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Services research to date has focussed mainly on service encounters of relatively short duration, such as those in travel agencies, banking, insurance, dry cleaning, pest control, fast-food restaurants, and public utilities (see Bitner, 1990;Cronin and Taylor, 1992;Parasuraman et al., 1991). In these types of service encounter customers typically spend only a brief period of time inside the service facility (if at all, as in the case of pest control or utilities). In these cases, service quality is apt to be perceived by customers primarily on the basis of intangible factors such as reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy (see Parasuraman et al., 1988), and less on the tangible aspects, such as the physical facilities of the service provider (i.e., the servicescape; see Bitner, 1992). For example, customers of dry cleaners are likely to place greater emphasis on how long it takes to have the clothes cleaned (i.e., reliability and responsiveness) and how courteous the personnel are (i.e., assurance) than on the aesthetics of the dry cleaning facility.Leisure services (such as amusement parks, water slide parks, concert halls, theaters, recreation or health clubs, hotels, resorts, cruises, and sporting events, etc.), on the other hand, generally require customers to spend extended periods of time in the physical surroundings of the service provider (see Turley and Fugate, 1992). In such cases, the perceived quality of the servicescape may play an important role in determining whether or not consumers are satisfied, which in turn influences how long they desire to stay in the facility (and hence how much money they will spend) and whether or not they intend to repatronize the leisure service provider. For example, while it may be obvious that customers at an upscale restaurant will evaluate the quality of the food and the service personnel, other factors, such as the quality of the architecture, layout and interior design of the facility, may strongly influence how long customers will stay in the restaurant and how often they will return to it. Likewise, the layout and design of a stadium or arena may partly determine whether sports fans will stay for the entire game or exit early to avoid congestion at crowded games. The servicescape is especially salient when one considers other leisure services such as Six Flags, Disney World, Carnival Cruise Lines, and Club Med.This paper builds on selected aspects of Bitner's (1992) servicescape framework (see Figure 1), which illustrates the effects of the servicescape on customers' behavioral responses such as approach/avoidance, spending money, and repatronage intentions, etc. In this paper we examine the effects of layout accessibility, facility aesthetics, electronic equipment, seating comfort, and cleanliness on the perceived quality of the servicescape. We hypothesize that perceived quality will have a positive effect on customer satisfaction with the servicescape, which in turn will affect how long

Avatars are lifelike characters created by technology. Research suggests that avatars can increase the persuasiveness of online sales channels. The authors investigate how the social cues inherent in avatars influence consumers' affect and shopping value. In Study 1, social cues induce perceptions of Web site socialness, leading to increased pleasure and arousal, both of which positively influence flow, hedonic and utilitarian value, and patronage intentions. Study 2 finds that social cue-induced arousal leads to increased pleasure only for consumers who are involved with the product category. Moreover, the influence of arousal on hedonic value is stronger for women, flow does not lead to pleasure for older consumers, and utilitarian value is less important for this group than for their younger counterparts. The findings suggest that there is a competitive advantage for online retailers that use social cues that provide consumers with enhanced perceptions of human connection and the formation of emotional bonds.

Services marketing research has largely focussed on measuring service quality and satisfaction associated with the primary service itself, with little attention given to the effect of the physical surroundings of the service setting. Leisure services in particular, may be concerned with how consumers perceive the quality of the “servicescape” and what effect the servicescape has on customer satisfaction and repatronage. Investigates these effects, as well as the interactions of perceived crowding, excitement and enduring involvement associated with the leisure service. Results indicate that servicescape quality does play an important role in determining customer affective and behavioural response to the service.

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