University of Cologne

Access-based services—in which consumers do not physically own material goods but gain access to services by registering with the provider—have risen in popularity as an alternative to individual ownership and conventional consumption. Yet, companies still face key challenges in promoting these services. Prior research indicates that consumers assign significant importance to their material possessions; the current study investigates how psychological ownership, or the mental state of perceiving something as one’s own, attained through access- based services might lead customers to increase their service use and forgo material ownership and consumption. With four studies, using cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental data, as well as combined self-reports with usage data, we theorize and demonstrate this effect. Firms that offer access-based services can increase customers’ service psychological ownership, which acts as a psychological substitute for physical ownership and increases access-based service use. The results suggest ways managers can leverage the psychological power of ownership feelings, rather than try to fight the lack of actual ownership, in access-based consumption contexts. 

Many digital service providers have adopted gamification to promote customer engagement. Critical questions, however, remain about the most effective way to enhance customer engagement and in- crease sales by applying gamification. With a research design that combines qualitative and quanti- tative methods, including the use of objective sales data from a large field study and replication of the findings across different contexts, this study explores how gamification fosters customer engagement. Both field study results and a simulation study reveal gamification principles (i.e., social inter- action, sense of control, goals, progress tracking, rewards, and prompts) that promote hope and consequently increase customer engagement and digital sales. Furthermore, we find that hope is more strongly associated with customer engagement than the psychological condition of compulsion, which even exerts a negative impact. This research thus explores how gamification creates value for customers and provides actionable insights for managers to foster hope through gamification as opposed to get customers hooked. 

Many services are difficult to understand and communicate, and as a result, difficult to position, differentiate, and sell. While important, understanding services as well-defined products has hardly received research attention although doing so offers a host of potential benefits. This conceptual article makes the following contributions. First, it synthesizes the literature to develop a better understanding of service productization as a process that transforms variable, ad-hoc services and service products into well-defined service products (i.e., ‘productized services’). Second, it advances that well-defined service products are (1) specified (i.e., have a formalized value proposition and are configured, standardized, systemized, and often also modularized and bundled), (2) branded (i.e., have a name, symbol, or design, and are identifiable by these linguistic, visual, and tangible cues), (3) and priced (i.e., have clearly stated, communicated, and committed prices that can include rate fences and tiering). Third, this article advances managerial practice by exploring the concepts and tools available to productize services and outlining managerial benefits and potential drawbacks of highly productized services.

Luxury brands have been reluctant to adopt technology-enhanced multi-actor interactions at the customer interface. This article synthesizes research on luxury and multi-actor interactions in non-luxury contexts to explore how luxury brands can adopt digitally enabled multi-actor service encounters. The literature is further supplemented by interviews with managers in luxury firms. Our findings caution against simply adopting approaches from non-luxury contexts as they risk undermining the luxury service experience. Rather, we develop a set of propositions at the intersections of the physical, digital, and social realms on how luxury brands can adapt the use of digital multi-actor interactions to augment rather than imperil their brand image. Specifically, our propositions help luxury managers to enhance the customer experience through hedonic escapism, strengthen their brand communities, and use digitization to simultaneously provide conspicuous customers with greater visibility and discreet customers with social exclusivity.

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Purpose – The market for luxury is growing rapidly. While there is a significant body of literature on luxury goods, academic research has largely ignored luxury services. The purpose of this article is to open luxury services as a new field of investigation by developing the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings to build the luxury services literature and show how luxury services differ from both luxury goods and from ordinary (i.e. non-luxury) services.

Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses a conceptual approach drawing upon and synthesizing the luxury goods and services marketing literature.

Findings – This article makes three contributions. First, it shows that services are largely missing from the luxury literature, just as the field of luxury is mostly missing from the service literature. Second, it contrasts the key characteristics of services and related consumer behaviors with luxury goods. The service characteristics examined are nonownership, IHIP (i.e. intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability, and perishability), the three additional Ps of services marketing (i.e. people, processes, and physical facilities) and the three-stage service consumption model. This article derives implications these characteristics have on luxury. For example, nonownership increases the importance of psychological ownership, reduces the importance of conspicuous consumption and the risk of counterfeiting. Third, this article defines luxury services as extraordinary hedonic experiences that are exclusive whereby exclusivity can be monetary, social and hedonic in nature, and luxuriousness is jointly determined by objective service features and subjective customer perceptions. Together, these characteristics place a service on a continuum ranging from everyday luxury to elite luxury.

Practical implications – This article provides suggestions on how firms can enhance psychological ownership of luxury services, manage conspicuous consumption, and use more effectively luxury services’ additional types of exclusivity (i.e. social and hedonic exclusivity). 

Originality/value – This is the first paper to define luxury services and their characteristics, apply and link frameworks from the service literature to luxury, and to derive consumer insights from these for research and practice.