Interview with Mark Rosenbaum, Kohl’s Corporation Professor of Retail Marketing at Northern Illinois University and guest editor of the JSM special issue “Understanding Vulnerable, Stigmatized, and Marginalized Consumers”
Introduction Video of the topic by Mark Rosenbaum
SERVSIG: What is the title of your special issue in the Journal of Services Marketing?
MARK:The special issue is entitled: Understanding Vulnerable, Stigmatized, and Marginalized Consumers in Service Settings.
SERVSIG: Can you discuss what you mean by vulnerable, stigmatized, and marginalized consumers?
MARK: To answer this question, let’s first review the American Marketing Association definition of marketing. Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. Now, let’s focus on this idea of exchanges between customers and another party. At the essence of this definition is an inherent assumption that both parties are on a level playing field. Both parties play by the same set of rules and indeed, understand the rules.
A vulnerable consumer is any consumer that is present within an exchange setting, and who lacks an understanding of the rules due to internal or external factors. Internal factors represent consumer conditions, such as illiteracy, income, education, language issues, intelligence, culture, a situation, such as an emergency, or physical, mental or emotional handicap that prevent him/her from understanding rules during service exchanges. External factors are those that encourage service providers to withhold or to provide inferior information to consumers. Such factors typically represent gender, ethnicity, country-of-origin, or sexual orientation. All of these factor have been shown to encourage service providers to refrain from sharing full information with consumers, which results in biased exchanges.
Building upon this thought, consumers may have a noticeable condition, a social stigma, such as a learning disability, an accent, or a pronounced sexual orientation, which encourages service providers to take advantage of them during exchanges by withholding information or providing incorrect information. Similarly, consumers may belong to minority groups in a society, which are marginalized, such as Gypsies in Romania, Turks residing in Germany, or the heavily tattooed and pierced, which encourages service providers to withhold or to bias information during service exchanges. Interestingly, Gianfranco Walsh and I created the term, service nepotism, to show how the stigmatized and marginalized may work together in service settings to provide each party with rewards that are not available to other consumers.
SERVSIG: What do you help to achieve with the special issue on this topic.
MARK: Consider for a moment every sacrosanct theory and framework in services. They all assume a level playing field. Have you ever seen an author state in the limitations section that a proposed theory assumes that service providers disclose correct information to consumers and that consumers can accurately interpret the information? I honestly believe that we take so much for granted in services research, we consider that all parties interact under so-called normal conditions. They rarely do so. Fo example, have you thought about how the handicapped or the elderly perceive a servicescape over a lifespan? Have you considered how gay couples judge service quality?
As I mentioned in the official call for papers, to date, service researchers have explored how vulnerable consumers, in terms of race and ethnicity, experience discrimination in service settings such as banks and automobile dealerships. Although we have a great deal of knowledge regarding how vulnerable, stigmatized, and marginalized consumers often experience the brunt of discrimination during service exchanges, we know considerably less about how these consumers employ strategies that influence how they use services. We need to understand the limitations of our sacrosanct theories from the perspective of vulnerable, marginalized, and stigmatized consumers.
SERVSIG: What inspired you and your co-editors to pursue this special issue?
MARK: During my Ph.D. at Arizona State University, I met a transgendered male-to-female, and he explained that he, and his friends, shopped for cosmetics at Nordstrom’s because the Scottsdale opens the store exclusively to transgendered men at certain times to permit them to shop in safety and comfort. How did these consumers judge service quality? My co-editor, Mario, wrote a paper regarding how consumers in Latin America may purposely opt out of the formal banking system and use “loan sharks” because of their convenience and ease-of-use. Finally, my co-editor, Tali, discussed how service providers in Israel play a key role in protecting customers from possible terror attacks. How does one judge the quality of a loan shark or a waiter who may deliver inferior service because he is monitoring incoming customers very closely? We simply don’t have the answers to these questions.
SERVSIG: What is the goal of the special issue?
MARK: I want to encourage service researchers to reconsider our theories and frameworks from new consumer perspectives. I would like us to take our substantive theories and make them more general by understanding consumer contexts when they fail and succeed. I want us to explore how consumers employ strategies to obtain satisfaction during service exchanges. Lastly, I want us to create theories that apply to vulnerable, stigmatized, and marginalized consumers in service settings.
more information about the special issue here.
