Using a sociocultural approach, we explore an illicit consumption community online. There are several thriving consumption communities that exist online that exchange illicit commodities without scrutiny from regulatory structures. Despite the large sums of money spent on this practice and the potential problems associated with illicit commoditizing, the online environment remains loosely regulated. A netnography of one such community, online poker players, is the central focus of this research. We propose a dramaturgical model that explains the macro-environmental factors of illicit consumption communities and the individual motives of online poker players. The online poker forum selected for this study is vibrant, rich with data and frequented often by online poker community members. By examining discussions held within this online community, we uncover insights on the illicit consumption of online poker players and their motives. We explore these varying factors and motives and discuss the public policy implications of our findings.

No description available.

This investigation is concerned with how financial services retailers approach the retention of customers. Markets for financial services have become saturated, competition has become fiercer and consumers have gained greater confidence in the consumption of financial services. Traditional retailers of financial services have begun to look to their existing customers to maintain and improve their profitability in these turbulent times. They hope that by retaining selected customers, they will be able to lower their costs by cross-selling financial products. In spite of considerable practitioner interest in customer retention, to date there is limited empirical study, in particular, into how retaining customers might actually be achieved. This study adopts a pluralistic methodology and uses the perceptions of staff working for financial services retailers to build a picture of how retention is organised. Interviews with managers and two surveys are conducted to gather the data, which are then evaluated within a framework of contemporary marketing. The study finds that there are a number of aspects involved in retaining customers that include information systems and strategy. The results of the investigation also suggest that these retailers are organised around the acquisition of customers and that balancing retention with acquisition may prove challenging.

No description available.

These last decades, Internet has appeared as an indispensable way to develop business activities. While a large number of consumers in France frequently shop on the Internet, research on what factors influence their behaviour changes has been fragmented. This dissertation therefore proposes a framework to increase researchers’ understanding of French young consumers’ attitudes toward online shopping and their intention to shop on the Internet.The consumer behaviour has been studied a lot, notably because, as soon as they know and understand their target, companies can adapt their offers. Nowadays, this kind of studies applied to online customers has become essential.The two ways of shopping are relatively different from each other in terms of perceived shopping benefits. Diverse factors are the key to the consumer behaviour changes between both traditional shopping in physical stores and e-shopping on the Internet. In this paper, we are going to emphasis them.

There is increasing awareness that mental health consumers may have important information for the development of services. In this qualitative study, I interviewed 10 consumers with the purpose of exploring in depth their experiences in interacting with service providers in the greater Vancouver area. Using constant comparative analysis, I found that the data suggested participants’ experiences of recovery developed largely out of connecting with other consumers rather than with service providers. Current services were portrayed as primarily reliant on the use of psychiatric medication. Consumers pointed to numerous difficulties in seeking help, including a lack of treatment alternatives, stigma and isolation. They also presented a strong demand for services and policies that promote an individual sense of recovery and support their fundamental human rights. Mental health service providers need to critically reflect on their current practices and policies, and how they may negatively impact their clients' lives by failing to properly listen to their narratives, grievances, experiences and perceptions. This study suggests further inclusion of consumer's views and participation in services to foster collaborative, recovery-oriented practices.

The notion of community remains an important concern, for individuals, in urban planning practice, and more recently in consumer research. This thesis research explores community at the junction of these areas, through a grounded study of the consumption practices of a place based consumer tribe that exists within an inner city suburb undergoing urban renewal. The process of urban renewal is positioned as a means to revitalise under-utilised inner city areas, and broaden opportunities for city residents and visitors to experience an inner city lifestyle. It can also be seen as a standardising project that commodifies diversity and devalues existing communities and is associated with gentrification. Both perspectives can obscure the possibility that consumption practices can be used to build community like connections. This thesis applies a framework of literature from marketing and consumer research to an urban renewal context, to explore this area of ambiguity. The result of this exploration is a grounded theory of assuming a 'local' identity through consumption experiences in servicescapes. This thesis argues that consumers seek out individual servicescapes for the value experiences that they offer, which can be identity defining. In particular the interaction generated through these experiences can work to build tribal connections to, and within, that servicescape. These consumption experiences can also be used to make assumptions regarding the identity of others; both of the businesses themselves, and the individuals encountered within them. The tribal connections these experiences may generate can have individual benefits in that they can build into existing social networks, but through repetition and shared experiences, may also link an individual to a broader place based community. This thesis also proposes that servicescapes can work to encourage this process, by encouraging identity defining consumption experiences. Like individuals, businesses can come to be assumed to be tribe members and this 'localness' can become a symbolic operant resource that is valued by the tribe. As key sites in which members of the 'local' tribe reinforce their commitment to the tribe, locally owned businesses may benefit by being more likely to be chosen over their 'non-local' competitors. However, as an element of their tribal membership these businesses have a moral responsibility to reinforce the collective ethic of the tribe and assist in integrating new tribe members. In this way they can become ambassadors for the identity of the community, communicating the shared values of the tribe to members and non-members alike. Such a place based tribe is primarily based on public interaction, thus the servicescapes and public spaces that link them can come to work as a theatre in which the tribe is manifested and its rituals performed. As the experience of a sense of shared value is repeated across a range of geographically united servicescapes, this shared experience can be displaced from any one servicescape and generalised into a localness experience that is grounded within the geographic community. It is here that the physical and ideological aspects of the community combine, and the experienced value of a shared identity that originated in a servicescape based consumption experience can come to symbolise the values of the greater community itself. These research findings have implications for inner city urban renewal developments, suggesting that the increased availability of consumption activities that are associated with urban renewal may also be considered as an increased opportunity to build place based consumer tribes. This thesis proposes ways of encouraging this process.

This dissertation analyses the statistical and theoretical basis of Goodhardt, Ehrenberg and Chatfield's (1984) NBD-Dirichlet model of purchase incidence and brand choice. In doing so it makes a contribution to the understanding and use of this model specifically and to gamma models in general. / Particular attention is devoted to the mixing distributions of the NBD-Dirichlet model. It takes the oft-mentioned and little understood random variables of the model and exploits these as the principal tool of understanding. / The value of this approach is demonstrated by the proposition that all of the NBD-Dirichlet model parameters (A, K, S and the g brand α) can be comprehended to such a degree that a reader will be able to anticipate values of these parameters for different categories prior to fitting the model, and further, that it is possible to develop empirical generalisations relating to these parameters. / A deeper understanding of this model is, therefore, achieved through examining the gamma distribution. By understanding this continuous distribution, its parameters and random variables, the NBD-Dirichlet model and its parameters may be understood. The starting point is the random variable. Properly understanding the random variable of the NBD-Dirichlet model's mixing distributions in the marketing context is integral to this dissertation. / This dissertation expands the conceptualisation of the random variable briefly mentioned in the literature for the negative binomial distribution and also extends it to the underlying random variable for the Dirichlet multinomial distribution, hence resulting in a conceptually identical random variable for both brand choice and purchase incidence. These random variables are termed selection rates, and are latent, with each shopper having a 'latent selection rate' for every brand in the category and an additional, and independent, latent selection rate for the category itself. Thus in a g brand category, each shopper has g + 1 latent selection rates. In the NBD-Dirichlet model, latent selection rates are distributed gamma over the population. / Nine propositions regarding the NBD-Dirichlet model parameters in fast moving consumer goods (hereafter FMCG) categories are derived from latent selection rate theory. A number of these propositions are supported either directly or indirectly by the literature, with a tenth proposition arising solely from this second source. Observations of parameters in 50 FMCG categories are obtained in order to test these propositions. The empirical results demonstrate the utility of the theory of latent selection rates and in addition develop a number of generalisations relating to the NBD-Dirichlet parameters. The principal result of this dissertation is that the theory of latent selection rates enables the parameters of the NBD-Dirichlet model to be anticipated for a given FMCG category. / The notion of latent selection rates and describing the underlying random variables of the NBD-Dirichlet model is not unique to this dissertation, however using them as a tool for understanding, and anticipating the parameters of the model is. This dissertation thus enhances the practical and theoretical usefulness of the NBD-Dirichlet model by focusing on its parameters which fully specify any stationary and non-partitioned category. / This is achieved by showing that the parameter values of the NBD-Dirichlet model for a given category may be anticipated simply through a basic knowledge of the category and a theoretical knowledge of the model; specifically the theory of latent selection rates. The theory thus enables a greater comprehension of the NBD-Dirichlet model and has significant implications for both academic research and everyday managerial decision making. / Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2005.

Thesis (DBA(DoctorateofBusinessAdministration))--University of South Australia, 2005.

Researchers have been quick to illustrate how traditional retail theory can be adapted to e-tail (Spiller and Lohse, 1997, 1998; Eroglu, Machleit and Davis, 2000). Similarly traditional high street retailers (bricks and mortar retailers) have sought to replicate their offering on-line via the internet. Despite the apparent parallels between on-line and in-store retail, practitioners merely replicating their in-store offering on-line have been unable to compete in this new format and in many cases have seen one format cannibalise the other (Chen and Leteney, 2000; Enders and Jalessi, 2000). Although there are obvious differences between the Internet and traditional bricks and mortar retail formats, there are likely to be some retail theories that hold true for both formats. This thesis provides a starting point in determining how existing retail knowledge can be adapted to the Internet by comparing aspects of customer behaviour on and off-line. The advent of the World Wide Web (WWW) signified global opportunities for members and stakeholders of the wine industry. Wine retailers have been quick to trial the on-line format and their trials have been met with varying degrees of success. Wine producers have also seized opportunities to promote and sell their products via the Internet. In recent years tax incentives have been introduced to encourage wine producers to sell directly to the consumer, with most wine producers being located in rural areas the Internet offers an opportunity to bring customers closer to wine products. This thesis utilises data collected through a customer database and via surveys customer behaviour has been compared. The findings of this research show that not only do a unique group of customers use the Internet for their wine purchases, but also that these customers modify their behaviour to maximise the benefit they gain from their on-line transactions. Results show that, contrary to popular belief, customers are not using the Internet to purchase the same products (as they would purchase in-store) at a lower price. A comparison of the same of the same customers purchases on-line and in-store showed customers spent more per item on-line and purchased a greater number of items per transaction on-line compared to in-store. Furthermore, a comparison of these customers' in-store transactions with customers who only purchased in-store, showed that on-line customers spent more per item and purchased in greater quantities than other customers irrespective of format. Individual characteristics identified in this research allow the targeting of customers more likely to adopt the internet as a retail format. By focusing efforts on these individuals marketers can realize optimal results from their efforts. For academic research, the established differences in retail behaviour point to areas where existing retail can be expanded to the Internet and highlight areas for future research. / Thesis (MBusiness-Research)--University of South Australia, 2004