Many companies do it: they let their employees play - with small plastic bricks, tokens, memory cards or board games. Practice and anecdotal evidence suggests that brand games work, because they are fun and motivate customer-contact employees to live the brand. The purpose of this paper is to investigate if a brand and its underlying values can be communicated effectively through the use of brand games. Drawing on flow theory and research on social interaction the reported field experiment demonstrates that brand games can lead to more favorable evaluations of the brand and higher levels of positive affect toward the brand compared to an expository representation.
One of the most frequently studied concepts in sponsorship research is the notion of congruence (also referred to as fit, match, or relatedness) between the sponsor and the institution or activity being sponsored (e.g., Gwinner and Eaton 1999; Rifon, Choi, Trimble, and Li 2004; Roy and Cornwell 2004; Johar and Pham 1999). Congruence between the sponsor and the sponsee has been shown to lead to more favorable consumer responses and greater sponsorship success, whereas a lack of congruence usually entails less positive consequences. However, it has also been pointed out that many companies may not have logical, native links to sports, events, and causes and may therefore end up sponsoring properties that are not a natural match (Cornwell, Humphreys, Maguire, Weeks, and Tellegen 2006; Simmons and Becker-Olson 2006). This raises the question whether incongruent sponsorships are necessarily doomed to fail or whether evaluations of incongruent sponsorships can be improved through adequate marketing activities. The purpose of this research is to investigate to what extent (1) the articulation of the sponsorship relationship and (2) the active participation of the audience in the sponsorship experience can lead to improved responses to incongruent sponsorships.
Although applicant-employee fit has emerged as an important topic in recruitment research, little is known about how job seekers' perceived similarity with the employees working for an organization affects employer attraction. In this research, we introduce temporal construal as a crucial moderating variable and study how the temporal decision context affects the weighting of applicant-employee fit. In particular, we argue that applicant-employee fit is construed in abstract, high-level terms and exerts a stronger influence when prospective applicants hold a distant time perspective. In contrast, instrumental attributes such as pay level represent low-level construals and gain greater relevance when prospective applicants hold a near time perspective. Two experiments involving a student sample and a sample of unemployed job seekers supported these predictions.
Although ethical scandals are a common phenomenon in the service industry, there is little research on the service-specific aspects of crisis management. In this research, we argue that frontline employees are of crucial importance after a scandal and examine how firms can secure the support of frontline employees following different kinds of scandals. Specifically, we demonstrate that corrective responses that address the internal causes of a scandal and ceremonial responses that guide attention to positive aspects unrelated to the scandal moderate the impact of different scandals on frontline employee support. Three experiments showed that frontline employee support was greater after scandals that involved a great rather than a small number of wrongdoers and after scandals that had been caused by high-ranking managers rather than low-ranking employees when a corrective response was implemented. In contrast, support was greater following scandals that had been committed by a few low-ranking employees rather than high-ranking managers when a ceremonial response was employed. These results have important implications by illustrating how companies can effectively restore frontline employee support following a scandal.
Im Wettbewerb um Fachkräfte stellen manche Arbeitgeber Leistungen wie ein hohes Gehalt in den Vordergrund, andere werben mit weichen Faktoren wie ihrer Unternehmenskultur. Eine Untersuchung zeigt, wann welche Strategie den grössten Erfolg verspricht.
Ein charakteristisches Merkmal vieler Dienstleistungen stellt die Interaktion zwischen Mitarbeiter und Kunde dar. Egal ob im Restaurant, beim Einkaufen oder im Fitnesscenter, fast überall treffen Kunden auf Mitarbeiter, die ihre Wahrnehmung und Bewertung der Dienstleistung mit beeinflussen. Vor diesem Hintergrund ist der Gedanke naheliegend, dass Mitarbeiter einen wichtigen Faktor zum Erreichen einer hohen Dienstleistungsproduktivität darstellen (Drucker 1993; Bienzeisler/Löffler 2006).
