ABSTRACT
Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many consumers to pause and rethink the impacts of their consumption behavior. The purpose of this paper is to explore changes to consumers’ preferences and shopping behavior in retail using a sustainable consumption lens to understand the long-term effects of the pandemic on retail services. Design/methodology/approach: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 participants to gain insights into shopping behaviors and preferences during the pandemic and to investigate changes in attitudes or behaviors toward sustainable consumption as a result of the pandemic. Data analysis involved an iterative inductive process and subsequent thematic analysis. Findings: The results reveal a strong move toward sustainable and conscious consumption with three key changes occurring as a result of the pandemic, including changes in consumers’ ethos, move to purpose-driven shopping and drive to buy local and support national. Practical implications: This paper reveals insights into consumer shopping behaviors and preferences that can potentially counter the collapse of “normal” marketplace activities in the face of the current global pandemic by providing a framework for how retail services can respond, reimagine and recover to move forward long term. Originality/value: This study uncovers the importance of services marketing in endorsing and promoting sustainable consumption by shaping subtle shifts in conscious consumption as a way to recover from a global pandemic and move to a “new” service marketplace. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.
ABSTRACT
Purpose: The healthcare sector is experiencing a major paradigm shift toward a people-centered approach. The key issue with transitioning to a people-centered approach is a lack of understanding of the ever-increasing role of technology in blended human-technology healthcare interactions and the impacts on healthcare actors' well-being. The purpose of the paper is to identify the key mechanisms and influencing factors through which blended service realities affect engaged actors' well-being in a healthcare context. Design/methodology/approach: This conceptual paper takes a human-centric perspective and a value co-creation lens and uses theory synthesis and adaptation to investigate blended human-technology service realities in healthcare services. Findings: The authors conceptualize three blended human-technology service realities – human-dominant, balanced and technology-dominant – and identify two key mechanisms – shared control and emotional-social and cognitive complexity – and three influencing factors – meaningful human-technology experiences, agency and DART (dialogue, access, risk, transparency) – that affect the well-being outcome of engaged actors in these blended human-technology service realities. Practical implications: Managerially, the framework provides a useful tool for the design and management of blended human-technology realities. The paper explains how healthcare services should pay attention to management and interventions of different services realities and their impact on engaged actors. Blended human-technology reality examples – telehealth, virtual reality (VR) and service robots in healthcare – are used to support and contextualize the study’s conceptual work. A future research agenda is provided. Originality/value: This study contributes to service literature by developing a new conceptual framework that underpins the mechanisms and factors that influence the relationships between blended human-technology service realities and engaged actors' well-being. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited.