This study investigates predictors (stated motivation and reported leisure activities) of health travel as opposed to a control group incorporating all other travel of the Swiss resident population, a well matured market. An a-priori segmentation of more than 11,000 trip cases (health travel as opposed to non health travel) was chosen as means of methodological concept, and stepwise logistic regression of 25 types of motivations and 72 types of activities towards group membership served as means of analysis. There appears to be a mature perception of health travel in the developed Swiss market, comprising rewarding elements of beauty, indulgence, and regeneration combined with demanding elements such as (challenging and stimulating) sports, including mountain biking, hiking, and golf.
Dieser Aufsatz zeigt anhand einer empirischen Studie, wie sich Erkenntnisse aus der psychologischen Forschung mit dem Design von Produkten verknüpfen lassen. Dazu werden Hypothesen aus der Gesichterforschung in die Welt der Produktentstehung übertragen. Anhand von Kaffeemaschinen, die dank der Arbeit eines Grafikers die typischen Merkmale des menschlichen Gesichts aufweisen, lassen sich Rückschlüsse auf managementrelevante Zielvariablen wie Kaufabsicht ziehen.
Communities are a traditional concept to enhance customer attraction, loyalty and retention for consumer goods. These communities are supported through either companies or customers themselves. Companies that are able to encourage their customers to interact stimulated by their branded products could position their product as a link between their customers and employ the developing communities for marketing purposes. To stimulate this kind of interaction companies have increasingly used Internet functionalities in the past years. Drawing on the overwhelming penetration rate of mobile devices of over 80 percent in Europe, we propose to propose to employ the mobile channel to support this kind of community building process. We derive four constitutional elements of communities based on existing research and develop a structured and theoretically founded four step method to analyze the potential of mobile services for specific community building purposes.
This paper discusses the application of the means?end chain (MEC) framework for investigating customers cognitive"; structure regarding community applications. It is argued that the understanding of customers cognition is crucial for the development of sustainable communities. MEC analysis is seen as a mean to support the community design tasks, especially concept development. The MEC analysis within concept development helps to improve the success rate of a newly designed community by the early integration of customer needs and benefits. Based on theoretical considerations about the MEC framework and its limitations a case study regarding an information community is illustrated. Data was collected conducting individual laddering interviews online at a major information portal in Germany. Dividing answers into attributes, consequences, and values and using content analysis hierarchical value maps (HVM) for both, messaging applications and information ?portals, were constructed. To support concept development of a new information community, as a distribution platform for content, the findings of both HVMs were considered. Examples illustrate, that the MEC analysis helps to create a community concept that is focused on the targeted customers. It is supporting the creative process of finding community functions and features that are fitting or can be linked to the existing cognitive structures.
Human being is living within a cognitive space that makes perception and interpretation of a certain reality possible (Schmid 2000). This enables them to realize a manifold of what could be comparing to what is and forces the rise of demands and wants through an evaluation of the difference. Needs and wants therefore are the origin of a goal seeking behavior that leads to exchanges (Houston and Gassenheimer 1987). In other words, exchanges are the result of a transformation process between here and now, between debit and credit among interacting entities with the goal to satisfy individual and organizational needs. Because of this fundamental character, investigations in exchanges are widely spread among research disciplines such as economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, marketing and information science (Bagozzi 1979) Nevertheless, no unique conceptualization of exchange, or well-developed theories do exist (Bagozzi 1997; Houston and Gassenheimer 1987; Dwyer et al. 1987). Thus, a comprehensive view of exchanges shall be developed in this paper filling this gap.
Although generally assumed to benefit consumers, mass customization can have unintended consequences. Two studies demonstrate that customizing by-attribute (vs. choosing from pre-specified configurations) increases local processing and decreases mental simulation, leading to lower satisfaction, pride, and purchase intentions. The findings offer novel insight regarding configuration systems in mass customization.
