This article conceptualizes and presents a research agenda for the emerging area of transformative service research, which lies at the intersection of service research and transformative consumer research and focuses on well-being outcomes related to service and services. A conceptual framework provides a big-picture view of how the interaction between service entities (e.g., individual service employees, service processes or offerings, organizations) and consumer entities (e.g., individuals, collectives such as families or communities, the ecosystem) influences the well-being outcomes of both. Research questions derived from the framework in the context of financial services, health care, and social services help catalyze new research in the transformative service research domain.
This research uncovers the impact of a multifaceted crisis on consumers' immediate shopping behaviors, short‐term financial spending, and long‐term shopping and spending responses. This longitudinal study adopts a future studies approach to expose consumers' current experiences, expectations of the future, and realized future experiences to understand a pandemic's impact on consumers' collective shopping and spending behaviors. Data were collected at the beginning of the COVID‐19 pandemic, during its peak, and as restrictions were being lifted. Findings reveal that consumers adapt their shopping and spending behavior through a crisis in response to constantly shifting environmental stimuli. Consumers moved from fear to frugality and then followed one of two paths—maintaining new crisis‐induced behaviors or, more often, returning to prior familiar consumption behaviors. Retailers and service providers must understand these responses to be able to serve both groups during and after a crisis.
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