Research Seminar - Professor Heiner Evanschitzky - Customer Inspiration: A Scale-Development

Event Date: 25 November 2015

Time: 10am

Location: Room 406a, Cathedral Wing.

The Department of Marketing invites staff to Professor Heiner Evanschitzky’s forthcoming research seminar "Customer Inspiration: A Scale-Development"

Lunch will be provided from 12.30pm in the Department of Marketing, Level 5, Stenhouse Wing. Please confirm your attendance with Christina MacLean (christina.maclean@strath.ac.uk).

Title: Customer Inspiration: A Scale-Development

Biography: Heiner Evanschitzky is Professor and Chair of Marketing at Aston University. Heiner received his PhD and Habilitation from the University of Muenster (Germany). Previously, he worked as Professor of Marketing at the University of Strathclyde. He was Visiting Professor at University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), Curtin Business School (Australia), and Florida Atlantic University (USA).

His research investigates interesting and relevant problems with an attempt to develop impactful conclusions. The current focus primarily lies in Service and Retail Marketing/Management where he investigates customer (value) management, relationship marketing, franchising, myopic marketing management, and profit chain models. His work has been published in journals such as Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Retailing, Journal of Service Research, International Journal of Research in Marketing, and Journal of Product Innovation Management. Heiner currently serves as Associate Editor for the British Journal of Management.

Abstract: Introducing new ideas to the customer lies at the heart of marketing, yet surprisingly little is known about customers’ state of inspiration within a marketing context. Based on prior conceptualizations in social psychology, we develop a two-dimensional 10-item customer inspiration scale that consists of an “inspired by” and an “inspired to” component. The scale is useful for measuring a customer’s state of mind when receiving a new or enhanced consumption-related insight that motivates a specific consumption-related behavior.

This presentation will provide insights into the scale-development process and outlines challenges and publication hurdles. It will further show the step-by-step procedure that led to the customer inspiration scale. More precisely, the scale development process begins with an extensive item generation effort, followed by four studies that involve (1) scale purification and initial validation, (2) an exploration of the nomological network, (3) tests for the experimental and predictive validity, and (4) a replication within a field experiment. Empirical results reveal sound psychometric properties of the scale and demonstrate its unique position within the nomological network of related consumption variables and shows high predictive validity in both a lab and a field experiment.

As the talk is intended to be “workshop-style”, there will be plenty of opportunity to discuss scale development more generally.

Published: 22 October 2015