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Advertising and promotion in "new" Asia
Edited by Kim-Shyan Fam and Lisa McNeill
1. Introduction
Rising incomes have made many Far-Eastern markets attractive propositions for large international hypermarket chains ([10] Dawson et al. , 2003). With foreign entrants into these markets, local (wet/traditional markets) were anticipated to decline as customers switched to stores with extensive ranges, attractive services capes and customer service. However, this shift has failed to materialize ([19] Goldman et al. , 1999, [20] 2002; [24] Ho, 2005) and as a result the hypermarket sector has become increasingly competitive. In Taiwan alone there have been multiple entry-exits of foreign retailers who have been drawn to this apparently attractive market. These included Makro's cessation of eight hypermarkets (due to cost pressures) ([34] Lue and Chen, 2003) and TESCO with six stores, due to an inability to overcome entrenched competition represented by Carrefour (in partnership with Uni-President a local conglomerate) and RT-mart (indigenously developed) during eight years of competition.
Given the increasingly competitive marketplace ([27] Hsueh, 2005), hypermarkets have focused on product range, competitive pricing and service quality for differentiation. The latter through direct customer contact in the service encounters ([8] Czepiel et al. , 1985) offers the opportunity for interactive marketing whereby value is added through people and the social processes ([33] Lovelock et al. , 2005). The service dividend of this investment comes in the form of favourable behavioural intentions, such as repurchase and referral. Therefore, a key task of management is to train, support and motivate staff so that customer contacts (the interactive marketing effort) creates a positive impression.
Whilst some studies have explored customer perceptions of service in general retail settings ([2] Bitner et al. , 1990; [41] Parasuraman et al. , 1988), few have considered hypermarkets ([9] Dabholkar et al. , 1996), and even fewer have focused on Chinese customer responses to service offers ([28] Imrie et al. , 2002; [47] Stanworth et al. , 2007).
This research adopted a customer perspective with the goal to find describe distinguishing attributes of satisfying and dissatisfying service contacts in a Chinese cultural context. More specifically the researcher set out to answer the following two questions:
(1)] What aspects of encounters are (dis)satisfying for customers of hypermarkets in a Chinese cultural setting?
(2)]...