In this third issue of 2018, the APJML presents a series of papers that stretch over three main research themes: consumer behavior, logistics, and supply chain management. Our industry spotlight section builds on this with an insight into an identification of warehouse location in Thailand.
The issue opens with a series of papers examining consumer behavior from various perspectives. The first paper by Mathew and Thomas investigates the role of product and customer dimensions (i.e. brand credibility, affective commitment, and involvement) in the contribution of brand experience to the formation of true brand loyalty. The results suggest that the hierarchy-of-effect model varies based on the level of product involvement, subject involvement and interaction involvement. In the next paper, Kim and colleagues examine the relationship among inter-departmental communication, buyer innovativeness, and retail competitiveness. They also test whether a retail strategy of supply base diversification for managing suppliers moderates the association between innovativeness and competitiveness. The results indicate that inter-departmental communication between merchandizing and store divisions drives innovativeness among retail buyers and ultimately strengthens firm competitiveness. Moreover, when buyer innovativeness is evident and the less actively the retail buyers utilize supply base diversification, the stronger is the retailer’s competitiveness. The following paper by Fatehi and colleagues is on intra-cultural and intra-market heterogeneity. The findings of the paper would have wide applicability and implications for international marketing strategy, including ways of deploying market segmentation, targeting, positioning strategies, as well as configurations of marketing mix elements.
Moving onto service experience, Clemes and colleagues investigate the relationship among service quality, customer satisfaction, perceived value, restaurant image, and behavioral intentions for moderate upscale restaurants in Malaysia. The authors find that consumers’ willingness to re-patronize and recommend a restaurant is influenced more strongly by restaurant image than by customer satisfaction. Next, the paper by Jang and colleagues provides new insight onto the effectiveness of the marketing strategies in the product-harm crisis literature. Using a defaming product-harm crisis that involved two competing firms, the paper examines how the firms changed their advertising strategies and how the changes affected consumers’ online search behaviors regarding the two firms. The analyses show that after the crisis, the offending firm sensitively reacted to its own and the victim firm’s advertising levels, but the victim firm did not react to the offending firm’s advertising as it had previously. The final paper in consumer behavior stream, by Chang and colleagues, examines the relationships between consumer ethical beliefs and the personality traits of consumer relationship proneness, religiousness, attitude toward business, and love of money.
The importance of total quality management (TQM) in supply chain management has been evident in the literature. In line with this, Jie and Thai investigate the influences of TQM and supply chain integration (SCI) practices on firm performance (FP) of container shipping industry in Singapore. Conducted on 159 container shipping companies, the research shows that both TQM and SCI practices have positive effects on service quality and FP but at different extents, while TQM also contributes positively to SCI. The paper further provides guidelines for shipping managers on how to implement the SCI and TQM practices appropriately to boost their FP to the fullest extent. The following paper by Wang provides empirical support to the impacts of supply chain uncertainty and risk on the logistics performance in the Australian courier industry. The results indicate that supply chain uncertainty and risk have negative impacts on logistics performance. Shifting focus over to channel performance, Yang and colleagues examines the importance of channel partners’ government relations within channel performance and explores how institutional factors interact to influence the performance. Drawing on an institutional perspective, the authors suggest that the effect of partner’s government relations on FP is moderated by the institutional environment factors, such as government interference, legal protection, and the importance of guanxi. Relevant to Yang’s paper, the following paper by Wong and colleagues assesses the impact of corruption toward trade facilitation which is measured by logistics performance index (LPI). The findings show that corruption significantly affects LPI and each of the six dimensions in LPI. The results also show that government effectiveness has a moderating role on the relationship between corruption and LPI.
The next paper focuses on the relationship quality in the logistic service industry. Chen and colleagues examine the relationship between competitive capabilities, including flexibility and collaboration between logistics service providers and their customers, and relationship quality, as measured by trust, dependence, and commitment. The findings suggest that both flexibility and collaboration positively influence trust and dependence. Finally, Wong and colleagues examine the inter-store stock transfer operations of an international retail chain distribution. In doing so, the authors suggest strategy to reduce customer dissatisfaction by developing an integrated quality service improvement methodology and an optimization tool for product delivery. The findings would provide meaningful insights for the practitioners in the international retail chain distribution.
Finally, the industry spotlight paper identifies a province in Thailand where total transportation cost for shipping grocery goods from this province to customers in all other provinces is the lowest. Vanichchinchai suggests that selecting right warehouse location enhances competiveness through lower transportation and inventory cost as well as faster responsiveness. This study sheds light on an under-represented warehouse location phenomenon in Asia pacific region, and serves as a springboard for future research endeavors in this area.
I hope this issue has provided interesting perspectives and unique insights to stimulate future research. I thank the reviewers and EAB for their timely reviews and contribution to the APJML, and the authors for submitting manuscripts of exceptional caliber.
