D.Com. (Business Management) / In recent academic journals it is clear that the marketing of services is still a popular topic of research. Although not surprising, the bulk of the research centered around aspects such as marketing strategy, service quality and the difference between product and services marketing. The aspect of risk perception, particularly in the buying process of services, has received rather marginal attention from researchers and the interest in the relationship between risk perception and information acquisition has only recently been revived in the work of Murray (1991). A topic still to be resolved in academic research, is the involvement of risk perception in the buying process of industrial services. This study is primarily concerned with the relationship between risk perception and the information acquisition behaviour of buyers of industrial services in contrast to the purchase of consumer services. To make a contribution to the scientific understanding of the marketing of services, six hypotheses were proposed to be tested in an experimental setting. The hypotheses postulated selected behavioural patterns of decision maker in reaction to the independent variable of manipulated risk perception. The experimental design used, was a 2x3 repeated measures design where the independent variable was manipulated with one of five randomly assigned services in each category of a continuum of three different levels of risk perception (High, medium and low risk). The dependent variables constituted measures of source usage, source effectiveness and source confidence. The three dependent measures were operationalised by a 25-item rating scale derived from Andreason (1968) and Murray (1991)...
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uj/uj:13474 |
| Date | 18 March 2015 |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | University of Johannesburg |
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