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Extant research confirms the importance of value cocreation through customer participation (CP), but relatively little is known about whether and how it creates an enjoyable experience for customers and service employees and the consequential outcomes of this positive affective experience. This study applies the concept of flow as an overarching framework and draws theoretical support from social cognitive theory, particularly its extension (i.e., the conceptual model of relational efficacy beliefs), to examine how customers and employees derive enjoyment from CP conditional on their perceived efficacy of themselves (self-efficacy [SE]) and their partners (other-efficacy [OE]) in financial services. Empirical results from 223 client-financial adviser dyads confirm that participation enjoyment, in addition to economic and relational values, mediates the impact of CP on participants' satisfaction evaluations, with SE positively moderating CP's impact on participation enjoyment. The synergistic effect of SE and OE on participation enjoyment also differs for clients versus financial advisers: Even incongruent levels of SE and OE can enhance participation enjoyment as long as they help validate role expectations of the respective participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although brand theorists suggest that what a person knows about a company (i.e., corporate associations) can influence perceptions of the company's products, little systematic research on these effects exists. The authors examine the effects of two general types of corporate associations on product responses: One focuses on the company's capabilities for producing products, that is, corporate ability (CA) associations, and the other focuses on the company's perceived social responsibility, that is, corporate social responsibility (CSR) associations. The results of three studies, including one that measures respondents' CA and CSR associations for well-known companies and one that uses consumers recruited in a shopping mall, demonstrate that (1) what consumers know about a company can influence their beliefs about and attitudes toward new products manufactured by that company, (2) CA and CSR associations may have different effects on consumer responses to products, and (3) products of companies with negative associations are not always destined to receive negative responses. The authors conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for marketing managers and further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous authors have discussed the possibility of a marketing science and have presented their visions to describe the characteristics of such a science. Fundamentally, these visions must come to grips with the idea of "truth" and the role truth plays in theory and research. In this article, the authors explore "truth in marketing science" by describing the essential problem of science in general and discussing the issues that shape the notion of a marketing science in particular. They note two limiting factors in viewing marketing as a science: (1) marketing as an applied field and (2) marketing's attempts to explain human behavior - a phenomenon that is mutable, unpredictable, and reactive. They propose a scientific realist perspective, which can be useful for describing some of the "scientific" explanations offered in the marketing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts pertaining to marketing. They include "A Flexible Class of Discrete Choice Models," "Consumer Store Choice and Choice Set Definition," and "Economics and Advertising: Exercise in Denial."