Lena Steinhoff

Paderborn University · Marketing & Digital Transformation

Existing customers are commonly considered a relatively secure source of revenue and thus taken for granted. Yet complacency can result in missed opportunities to expand the business or, in the worst case, customer defection. Customer engagement—sellers’ initiatives to occupy the attention of an existing customer by providing special benefits and e...

Loyalty programs are a ubiquitous marketing tactic, yet many of them perform poorly and the reasons for loyalty program failure remain unclear to both marketing managers and researchers. This article presents three studies—two experiments and one survey—in support of the notion that a greater understanding of loyalty program performance demands an...

In service industries, hierarchical loyalty programs are common relationship marketing instruments that award elevated status to customers who exceed a certain spending level (e.g., gold membership). In practice, service companies offer elevated status to some customers who do not meet the required spending level, in an attempt to profit from the p...

Purpose Customer satisfaction formation represents a dynamic phenomenon, especially in extended service encounters. A single service encounter may have an extended duration and feature several service interactions, which the customer can evaluate independently. This paper aims to offer a dynamic perspective on satisfaction formation, which indicate...

Customer misbehavior poses a major risk in the sharing economy. For example, property damage to shared accommodations imposes burdens on both sharing platforms and hosts, especially if misbehaving guests purposefully, not coincidentally conceal, or fail to report damages. Such misbehavior might be facilitated by remote listing management and the la...

Service frontline encounters between customers and service providers have been subject to fundamental changes in recent years. As two major change agents, technology infusion and data privacy regulations are inextricably linked and constitute a critical ethical and societal issue. Specifically, service frontlines—as represented by human or technolo...

Noting its performance-enhancing effects, relationship marketing managers around the world actively seek to stimulate customer engagement. Research insights into how to engage customers, such that they voluntarily contribute their resources to support companies’ marketing efforts, almost exclusively pertain to individual, domestic markets. The prer...

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...

Voice commerce creates unprecedented opportunities for consumers and vendor firms to interact, engage, and relate. With artificial intelligence-powered voice assistants, consumers can make technology-mediated purchases without using their tactile senses, which represents a new space for commercial interactions. Drawing on the customer journey as an...

Voice commerce creates unprecedented opportunities for consumers and vendor firms to interact, engage, and relate. With artificial intelligence-powered voice assistants, consumers can make technology-mediated purchases without using their tactile senses, which represents a new space for commercial interactions. Drawing on the customer journey as an...

Traditionally, loyalty programs have rewarded members following their purchases. However, current versions of these programs feature extended scopes of benefits, including technology-facilitated complementary service features that span multiple purchase stages. Using a multimethod approach, this research explores the potential of loyalty programs t...

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...

Unprecedented, exponential growth in the amount of consumer data collected by retailers across various customer touchpoints has made safeguarding data privacy a key priority. Data privacy in retail contexts requires convergence among three key stakeholders—consumer, retailer, and regulatory—each of which has unique roles and viewpoints. With a glob...

As exemplary instruments of relationship marketing, loyalty programs are being implemented and studied at an unprecedented rate. Yet real-world efforts often fail—or at least do not live up to expectations—and despite the growing richness of loyalty program literature, the field remains fragmented. Thus, a comprehensive perspective is required. To...

Value propositions (VPs) can play a major role for the strategy development and implementation process in B2B markets. While being recognized as one of the firm's most important organizing principles, the VP concept is still poorly understood and executed in many B2B firms and scholarly research provides limited guidance on how to develop and imple...

Customer value propositions have experienced a growing interest among marketing scholars and managers in recent years. Despite its frequent mention in the business and academic press, the value proposition concept remains poorly understood and executed. This article introduces the reader to the special issue of Industrial Marketing Management on un...

Gift giving is an effective means to strengthen interpersonal relationships; it also may initiate and enhance customer–brand relationships. Through a field study conducted with an international monobrand retailer of beauty products, a combination of propensity score matching with difference-in-differences estimations, and two experimental scenario...

Online interactions have emerged as a dominant exchange mode for companies and customers. Cultivating online relationships—defined as relational exchanges that are mediated by Internet-based channels—presents firms with challenges and opportunities. In lockstep with exponential advancements in computing technology, a rich and ever-evolving toolbox...

The concept of relationship marketing has been discussed among marketing academics and managers since the early 1980s. But instead of reaching its maturity stage, relationship marketing is nowadays encountering its next upsurge. Due to a confluence of trends driving the global business world—including the transition to service-based economies, fast...

Customer engagement, a customer’s active participation in and connection with a firm’s services, has been promoted as a key driver of customer loyalty. Yet, insights on how to effectively manage engagement are scarce. This article employs an experimental study to assess the loyalty-effect of customer engagement and disentangle the effectiveness of...

In hierarchischen Loyalitätsprogrammen bekommen einige Kunden einen bevorzugten Kundenstatus vom Unternehmen geschenkt, anstatt diesen wie üblich aktiv zu erreichen. Ob sich der geschenkte bevorzugte Kundenstatus ebenso positiv auf die Kundenloyalität auswirkt wie der erreichte, ist unklar. Auf Basis sozialpsychologischer Theorien und Konzepte leit...

Gegenstand der vorliegenden Arbeit ist die Untersuchung des Zusammenhangs zwischen dem geschenkten bevorzugten Kundenstatus und der Kundenloyalität. In diesem Kapitel wird eine Schlussbetrachtung der Untersuchung vorgenommen. Abschnitt 5.1 fasst die wesentlichen Ergebnisse der Arbeit zusammen. In Abschnitt 5.2 werden aus den Ergebnissen Schlussfolg...

Dieses Kapitel nimmt eine empirisch-experimentelle Analyse der zuvor theoretisch hergeleiteten Zusammenhänge zwischen dem geschenkten bevorzugten Kundenstatus und der Kundenloyalität vor. Abschnitt 4.1 gibt einen Überblick über die experimentelle Forschung als methodische Grundlage der empirischen Untersuchung.

Um die identifizierte Forschungslücke zu schließen, wird in diesem Kapitel der Zusammenhang zwischen dem geschenkten bevorzugten Kundenstatus und der Kundenloyalität zunächst auf Basis theoretischer Überlegungen analysiert. Abschnitt 3.1 identifiziert die relevanten theoretischen Ansätze und stellt die theoretischen Grundlagen dar. In Abschnitt 3.2...

In diesem Kapitel werden die konzeptionellen Grundlagen der beiden Themenbereiche Kundenloyalität und Loyalitätsprogramme aufbereitet. Hierzu beschäftigt sich Abschnitt 2.1 mit der Kundenloyalität als Zielgröße des Beziehungsmarketing, Abschnitt 2.2 betrachtet sodann Loyalitätsprogramme als Instrument des Beziehungsmarketing. Ziel des Kapitels ist...

Loyalty programs are popular and ubiquitous marketing instruments, with U.S. companies spending more than $1.2 billion on them each year, program participation topping 1.8 billion, and the average U.S. household subscribing to 14 different programs. Yet, many loyalty programs perform poorly, often resulting in their abolition. To both marketing man...