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If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.Abstract Because service encounters and service relationships are first and foremost social encounters, norms and expectations related to such encounters are likely to vary from culture to culture, but especially between high context Eastern, collectivist and low context, Western individualistic cultures. The purpose of this study was, in part, to replicate and then extend the work of Gwinner et al. in the USA, but this time in a Southeast Asian context. Gwinner et al.'s work examined the benefits customers perceive they receive from engaging in long-term relationships with a variety of service-providers. The current sample comprised 155 respondents in Bangkok, Thailand who each completed a series of questionnaires concerning their relational behavior with service suppliers. The results support the earlier study showing relational benefits can be categorized into three distinct benefit types. However, compared with the past research results in a Western context (USA), the results indicate some clearly discernible variations. It is apparent that we should not rely wholly on empirical research emanating from Western cultures, but also develop reliable models of how various marketing phenomena work in the rapidly expanding Asian economies.Whereas uncorroborated research outcomes must be considered tentative, their successful replication promotes confidence in the veracity of a discipline's cumulative knowledge base. Other things being equal, replication protects against the uncritical assimilation of spurious empirical results into the literature. Replications with extensions serve to determine the scope and limits of empirical findings by seeing if they can be generalized to other populations, contexts. . . The research register for this journal is available at

Brands represent the most valuable asset that many firms possess, and the associated brand equity is usually the result of years of development efforts. Yet many brands are becoming increasingly threatened by the worldwide phenomenon of brand counterfeiting, whereby imitations of the brand are sold to unwary consumers as the original. Counterfeits are known to flourish especially in developing countries that have weak legal infrastructures and corruptible public officials. What can a company do in the face of this threat? The authors summarize the literature that addresses this issue and provide an in-depth description of how one company addressed the threat of counterfeits in a lucrative developing market. The case illustrates the lengths companies may need to go to respond to counterfeits and raises many issues in relation to these actions.

This study examines for the first time, antecedents of relationship commitment in service industries in an Eastern cultural context. The study investigates the reasons for customers engaging in long-term relational exchanges with service firms, as well as the impact of attractive alternatives and switching costs on such relationships. The sample comprised respondents in Bangkok, Thailand, who each completed a series of five questionnaires over a period of two weeks pertaining to their relational behaviour (technical service performance, social bonds and communication) with five predesignated service types. The results indicate that collectivist cultural norms impact the nature of relationships, and that antecedent variables have significantly different impacts across service types. Furthermore, switching costs were identified, which act as powerful inducements to stay in a service relationship. Management implications for relational strategies and future research implications of the findings are discussed.

Emerging markets are often viewed as the source of greatest business expansion in coming years. Yet, their economies tend to be more volatile, and the associated economic crises are deeper and more prolonged than is the case in advanced economies. This study examines consumer disposition processes in Thailand at the time of that nation’s economic crisis. Disposition has not been studied either in an emerging market context or in the context of consumers faced with crises derived from macroeconomic forces. The study examines sellers’ motives and behavior at a retail institution that arose spontaneously out of the Thai economic crisis: the car boot sale (CBS). This institution and its variants are well known in the United States and United Kingdom but had not existed as acceptable upper-middle and upper-class retail formats in Thailand prior to the crisis. The study also examines the Thai CBS phenomenon in cultural terms.