电子商务B2B市场营销中英文对照外文翻译文献

中英文对照外文翻译

(文档含英文原文和中文翻译)

原文：

Service quality and marketing performance in business-to-business markets: exploring the mediating role of client satisfaction

Keywords

Service quality assurance, Product quality, Information systems, Business-to-business marketing, Customer loyalty, Customer satisfaction

Abstract

Drawing on relevant literature, the authors empirically test a

model of business loyalty in a sample of 234 clients of information systems suppliers, integrating the concepts of service quality, satisfaction, and loyalty. The study builds on recent advances in services marketing theory and assesses the relationships underlying the identi?ed constructs in the speci?c industry. A clear pattern of service quality dimensions is established following the Gronroos conceptualisation. Several important ?ndings are reported, including the empirical veri?cation of the mediating role of industrial satisfaction in the formation of loyalty attributes. Industrial satisfaction fully mediates the relationship between accessibility and loyalty and partially mediates latent construct’s relationship with technical assistance and delivery service. The results provide robust evidence concerning the direct effect of industrial satisfaction on loyalty,accessibility, delivery, and product reliability as antecedents of industrial satisfaction.

Introduction

The advent of relationship marketing and the increased competition that has characterised markets over the past 30 years has resulted in consumer satisfaction and related research constructs becoming central topics in the services literature. Particular attention has been given to the conceptualisation and measurement of the variables of quality and satisfaction. These variables are central to modern marketing theory and practice as principal indicators of marketing performance Babin and

Grif?n, 1998; Walker, 1995; Jones and Suh, 2000. The importance of studying and understanding these two related variables can be illustrated by their relation with behavioural intentions and loyalty Newman and Werbel, 1973; LaBarbera and Mazursky, 1983; Cronin and Taylor, 1992; Rust et al., 1995; Singh, 1990; Taylor and Baker, 1994; Zeithaml et al., 1996.

Although numerous studies have made an effort to clarify, conceptualise, and measure these constructs in a business-to-consumer environment, in a business-to-business B2B context there continues to be debate regarding: the identi?cation of the variables responsible for external effects; the form and/or strength of the relationships between them; and the presence of interaction or mediational effects between them. There is a large body of contradictory empirical evidence Schellhase et al., 1999; Parasuraman, 1998. In assessing the effects of perceived quality, many researchers have suggested its positive in?uence on loyalty Carman, 1990; Parasuraman et al., 1985, 1988; Boulding et al., 1993. However, recent ?ndings demonstrate that this correlation is either not signi?cant or mediated by satisfaction Cronin and Taylor, 1992; Spreng and Singh, 1993; Cronin et al., 2000 The paucity of research assessing quality and satisfaction in B2B markets has created a need for conceptual and empirical research to: establish a pattern of dimensions that formulate the quality perceptions of industrial buyers; de?ne the concept of industrial satisfaction and clarify its role within a B2B services

framework; establish theoretical and empirical links between these two constructs in terms of industrial behavioural intentions and loyalty levels; and identify an appropriate method of measuring the constructs involved One of the main objectives of the present research was to clarify the contradictory evidence with respect to the relationships among the concepts of service quality, industrial satisfaction, and loyalty, and to provide evidence of the mediating role of industrial satisfaction In particular, the purposes of the present study were: to develop a validated instrument of loyalty measurement using the key constructs of quality perceptions and industrial satisfaction; to create the theoretical basis upon which hypotheses can be formulated concerning the variables of perceived quality, industrial satisfaction, and loyalty; to explore and identify a stable pattern of the dimensions of quality perceptions in an industrial context; and to test the hypotheses and the mediating role of industrial customer satisfaction empirically The present paper begins with an examination of the literature pertaining to each of the concepts involved and the presentation of the study’s conceptual framework. The methodology employed in this research is then explained and the study results are presented and discussed. Finally, conclusions and managerial implications of the study are provided and a set of future research directions is examined, as are the limitations of this study.

Literature review

Service quality

In the services marketing literature, the service-quality construct is a controversial topic Brady and Cronin, 2001; Zeithaml, 2000; Zins, 2001; Rust and Oliver, 1994; Lapierre et al., 1996. In the business-to-consumer literature, researchers have adopted three broad conceptualisations. The ?rst, proposed by Gro ¨nroos 1982, 1984, de?ned the dimensions of service quality in global terms as being functional and technical. The second, proposed by Parasuraman et al. 1988, identi?edservice-quality dimensions using terms that describe service-encounter characteristics reliability, responsiveness, empathy, assurances, and tangibles. The third, proposed by Rust and Oliver 1994, considered overall perception of service quality to be based on the customer’s evaluation of three dimensions of service encounters: the customer-employee interaction, the service environment, and the service outcome. It is not clear, however, which of these conceptualisations and dimensional patterns are the most appropriate to use Brady and Cronin, 2001; Rust and Oliver, 1994.

Industrial satisfaction

Although manufacturers and retailers consider satisfaction to be a key variable ? indicative of the success or failure of a business relationship ? a review of the pertinent literature reveals:

.a lack of a consensus de?nition for consumer satisfaction ? thus

posing serious problems for researchers in terms of

conceptualisation,operationalisation, and measurement Babin and Grif?n, 1998; Woodruff and Gardial, 1996; Giese and Cote, 2000; and a lack of a comprehensive, theoretically based, empirical research stream Schellhase et al., 1999.

In B2B markets, the principal differences among end-consumers arise from the decision-making unit evaluating the product or service. When considering the satisfaction of an industrial client, it is necessary to evaluate the satisfaction of the different constituents of the buying centre who are in contact with the industrial supplier Parasuraman, 1998. Even though the individual members of a buying centre are guided by the company’s objectives, they have their own motivations and objectives and evaluate the performance of the product or service according to their own reference standards Anderson and Narus 1990, in their effort to model manufacturer-distributor relationships, de?ned satisfaction as a positive, affective state resulting from the appraisal of all aspects of a ?rm’s working relationship with another ?rm. This de?nition posits that satisfaction understood as affective can be contrasted with an objective summary assessment of outcomes ? thereby forming a target-performance comparison mechanism. If expectations are exceeded by performance, satisfaction is generated Churchill and Surprenant, 1982; Bearden and Tell, 1983; LaBarbera and Mazursky Previous research has used various

methods of satisfaction measurement. Objective measures of satisfaction have included the acquisition of data on variables such as market share and loyalty as indicators of client satisfaction Oliver, 1980; Oliver and Swan, 1989. Due to the suspect validity of objective measures, information on satisfaction can alternatively be collected on a subjective basis. Attribute-oriented procedures acquire data on satisfaction indirectly by using indicators such as complaints ?gures Oliver, 1980; Bearden and Tell, 1983 Explicit approaches have directly measured satisfaction using single overall or multidimensional scales. Using these scales, overall satisfaction is an aggregation of all previous transaction-speci?c evaluations and is updated after each speci?c transaction ? in much the same way as expectations of overall service quality are updated after each transaction in a business-to-consumer environment Boulding et al., 1993. Transaction-speci?c satisfaction might not be perfectly correlated with overall satisfaction ? because service quality is likely to vary from experience to experience, especially in an industrial context. Overall satisfaction can be viewed as a moving average that is relatively stable and similar to an overall attitude Parasuraman

et al., 1994 After thorough interviews with professionals in the area under investigation, it was clear to the present researchers that none of the existing de?nitions depicted the elements of buying centres and relationship evolvement over time. The present researchers therefore

decided to adapt the cumulative de?nition of industrial satisfaction of Chumpitaz 1998:Industrial satisfaction is an overall evaluation of the total purchase, use and relationships experience with a product or service over time, as expressed by members of the buying decision centre.

This de?nition provided the basis for conceptualising and measuring effectively the industrial satisfaction construct in the present study.

To conceptualise perceived service quality, Oliver 1993 distinguished between quality and satisfaction by noting that the dimensions underlying quality judgments are rather speci?c ? whether they are cues or attributes Bolton and Drew, 1991. Satisfaction judgments, in contrast, can result from any dimension ? some related to quality, and some not. Expectations of quality are based on ideals or perceptions of excellence, whereas a large number of non-quality issues ? including needs Westbrook and Reilly, 1983 and equity or fairness Oliver and Swan, 1989 ? help in the formation of satisfaction judgments. Rust and Oliver 1994, p. 6 stated that “ quality is one dimension on which satisfaction is based”. In making this statement they were in accord with Dick and Basu 1994, Anderson and Fornell 1994, Iacobucci et al. 1995, Sivadas and Baker- Prewitt 2000, and Odekerken-Schroder et al. 2000. More recently, Cronin et al. 2000, in their study of six different service industries, supported and built on the extant literature by indicating that service-quality perceptions are important determinants of satisfaction Based on previous

evidence concerning the causality of these related constructs, the present study placed service-quality perceptions as antecedents to the formation of industrial satisfaction attributes. Considerable evidence con?rms that performance judgments of service related issues play a signi?cant role in the formation of satisfaction cues Erevelles and Leavitt, 1992; Oliver, 1980; Kristensen et al., 1999; Martensen et al., 2000. This leads to the following hypothesis being proposed:

H1In a business-to business context, quality perceptions have a positive in?uence on industrial satisfaction levels.

Loyalty

The importance of loyalty has been widely recognised in the marketing literature Oliver, 1999; Samuelson and Sandvik, 1997; Howard and Sheth, 1969. Reichheld and Sasser 1990 have studied the impact on pro?ts of having a loyal customer base, and Aaker 1991 has discussed the role of loyalty in the brand-equity process, observing that brand loyalty reduces marketing costs and that the relative costs of customer retention are substantially less than those of acquisition Fornell and Wernerfelt, 1987. Another important element of brand loyalty is the intended support of the product or service expressed in communication experiences ? with positive word of mouth among loyal consumers leading to greater resistance to competitive strategies Arndt, 1967; Oliver, 1999; Dick and Basu, 1994.

Despite the clear managerial relevance of brand loyalty, conceptual

and empirical gaps remain Chaudhuri and Holbrook, 2001; Lau and Lee, 1999; Oliver, 1999; Fournier and Yao, 1997. Speci?cally, the concept of loyalty in a B2B context is not clearly de?ned and there are numerous ways of de?ning and measuring this matter on a consumer market basis. Oliver 1999, p. 34 de?ned brand loyalty as follows:. a deeply held commitment to re-buy or re-patronize a preferred product/service consistently in the future, thereby causing repetitive same brand or same brand-set purchasing, despite situational in?uences and marketing efforts havingthe potential to cause switching behavior.

This de?nition emphasises the two principal aspects of brand loyalty that have been studied in previous studies: behavioural and attitudinal Aaker, 1991; Assael, 1998;Day, 1969; Jacoby and Chestnut, 1978; Jacoby and Kyner, 1973; Oliver, 1999; Tucker, 1964. Behavioural loyalty refers to repeated purchases of the brand, whereas attitudinal brand loyalty includes a degree of dispositional commitment in terms of some distinctive value associated with the brand. The attitude behind the purchase is important because it drives behaviour. Although brand-loyal behaviour is partly determined by situational factors such as availability, attitudes are more enduring Jacoby and Kyner 1973 proposed a de?nition of loyalty that includes six necessary conditions ? that brand loyalty is the biased that is, non-random, behavioural that is, purchase response, expressed over time, by some decision-making unit a person or group of persons, with

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