Ebook: Services Research In A Cross-Cultural/Cross-National Context

This special issue of International Marketing Review focuses on “Services research in across-national or cross-cultural context.” The growth of the services sector in a globalcontext has been and continues to be phenomenal. While excellent quantitative as wellas qualitative research is ongoing in many individual country settings, there is littlewhich has been published in a cross-national or cross-cultural context. Servicecompanies are facing important questions about the applicability of home marketservice “experiences” in new international markets. Do customers have the sameexpectations in mind for service offerings? What are important strategic implicationsfor service marketers looking at new foreign markets? With the economic pressures tostandardize service offerings, are there similar service expectations that can be foundin multi-country settings? With the importance of service quality and customersatisfaction, do assessment mechanisms hold up in cross-national contexts? Areservice recovery strategies applicable in multi-country settings? To demonstrate the variety of issues within this exciting area of research, thefollowing topics were provided to all potential authors in the call for papers: servicedesign and development, customer service expectations, service recovery strategies,the applicability of assessment tools such as SERVQUAL, SERVPERF andblueprinting, service personnel in multi-country settings, strategic issues involvingthe services mix, and qualitative and quantitative tools and methods for servicesresearch. The first paper which appears was an invited article while the remaining fivewere accepted from a pool of 21 submitted articles. I am very grateful for the excellentefforts of the 30 reviewers, especially given the multiple iterations involved and anaccelerated timeframe for the special issue. The lead article, written by Naresh Malhotra, Francis Ulgado, James Agarwal, G.Shainesh and Lan Wu examines consumer perceptual differences regarding servicequality dimensions between developing and developed economies. Ten dimensions ofservice quality relating to banking services were evaluated with in-home personalinterviews with 1,069 respondents from the USA, India and the Philippines. Theauthors found that core aspects of the service should be emphasized in developing countries while augmented services should be stressed in developed countries. Thefindings have important implications for international marketers in terms ofinternational service design and delivery. Michel Laroche, Maria Kalamas and Mark Cleveland focus on the use of informationsources in service expectation formulation in the second article. This study involvedthe airline industry and examined possible differences in the use of internal andexternal sources of information by individualists and collectivists usingFrench-speaking and English-speaking Canadians. The authors found thatindividualists placed more emphasis on explicit promises and third parties thancollectivists, and collectivists were found to place less emphasis on the self andtherefore do not emphasize unexpected experiences. The article concludes with a set ofinteresting practical implications for service managers regarding the leveraging offunctional and/or technical components of services given target customer culturalorientation. Through a content analysis of service advertisements in the USA and Korea,Hae-Kyong Bang, Mary Anne Raymond, Charles “Ray” Taylor and Young Sook Moonexamine 400 advertisements for service organizations found in a series of Americanand Korean weekly and monthly magazines in the third article. The authors found thatKorean ads were similar to American ads in that they tended to utilize rational appealsmore often than emotional appeals, emphasized assurance and reliability cues inroughly the same amounts, and stressed responsiveness less than other service qualitydimensions, but they also found that American ads reflected empathy more often thanKorean ads while Korean ads provided tangible cues more often than American ads.Important implications are provided for service managers regarding possibleopportunities for advertising standardization. The fourth article written by David D. C. Tarn examines ways in which serviceproviders can raise service tangibility through effective marketing-based activities. Aproposed model is tested utilizing responses from decision makers from American,Japanese, and European service firms operating in China and Taiwan. The authordevelops and tests a services tangibility scale, and the results indicate that there are sixstrategies which can effectively be used to improve service tangibility. Importantsuggestions are provided for further model testing and refinement and practicalimplications are offered for service managers regarding service design and promotion.Mark Peterson, Gary Gregory and James Munch employ the five service dimensionsof SERVPERF as a framework for examining cross-regional equivalence of servicequality in the USA and Europe for repair services for mission-critical equipment in anindustrial marketing setting in the fifth article. The respondents were clinicallaboratory directors from the USA and eight European countries, and the authorsfound that the SERVPERF framework was indeed applicable in the two-region setting.It was also found that there were many similarities in perceptions across the tworegions, raising interesting standardization possibilities for B2B services.The final article was written by Brian Imrie and examines the role of generosity andsurprise in consumers’ service experiences. The author ran a series of focus groupsinvolving ethnic Chinese who were citizens of Taiwan but residing in New Zealand orin Taiwan and found evidence that culture plays not only a formative role, but afiltering role as well in the development of consumers’ service experiences. A proposedmodel of service quality in a Taiwanese context is presented and a series of suggestions for future research are provided. Possible implications for global servicestrategy formulation and development are provided. Given the enormous size of the global services sector and its rapid growthprojections, it is surprising how little academic research has been undertaken in across-cultural/cross-national context. Too much research suffers from the pseudo-etictrap in which localized studies are generalized to other country/cultural settingswithout proper cultural basing and adaptation. It is hoped that the kind of studiesrepresented here will help provide both service researchers and practitioners withvaluable suggestions and implications. Previously published in: Education & Training, Volume: 22, Number 3, 2005