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Managing Customer Perceptions of the Business Environment for Competitive Advantage

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Predrag Basic
BA 656
01/16/2011
Article Critique: Managing customer perceptions of the business environment for competitive advantage
By: Toni Hilton, PhD Westminster Business School, UK and Warwick Jones, PhD University of the West of England, UK
Journal of Customer Behavior, 2010, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 265-281

Article Summary
Per Bendapudi and Berry, the environmental influences consumer behavior but does not influence consumers’ trust. Organizations have to research extent of how their marketing environment creates customers’ perceived behavior and also how individual factors of given environment add to that perception. While many other researchers and authors suggest that functional behavior requires perception of …show more content…

Result of the study finds that commercial clients think that their organizations live in turbulent times where outcomes are uncertain but also where decisions, actions and opportunities are time-dependent. In contrast, private clients do not appear to perceive the legal services environment as dynamic. They suggest that legal matters take a long time, often longer than they expect. These findings cannot be taken for granted. Actual quantity of services can vary from day to day, from service employee to service employee and from customer to customer or case to case. When marketers try to standardize their services in order to provide consistency of quality, downside is the loss of customized services, which many consumers value.
Major issue with legal services is that they are first sold and then produced and consumed simultaneously. An inferior legal service is consumed as it is being produced. There is little opportunity to correct it, negative impression caused by legal services representative is difficult to correct. Consumer evaluation of service quality is usually reflection of magnitude and direction of the gap between the customer’s expectations and customer’s assessment (perception) of service quality. That perception of service quality includes segments of the business environment and built up dependence.
We can see completely different research results between commercial

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