Author
Listed:
- Hongyan Jiang
- Mengmeng Xu
- Peizhen Sun
- Jing Zhang
Abstract
Purpose - Mixed products, while presenting new business opportunities, raise considerable concerns among managers and researchers. However, whether mixed products (functionally vs culturally) trigger positive or negative consumer reactions is controversial. Hereby, the present research seeks to resolve the conflicting effects by examining the moderating role of service provider type (humanoid service robot vs human employee) in the impact of mixed products on consumer reactions. Design/methodology/approach - Two studies were conducted to explore the effect of mixed products on consumer reactions. Specifically, study 1 was developed to examine the interplay of mixed products and service provider type in shaping consumers' product attitudes and purchase intentions under an offline shopping scenario; study 2 further provided evidence for the mediating roles of perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment in the above processes under an online-shopping context. Findings - The convergent findings of two studies conclude that, when served by a humanoid service robot (vs human employee), consumers exhibit more positive attitudes and higher purchase intentions toward functionally (vs culturally) mixed products. Furthermore, such effect is driven by the perceived usefulness (vs perceived enjoyment) when served by humanoid robot (vs human employee). Originality/value - First, this is one of the first studies to conceptualize mixed products as the two-dimensional construct (i.e. functionally mixed and culturally mixed), and the findings sheds light on the mixed products literature. Second, this paper introduces service provider type as the boundary condition for the impact of mixed products on consumers' product attitudes and purchase intentions, which expands the match-up hypothesis and schema theory in service marketing. Third, the current research explores the mediating roles of perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment in the above effects, which could make significant contribution to the motivation theory.
Suggested Citation
Hongyan Jiang & Mengmeng Xu & Peizhen Sun & Jing Zhang, 2021.
"Humanoid service robots versus human employee: how consumers react to functionally and culturally mixed products,"
International Journal of Emerging Markets, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 17(4), pages 987-1007, October.
Handle:
RePEc:eme:ijoemp:ijoem-04-2021-0643
DOI: 10.1108/IJOEM-04-2021-0643
Download full text from publisher
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eme:ijoemp:ijoem-04-2021-0643. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Emerald Support (email available below). General contact details of provider: .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.