This strategic marketing thesis explores the effects of the service environment (servicescape) on customers' loyalty intentions towards UK restaurants. To obtain a deeper understanding of approach-avoidance behaviour, the study draws from broadly parallel perspectives in the economics, psychology and organizational behaviour academies, in conceptualizing and operationalizing loyalty intentions. The organizational behaviour domain was particularly integral to the study as the climate and culture of an organization were shown to respectively determine the cues placed in the servicescape and the performance of service staff, thereby proving useful lenses through which the servicescape could be explored, conceptualized and rigorously tested. In furtherance of conceptualization efforts, a model was developed to evaluate the linear influences of nine servicescape variables on customers' loyalty intentions. Additionally, the model appraised the impact of personal and environmental factors which were believed to moderate the servicescape - loyalty intentions relationship. The insertion of nine servicescape variables and four moderating factors into the model allowed for the development of a global configuration of the servicescape and provided a variation to the traditional servicescapes model. The results of rigorous statistical and econometric testing support ten of the thirteen advanced hypotheses, thus sustaining the adoption of an organizational behaviour perspective as a legitimate approach to servicescape study. To validate these findings, triangulate empirical results and add richness to the study, a series of focus group sessions were conducted to obtain high-quality data on customers' perceptions of servicescape cues. The findings of these sessions were shown to complement utilized empirical techniques and enrich understanding of the restaurant servicescape via the organizational behaviour domain. Consequently, organizational climate and organizational culture should, at the very least, be equated in importance to overall services marketing strategy.

From the additudinal Website loyalty perspective, Internet marketing strategies of Website activities and loyalty scheme are recommended to fit the underlying different cognitive styles of the four consumer segments, namely, less-involved adaptors, more-involved adaptors, less-involved innovators, and more-involved innovators. In this way, managers will effectively and efficiently enhance consumers' attitudinal loyalty to the brand/Website and take full advantage of the Internet technology.

Taiwan has experienced a series of economic growth phases since the 1940s. Following these growth phase, there have been considerable changes in the nature of the retail system and consumer behaviour on the island. Notably, in 1994, in order to promote economic development, the Industrial and Commercial Composite Area Establishment Law (ICCAE Law) was promulgated by the MOEA and the MOI which opened the door to a new type of larger out-of-town retail development in Taiwan. However, few English language studies have focused on recent retail market development or collected retail data pertaining to Taiwan. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the relationship between consumers' patronage behaviour and the retailing system in Taiwan's urban area and then, drawing on changes in behaviour, to infer likely retail impact derived from the new retailing type. The Taiwan Sugar Mall in Tainan, Taiwan, one of the first larger out-of-town retail developments derived from the ICCAE Law, was selected as a case to conduct an empirical study. Through a longitudinal panel shopping behaviour survey of households, both quantitative and qualitative data were collected to develop shopping destination choice models, analyse changes in patronage behaviour, and explore likely impacts derived from the Taiwan Sugar Mall. The study found households' convenience goods' patronage behaviour was more easily measured/predicted than their comparison goods' patronage behaviour, better explained/predicted by a dichotomous logistic regression model, primarily dominated by spatial separation distance and store selection criteria. Comparing steady unplanned retailer shoppers with changed-to-planned retailer shoppers, the latter were identified as: travelling further, younger, having short residential durations, single, with a higher educational level, higher personal income, and more concerned about parking facilities and store loyalty card scheme/coupons/promotional activities. Finally, a minor impact of the Taiwan Sugar Mall was concluded due to failure to attract unplanned retailer shoppers, failure to meet planned retailer shoppers' requirements, failure to attract changed-to-planned retailer shoppers' patronage, and insufficient promotional activities.

This thesis presents a study of mid-level marketing managers' behaviour in product-market strategy implementation with the overall objective of understanding how the performance of product-market strategy implementation might be improved. A literature review from a number of fields is conducted in order to develop a guiding framework for the development of a conceptual model. By combining perspectives on product-market strategy implementation from a structural, contextual and interpersonal process perspective, the study provides a broad and integrative understanding of product-market strategy implementation performance. A holistic model encompassing situational antecedents to two dimensions of mid-level marketing managers' product-market strategy implementation behaviour (counterproductive work behaviour and citizenship behaviour) is presented. The outcomes of these dimensions of behaviour are assessed in terms of the internal and external effectiveness of product-market strategy implementation performance. A number of hypotheses are constructed linking situational antecedents to the dimensions of product-market strategy implementation behaviour and these dimensions of behaviour to product-market strategy implementation performance. The research design and empirical method used to test the hypotheses is developed and presented A questionnaire is designed and employed as the survey instrument to generate the data on the hypothesized relationships. The method of administration uses a four stage postal survey. The data generated are examined through an analysis of the descriptive statistics before scale construction through principal components analysis. The hypotheses are subsequently tested through correlation analysis and multiple linear regression analysis A discussion of the findings provides a number of conclusions that make a tangible contribution to knowledge and practice. Several directions for future research that emerge from the findings, in addition to opportunities presented from the limitations of the study are offered.

This study is about social persuasion, and it is specialised to a particular context of in-home shopping, in which the goal of social persuasion (by marketing communications) is to reduce the consumer's perceived risk taking source credibility as potential determinant of perceived risk. The consumer behaviour literature to date has not researched the constructs of source credibility and perceived risk within a single study. Both constructs have appeared, studied separately in more traditional retail contexts, and the research findings on the dimensionality of source credibility and of perceived risk have been relatively inconsistent. This study seeks to understand source credibility and perceived risk in the newer context of in-home shopping, by looking at whether source credibility (low and high) in the context of potential moderating variables: product type (CD player or T-shirt) and shopping medium (catalogue or TV) affect perceptions of consumers' risk. The research design used in this study had two phases: qualitative and quantitative. In the qualitative phase, a series of focus groups was used to explore the main concepts, to develop the main instruments, and to select "high" and "low" levels for the main treatment variables (source credibility) and "high" and "low" involvement products (product type) to be used in each of two shopping media (catalogue and TV). These levels were then operationalised as experimental treatments. In the quantitative phase, we used experienced in-home shoppers as sample subjects using a within-subject mixed factorial design (2 x 2 x 212). We found that the dimensionality of source credibility was not as predicted by previous research; whereas, the dimensionality of perceived risk was as predicted by previous research. This study suggests that the effects of source credibility are context specific, and are sometimes counterintuitive (a confirmation and extension of previous more general social persuasion research). In particular, our findings suggest that high source credibility (as opposed to low source credibility) tends to reduce perceived financial and performance risks for high involvement products but only in the TV shopping medium. It seems that the effects of moderating variables can outweigh the effects of variations in source credibility (especially for the psychological, social, and time dimensions of perceived risk). Our findings suggest that catalogue shopping is perceived to be less risky than TV shopping by both catalogue shoppers and TV shoppers. Interestingly, TV shoppers report higher levels of risk in both of these in-home shopping media than catalogue shoppers do. A completely unexpected aspect of this finding is that TV shopper's reported higher levels of risk in the medium they actually chose to use (TV) than in the one they do not use (catalogue). This study also demonstrated that the effects of the three experimental treatments (product type, shopping medium, and source credibility) on perceived risk are mediated by inter-individual differences between subjects. We established this by measuring a construct, which we term source approval, and by controlling for inter-individual variations in this variable using MANCO V A. The study has implications both for marketing management and for future marketing research.

The marketing programme standardisation/localisation policies of sixty-three UK companies exporting to the Gulf states are examined, using a three-factor, sixty variable model of country, firm, and marketing programme factors. The research framework is unusually broad compared with other standardisation studies, which have also concentrated more on the developed than the developing economies. Three firm variables and one country variable are shown to differentiate the degree of marketing programme standardisation between the UK and the Gulf. The degree of standardisation of the marketing programme variables varies across the individual elements. Product strategies are much more standardised and promotion, distribution and price more moderately adapted. In the Gulf, unexpectedly, industrial product firms appear to be no more standardised in their marketing programmes than consumer goods firms. UK companies tend to treat the six Gulf states as a single market cluster with only minor variations between them in their marketing programmes. The agents' views about the degree of standardisation are compared with the views of the headquarters, which are similar in their perceptions of the types of marketing programmes used.

Internal branding studies indicate that organizations are pointing to effective internal communication as an influential factor in business success in ensuring the delivery of the brand promise by their employees, particularly the customer-interface employees. Internal communication satisfaction makes employees feel that they are identified with, committed and loyal to the brand, so they would behave in ways that support the brand reality. The Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire (CSQ) is the most widely used business communication satisfaction questionnaire. However, the constructs of internal communication satisfaction from the CSQ have not been used in the internal branding concept in developing countries. Therefore, this researcher’s aim was to conceptualise and evaluate the role of internal communication satisfaction constructs from the CSQ constructs, which include seven constructs (Organizational Perspective, Organizational Integration, Personal Feedback, Relationship to Supervisors, Horizontal Communication, Media Quality and Communication climate) on employees’ brand outcomes in the hotel business in Thailand. Furthermore, this study provides empirical evidence to support the link between the domain of internal communication satisfaction and employees’ brand attitudes and brand behaviours. Within a positivist paradigm, the study employed a survey to collect data from customer-facing employees in the hotel business in Thailand in both high ranking and low ranking hotels. The data consists of 1,212 customer-facing employees from high ranking hotels and the other 535 employees from low ranking hotels. The study then analyses the data using a structural equation model. There are three notable findings upon which conclusions can be drawn from this study. First, the seven CSQ’s constructs as the domain of internal communication satisfaction in the internal branding concept can help employees represent a brand to customers that come into contact with the brand. Second, this study confirms previous studies that claim internal communication satisfaction is a tool of internal branding that shapes employees' brand attitudes (e.g. identification, commitment, and loyalty) and employees’ brand behaviours. Finally, the seven domains of internal communication satisfaction (created from the CSQ) in the internal branding concept can be used in both hotels of high and low customer ranking in Thailand context and communicated to staff to achieve higher employee brand performance. The study contributes to marketing academic knowledge by: (1) identifying the seven CSQ’s constructs as the domain of internal communication in the internal branding concept; (2) extending the concept of internal branding to explain how internal communication influences employees’ brand performance, and (3) confirming the functional importance of both organizational and management communication from the corporate communication approach, which will help employees achieve the internal branding goals. Managerially, the study provides a model for marketers to conceive and design the internal communication whose attributes work together to create employees’ brand outcomes and competitive advantage in business. It isolates the key role played, in developing effective measurement internal communication tools for the business, by the desire to explore both employees high and low in the variable work performance. The study consists of a series of philosophies and methods in quantitative research, and each tool for quantitative studies necessitates a choice. The researcher is aware that the same research objectives could have been met using a qualitative research methodology. The main limitations are now reviewed, and point the way towards future research.

Higher education institutions are working hard to associate their names with a positive brand image. However, an increasing phenomenon significantly affecting Jordanian Universities is campus violence perpetrated by consumer misbehaviour. Consumer misbehaviour in higher education has not been adequately researched and the incidences of campus violence are under reported by actors, and acted upon by the authorities. As, there is no single study in Jordan that has tackled campus violence from a marketing perspective, this thesis aims to explore the influence of consumer misbehaviour on international students’ perspective of Jordanian Higher Education Institutions’ (JHEIs) brand image. For reasons of clarity and international theoretical relevance, this thesis adopts the international term “consumer misbehaviours” in referring to the phenomenon of campus violence in JHEIs. Qualitative empirical semi-structured interviews with various international students were conducted in four Jordanian universities in order to gain an in-depth understanding of the phenomena and its influence on the brand image of JHEIs. This study revealed the prevalence of consumer misbehaviours and their consequences for JHEIs. The findings revealed multiple drivers of consumer misbehaviours, for example personal, cultural norms, academic, political, economic, and institutional. Furthermore, the types of consumer misbehaviours revealed, included verbal and psychological abuse, physical assault, sexual harassment, property damage, tribal brawls, discrimination and racism. Moreover, consumer misbehaviours were found to have a negative influence on the international brand image of Jordanian Higher Education (JHE), which subsequently affects the Jordanian economy. Despite this, the findings also showed that consumer misbehaviours are not always negative. For example, fighting against the injustices of universities’ policies, and forcing institutions to employ more security and qualified staff. The outcomes of this study generate numerous implications and suggestions for theorists and practitioners in the educational marketing field in order to mitigate student consumer misbehaviours. Higher education institutions can use the results of this study to make the educational environment safer, correct weaknesses identified by this study and develop policies, which will improve the safety of customers and staff. Examples of such policies include: engagement and collaboration, encouragement of good conduct, and increase collaborations with all HE stakeholders etc. Accordingly, the results provide a foundation on which future research can be built.

Sierra Leone is a multi-cultural and multi-faceted society with people from diverse backgrounds, who espoused different cultural behaviours at mealtimes and in their business dealings. The significance of this study is that it highlights the differences and similarities inherent among the families and businesses in the Sierra Leonean collectivist context, and Africa generally, which has been neglected by many researchers in the past. This study is the first of its kind in the African continent as it provides an opportunity for governments and businesses to see not only the cultural richness of Sierra Leone, but to learn and understand how to develop and respond to food products produced, consumed and sold in such markets. The aim of this study is to critically review literature on collectivism and undertake data collection to evaluate the factors stakeholders perceived as influencing families’ meal social interaction behaviour in a Sierra Leonean context, and apply the results on food retailers and producers to assess how they affect their behaviour when marketing their products to consumers. This research adopted the constructionist approach as its epistemological perspective, which is reliably linked with the ‘lived experiences of families and businesses as it is considered an appropriate way for determining how humans make sense of their surroundings. In the first phase of the study, 20 different Sierra Leonean families (husband and wife), with a sample size of 40, were interviewed using observations and one-to-one semi-structured interviews, whilst in the second phase of the study, 20 businesses (16 food retailing and 4 food manufacturing companies) were interviewed using a semi-structured interview approach. The research was conducted in the four provincial headquarter towns of Bo, Freetown, Kenema and Makeni. The data was collected using snowballing, experiential and convenience sampling techniques. The researcher used qualitative research in explaining the behaviours of families and businesses. The data was analysed qualitatively using an inductive approach. The findings showed that a majority of Sierra Leonean families and businesses displayed collectivist behaviour when interacting socially and/or when marketing their food products to customers. The findings also showed that religion, ethnicity, conformity, reference groups and social class were the predominant determinants of the behaviours of a majority of families and businesses in Sierra Leone. In addition, the results of the findings implied that variation exists even between individuals of the same religion, between gender groups, and between food retailing and food producing companies, which affects the way they behave. The findings further revealed that there is a cultural divide between a majority of Muslims and Christians with regard the type of food considered appropriate for consumption at the dinner table, which equally affects the type of food products manufactured and sold by businesses. Despite this division, the findings showed that there are increased commonalities between a majority of the families and businesses as well as differences, which affects their behavioural patterns. The key contributions of this study are that it provides an extension of our knowledge in identifying new concepts of collectivism in the Sierra Leonean context that influences families and businesses’ behaviour, for example, family/customer’s food ethics; gender differentiation; tribal sentiment; preferential treatment; communication style; education; etc. The study also highlights the concept of interactionalism, which posits that religion, ethnicity, conformity, reference groups and social class interact with each other in the form of a web in influencing the behaviour of Sierra Leonean families and businesses. Another contribution of this study is its presentation of the factors affecting families and businesses’ behaviour in schematic diagrams.

The extant literature provides a limited understanding of the role of customer-based corporate reputation (CBR) in business-to-customer relationships. Cognitive CBR and affective CBR are two distinct attitudinal components of CBR. However, research into CBR largely neglects to test the separate effects of both CBR components on business-to-customer relationships. In particular, the affective aspects of CBR have been underrated in comparison with the cognitive aspects of CBR in the conceptualization of CBR as a whole. The underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions of the effects of the CBR components on business-to-customer relationships also invite researchers’ attention to better explain how these effects operate and how different circumstances influence these effects. This study, therefore, distinguishes between both the cognitive and affective components of CBR to investigate their relative effects on business-to-customer relationships, and examines the underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions of such effects. For this purpose, customer trust, customer commitment, intentional loyalty, and customer perceived risk are adopted as representative constructs of business-to-customer relationships, from the existing literature. This study developed a conceptual model comprising of 21 hypotheses representing the inter-construct effects. Quantitative methodology was adopted to test the model. For this purpose, a systematic sample of 1059 customers was surveyed from the fast-food services industry in Pakistan. By disentangling the effects of CBR on business-to-customer relationships, this study makes several theoretical contributions. First, this study reveals that cognitive CBR and affective CBR have differential effects on business-to-customer relationships. Second, this study extends the application of social exchange theory into the areas of corporate reputation and business-to-customer exchanges by identifying that the underrated affective component of CBR has a strong impact on business-to-customer relationships. Third, this study explicates the mechanisms through which CBR affects business-to-customer relationships, by analysing the role of mediating factors that explain the effects of both CBR components on intentional loyalty. Fourth, this study finds relationship age as an important moderator (i.e. boundary condition) for the effects of CBR on business-to-customer relationships. Fifth, drawing on the international business perspective, this study theorizes and tests the moderating effects of firm type (local versus MNEs) for the impacts of CBR components on business-to-customer relationships. The findings help the service providers to better understand the ways in which CBR may affect their relationship marketing activities. The findings also suggest some useful implications in the areas of integrated marketing communication, customer segmentation, and international business management.