-of-mouth marketing
(WOMM) agency for this research, studies 1 and 2 report agency-conducted surveys of
campaign participants’ online and offline word-of-mouth (WOM) behaviors. Study 3
deployed an innovati...
Word-of-mouth (WOM) is an important influence on the opinions of donors and their donation behaviors. Against a background of more professional donor relationship management, we investigate about how, if at all, nonprofits (NP) manage WOM. We report an in-depth case study of a single NP. We find that there is widespread appreciation that WOM influe...
Our survey of respondents in 99 organisations with a customer relationship management (CRM) system finds that organisational culture is significantly related to the achievement of desirable CRM outcomes, as indicated by an index composed of a number of financial metrics. Most notable is the strong association between adhocracy and hierarchy culture...
Introduction Over 60 years ago Harold Lasswell published a simple and oft-quoted model of communication in the form of a rhetorical question. Communication, he wrote, is about'Who says what in which channel to whom with what effect? (Lasswell, 1948, p37). The 'who' is the source or sender, the 'what' is the message, the 'channel' is the medium used...
This paper explores the relationship between customer-generated word-of-mouth (WOM) and corporate reputation. After a concise literature review, we present several insights from case study analysis of three organizations. Our main finding is that customer dissatisfaction and negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) are thought to have strong downside conseque...
When participants in Word-of-Mouth Marketing campaigns talk face-to-face to others about their customer experience they choose only some members of their social network. Previous research has shed light on the raw numbers of persons reached in WOMM campaigns but nothing is known about how those persons cluster. Are they family members? Work colleag...
We discuss an issue critical to companies that invest in Customer Relationship Management (CRM): how to assess return on investment (ROI). A number of issues make this task challenging. First, defining the boundaries of CRM; second, establishing what constitutes a CRM investment; third, deciding what counts as a 'return' on that investment; and, fi...
Although word-of-mouth (WOM) has long been seen as an important influence on customer attitude, intention and behavior, very little is known about how, if at all, organisations manage this phenomenon. This paper reports how a sample of service organisations manages WOM. Using a case study approach, we find that there is a widespread appreciation th...
Benchmarking data provided by 144 organisations across four industry sectors are consolidated and mined to generate insights into the relationship between complaints-handling processes, as defined in ISO 10002, the International Standard for Complaints Handling, and a number of marketing-related outcomes. Factor analysis of the 17 complaints-handli...
Given all the recent attention dedicated by academics, consultants and practitioners to customer retention, customer acquisition has become a secondary concern. Yet, customer acquisition is of major importance and demands attention as the first stage of the customer life-cycle. Our research shows that companies are not particularly skilled at manag...
Our article reviews the literature on customer development and reports findings from an exploratory survey of practices in Australian companies. We find that companies that build customer development plans around increases in revenues, rather than reductions in cost-to-serve, achieve better development outcomes. Outstanding performance in customer...
Purpose
In this paper the authors present a theoretical framework that shows how interaction between two or more companies depends on its context of performance. Reflexivity between two or more levels of context potentially leads the parties to a situation exhibiting an apparently contradictory nature: paradox. The authors study the manner in which...
The importance of business relationships has been widely recognised, both in academic and practitioner literature. The effects of exchanged acts between parties have not been sufficiently explained though. The application of 'Rules Theory' to the field brings a new perspective that helps to advance understanding the dynamic interaction between orga...
This definitive textbook explains what CRM is, the benefits it delivers, the contexts in which it is used, how it can be implemented and how CRM technologies can be deployed to support customer management strategies and objectives. It also looks comprehensively at how CRM can be used throughout the customer life-cycle stages of customer acquisition...
Recent reports implicate organizational culture in the failure of customer relationship management (CRM) system implementations. This paper presents new empirical data on the association between organizational culture, as measured by the competing values model, and CRM outcomes. The research also investigates whether several additional variables mo...
Purpose
This paper seeks to analyse the effects that previous episodes have on business‐to‐business relationships and how these episodes can influence the parties’ responses to a particular act. This investigation uses a network approach to investigate this relational situation.
Design/methodology/approach
A single case study was used based on doz...
In the late 1990's and early 2000's several accidents were reported of Ford Explorers equipped with Firestone tires rolling over as a consequence of tires' failures. By the end of 2000 the death toll was estimated at more than 250, and some 3,000 incidents had been associated with 'defective' Firestone tires mounted on Ford Explorers. These problem...
Many authors maintain that word - of - mouth (WOM) from satisfied customers is a significant contributor to customer acquisition, and professional firms and SMEs rely on it. However, we know little about how WOM processes work for service firms, and how managers can influence recommendations. This multiple case study of three service organizations...
After a period of decline at the turn of the century, demand for customer relationship management (CRM) software is rebounding. Our investigation of the Australian context, however, shows that a large proportion of companies are still undeveloped in terms of their application of software to support their customer management strategies. Less than 40...
This article relocates the concept of needs from a psychological frame of reference to an anthropological one. Defining needs as the requirements of a particular social life leads to the conclusion that needs vary both historically and geographically. This opposes the views of Abraham Maslow who conceived of needs as universal and instinctoid. This...
Customer relationship management: concepts and tools is the first edition of a book that is now in its third edition. Rather than upload the full first edition, which is now out-dated, I have uploaded the first chapter of the 3rd edition.
Welcome to the third edition of Customer Relationship Management: Concepts and Technologies. Welcome also to a...
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) means different things to different people. For some, CRM is the term used to describe a set of IT applications that automate customer-facing processes in marketing, selling and service. For others, it is about an organizational desire to be more customer focused. Others associate CRM with the capture, analysi...
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) means different things to different people. For some, CRM is the term used to describe a set of IT applications that automate customer-facing processes in marketing, selling and service. For others, it is about an organizational desire to be more customer focused. Others associate CRM with the capture, analysi...
Linking aspects of relationships with some measure of competitive advantage has become a growing topic of interest for marketing and strategy scholars. Studies in this area have focussed on trust, commitment, mutual goals, power, social bonding, transaction costs, information exchange, idiosyncratic investment and governance, each of which have bee...
Many commentators have identified organisational culture as an important factor that enables or disables the achievement of desirable CRM outcomes, along with other key people-related issues, such as senior management commitment and people’s willingness to support the initiative. Our review of the CRM literature shows that an organisational environ...
Linking aspects of relationships with some measure of competitive advantage has become a growing topic of interest for marketing and strategy scholars. Studies in this area have focussed on trust, commitment, mutual goals, power, social bonding, transaction costs, information exchange, idiosyncratic investment and governance, each of which have bee...
Purpose
Customer retention has been a significant topic since the mid‐1990s, but little research has been conducted into management processes that are associated with excellent customer retention performance. This research investigates the associations between customer retention outcomes and a number of management processes including customer reten...
Our survey of CRM competencies in 170 Australian companies focused on 4 main areas: customer knowledge, customer acquisition, customer retention, and customer development. We find that current practice is rather elementary. Companies are failing to perform the basic tasks of generating customer knowledge, customer acquisition, customer retention an...
Purpose
– This research paper seeks to investigate the different types of attachment that customers develop towards retail banks.
Design/methodology/approach
– The approach blends literature reviews, in addition to qualitative and quantitative methods. The primary research programme analyses data from seven focus groups, 39 one‐on‐one interviews a...
After a period of decline at the turn of the century, demand for CRM software appears to be rebounding in the Australian marketplace. However, a large proportion of companies are still undeveloped in terms of their application of software to support customer management. Our research shows that less than 40% of companies use CRM software to support...
There are reports of grave disquiet about the performance of CRM systems. Vendors and consultants are accused of overselling the benefits of CRM. Clients are accused of buying naively without formulating clear performance expectations. Client satisfaction is undoubtedly low and there is a growing demand for more precise measurement of CRM's impacts...
Questions
Questions (4)
I'm interested to find out whether there has been any research into the influence that the seating or standing of retail store checkout/ cashier staff has on customer perceptions of service quality or customer experience more broadly. Does their posture - seating or standing - make any difference? Thanks for your help with this.
Hi everyone... I'm going to be in New Zealand from December 2016 to mid-2017 and would like to get involved in some interesting research. I'll be based in Hawkes Bay. My background is mostly marketing, word-of-mouth, complaints management, CRM and management more broadly. Please check out my RG profile and message me if you have anything to offer. Thanks.
Social CRM is management of the customer life-cycle (acquisition, retention, development) through social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. Tech vendors and consultants have a vested interest in telling good news stories, but who is doing independent research? And what is being discovered?
