Bernard Korai

The role played by emotions in funeral services, as in unwanted services in general, is still largely unexplored in the literature. While no theoretical attempt has been made yet to shed light on the dyadic and processual emotional relationship occurring in a service of this nature, a narrative literature review has been conducted from a multidisciplinary corpus. The analysis is designed to present both sides of this relationship, e.g., the perspective of the consumer as well as that of the service provider. Research avenues are developed to deepen the understanding of emotions in the consumer-organizational relationship specific to funeral services.

Purpose: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no study that investigates the historical roots of quantitative paradigm hegemony over the qualitative paradigm in marketing using a critical lens. The purpose of this paper is to stimulate thoughtful reflections among marketing scholars so that the dialog among paradigms expands, the stale paradigmatic debates disappear, and the marketing discipline evolves and contributes to the actual functioning of markets and the welfare of society. Design/methodology/approach: This study is conducted in the light of foucauldian genealogy through the analysis of historical materials that Foucault called discourses, a set of languages, systems of thinking and governality techniques that determine how individuals or organizations come to be disciplined. In this paper, the concept of discourse mainly refers to visible rituals and practices by which marketing researchers have been psychologically and behaviorally shaped to reproduce and perpetuate a hypothetical-deductive mainstream within their discipline. Findings: This paper intends to stimulate a dialog among marketing scholars about expanding paradigms so that stale debates disappear, and marketing disciplines proves their scientific status by better contributing to the functioning of markets and the welfare of society. As an evolving social science, marketing requires new theory, new concepts and new research methods. Originality/value: The intellectual contribution of this paper lies in its intention to alert marketing researchers about the danger we are exposing our discipline to by promoting imperialist traditions and standardization of thinking.

This paper aimed at examining the antecedents of brand sensitivity among African women whose cultural, economic, and social particularities make them a category of consumers that are different from their Western peers in terms of values and motivations. The concept of brand sensitivity has been assessed through two main variables: brand attachment and brand strength. The research postulated that narcissism, perceived risk, and involvement in a product category are the precursors of African women's brand attachment and brand strength. An online survey was administrated to a sample of 212 African women using cosmetic products. Results of confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling conducted with AMOS 21 supported the structural validity of the conceptual model. In summary, the hypothesis testing suggested that while narcissism, perceived risk, and involvement in a product category were found to be nonsignificant on brand strength, their relationship with brand attachment was significant. Furthermore, results also indicated the existence of an indirect effect of these antecedents on brand strength via brand attachment.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the service literature by investigating post-consumption evaluation in the context of unwanted services. In particular, it intends to delineate the main characteristics of funeral services.Design/methodology/approach: Given the lack of substantive literature on funeral services, a qualitative exploratory design was used from in-depth interviews with ten managers of funeral services companies in Quebec (Canada).Findings: The study shows that compared to other traditional services, funeral services are characterized by their strong emotiveness, non-recurrence, irreversibility, uncommonness, high level of symbolism and personalization and emotion control of the service provider. The study also argues that funeral services quality is strongly dependent on funeral houses’ integrated logistics, proximity and integrity.Practical implications: Because of consumers’ lack of competency, funeral companies need to guide and educate consumers about the criteria they should use to evaluate the service quality. Because funeral consumers are strongly emotion-driven at the purchase time, funeral services providers should find the right balance of emotions to express. Thus, more staff training is needed.Originality/value: Because funeral services are emotionally challenging and deal with grief and distressed clients, the present study contributes in shedding light on service quality assessment in the funeral industry. Although they have some characteristics of traditional services (intangibility, perishability and variability), funeral services are also different in many ways.