The customer is king: culture-based unintended consequences of modern marketing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose This study aims to examine how the modern marketing expectation of treating the customer like a king can become a source of power differential in societies that already have a predisposition for hierarchical structures. The authors explore how this marketing-generated power differential might have an adverse impact on service providers in Eastern cultures with high power distance. Design/methodology/approach Four studies involving receivers and providers of services in Canada and South Korea were conducted. The experiments required participants to read service scenarios and respond to survey questions. Findings The authors find that practicing the “The Customer is King” philosophy does produce a power differential between the customer and the service provider in Eastern cultures. In such cultures, customers may feel superior in social hierarchy compared to the service providers, may develop a sense of entitlement that infringes on the rights of the service providers and may carry over that expectation from service to non-service contexts. The power differential is also a source of stress for the service provider. Research limitations/implications The use of scenarios in our experiments may limit the generalizability of the study’s findings. Practical implications Although sharing of best practices across cultures can be a worthwhile goal for managers, blind copying of some Western practices in Eastern markets can be problematic. The cultural context of markets calls for caution. In their quest for excellent customer service, managers should not let customers expect the service provider to become subservient and servile. Originality/value This study is the first attempt at examining the social impact of a marketing philosophy (customer is king) and how the outcomes might be different depending on the culture in which the philosophy is practiced.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".