This article explores in-depth what health care customers actually do when they cocreate value. Combining previously published research with data collected from depth interviews, field observation, and focus groups, the authors identify distinct styles of health care customer value cocreation practice. Importantly, the authors show how customers can contribute to their own value creation through their own (self) activities in managing their health care. Building on past work in service-dominant (S-D) logic, consumer culture theory and social practice theory, the authors identify “roles,” “activities,” and “interactions” that underlie customer cocreation of value in health care. The authors uncover five groupings of customer value cocreation practices yielding a typology of practice styles and link these to quality of life. The practice styles are “team management,” “insular controlling,” “partnering,” “pragmatic adapting,” and “passive compliance.” Two in particular, team management and partnering, should be encouraged by managers as they tend to be associated with higher quality of life. The authors provide a health care Customer Value Cocreation Practice Styles (CVCPS) typology. The usefulness of the typology is demonstrated by showing links to quality of life and its potential application to other health care settings.

This research developed and empirically validated a multidimensional hierarchical scale for measuring health service quality and investigated the scale's ability to predict important service outcomes, namely, service satisfaction and behavioral intentions. Data were collected from a qualitative study and three different field studies of health care patients in two different health care contexts: oncology clinics and a general medical practice. Service quality was found to conform to the structure of the hierarchical model in all three samples. The research identified nine subdimensions driving four primary dimensions, which in turn were found to drive service quality perceptions. The primary dimensions were interpersonal quality, technical quality, environment quality, and administrative quality. The subdimensions were interaction, relationship, outcome, expertise, atmosphere, tangibles, timeliness, operation, and support. The findings also support the hypothesis that service quality has a significant impact on service satisfaction and behavioral intentions and that service quality mediates the relationship between the dimensions and intentions.

Understanding the contribution of marketing to economic and social outcomes is fundamental to broadening the focus of marketing. The authors develop a comprehensive model that integrates the impact of service quality and service satisfaction on both economic and societal outcomes. The model is validated using two random samples involving intensive health services. The results indicate that service quality and service satisfaction significantly enhance quality of life and behavioral intentions, highlighting that customer service has social as well as economic outcomes. This is an important finding given the movement toward recognizing social and environmental outcomes, such as emphasized through triple bottom-line reporting. The findings have important implications for managing service processes, for improving the quality of life of customers, and for enhancing customers' behavioral intentions toward the organization.

PurposeThis paper seeks to examine the central role that commitment plays in driving customer loyalty and to identify the effect that confidence, social and special treatment benefits as well as relationship investment, communication and management have on the development of commitment, and ultimately customer loyalty.Design/methodology/approachThe paper reports the results of a national mail survey of 591 consumers across nine different service industries.FindingsThe findings of the study suggest that relationship commitment drives customer loyalty and that confidence, social and special treatment benefits affect commitment to the service, as does relationship investment and management. Surprisingly, relationship communication was found to have a negative effect on commitment to the service.Practical implicationsThis paper provides managers with insight as to how they can better create and sustain loyal relationships through the creation of customer commitment.Originality/valueThe paper empirically demonstrates the importance of commitment in developing and sustaining loyal relationships while also providing a detailed assessment of the role of relationship benefits and maintenance in creating committed customers.

In this study, the authors develop an inexpensive method to help firms assess the relative effectiveness of multiple advertising media. Specifically, they use a firm's loyalty program database to capture media exposure, through an online media survey, for all the media in which the firm advertises. In turn, the exposure data are matched with the purchase history for these same respondents, thereby creating single-source data. The authors illustrate their method for a large retailer that undertook a short-term promotional sale by advertising in television, radio, newspaper, magazine, online display ad, sponsored search, social media, catalog, direct mail, and e-mail channels. In this case, seven of the ten media significantly influence purchase outcomes. Finally, the authors demonstrate how to use their advertising response model to determine the optimal budget allocation across each advertising media channel.