Jenny van Doorn

While service industries like healthcare and elder-care increasingly use technology to address staff shortages, its potential to support consumers experiencing vulnerability remains under-explored and under-utilized. For instance, elderly people who are experiencing vulnerability due to language loss or reduced proficiency in communicating in their national language can be supported by voice-based interfaces, such as robots, that can communicate with them in their native regional language. However, responses to such regional language adaptations, as well as the potential managerial benefits of tailoring service offerings to consumers with specific linguistic needs, remain unclear. This study begins to explore this area and reveals that elderly consumers prefer to interact with robots in their regional language rather than in the national language. We also find that caregivers are willing to pay a 30% premium for a companion robot that can use a regional language, and that regional language capabilities foster trust in robots in the general population, too. The theoretical contribution of the study draws from linguistics to show that these positive effects arise because regional synthetic speech is processed more fluently. The study also highlights human-likeness as a crucial boundary condition, as regional language adaptations unexpectedly backfire when delivered with machine-like voices. For service organizations, regional adaptations in voice-based interfaces present a unique opportunity to better serve linguistically vulnerable consumers while also fostering more positive attitudes in the general population, provided there is a high degree of human-likeness.

This paper provides an overview of the evolution and prospective directions of the University of Groningen’s Department of Marketing (GDM). Since its emergence in the early 1970s, GDM has grown from a small, nationally oriented group into a leading European department with global reach. We distinguish four phases of development: the formative years (1970–1985), characterized by the establishment of marketing education and the first contributions to econometric modeling; a phase of growth and maturity (1986–2003), marked by internationalization, methodological innovation, and strong collaborations with econometrics; a period of renewal and broadening (2004–2014), during which the department expanded into managerial and consumer behavior research and strengthened its engagement with practice; and the current stage (2015–present), featuring significant growth in faculty and students, increasing interdisciplinarity, and greater diversity. Over time, GDM has published 149 articles in the leading marketing journals, built a strong tradition in quantitative modeling, and extended its expertise to consumer behavior, strategy, and digitalization. Its impact is further reflected in a wide network of alumni in prominent academic positions worldwide and in long-term partnerships with business, notably through the Customer Insights Center and the Groningen Digital Business Center. Looking ahead, demographic decline, de-globalization, and reduced public funding present major challenges for higher education. In response, GDM intends to consolidate its broad profile while prioritizing societally relevant themes such as health, sustainability, and digital transformation and AI, thereby continuing to advance marketing science and its societal impact.

Service robots on organizational frontlines, notably in health and elderly care settings, promise to tackle staff shortages. In such service contexts, compliance is crucial for consumer well-being, but compliance with robot advice remains problematically low. This research explores how the source of robot advice affects compliance in human–robot interactions. In six studies, including four field studies with real human–robot interactions, the authors demonstrate that consumers are more likely to comply with advice given by a robot service provider when the source of advice is a human rather than the robot itself. This is because a human source of robot advice increases the feeling of accountability, or the expectation that one might need to justify one's actions to others, which is more difficult to achieve with only robot social presence. In turn, this fosters advice adherence, which also persists over time across repeated interactions. However, when the robot embeds social cues in the advice, the difference in accountability and compliance between robot-only and robot advice with a human source attenuates. These insights hold enormous promise, especially for health care practitioners, institutions, and consumers for whom increased compliance can lead to better health outcomes, reduced hospital readmissions, improved recovery, and elevated well-being.

Governments enact various regulations to decrease the use of plastic. This raises the question of whether the effectiveness of such measures is restricted to the realm of the plastic products being regulated, or whether and how it ‘spills over’ on to the use of other plastic products. Leveraging scanner and survey data across 22 countries, the authors show that a ban or a charge on plastic bags strengthens descriptive social norms to avoid plastic, which in turn curbs the purchasing and use of plastic bottles, as well as of other plastics. Yet there is also a dark side to charging consumers for plastic bags, as a negative cueing effect can lower concerns about plastic pollution and make consumers less vigilant about their use of other plastic products. Taken together, this research shows that government regulation aimed at changing small common behaviors potentially has a much larger impact via spillover effects.