Exploring Cross-National Differences in Consumer Engagement: A Comprehensive Study of Business Processes, Interaction Methods, Incentives, and ICT Utilisation in the HoReCa Sector in Poland and the UK

Monika Eisenbardt; Roisin Mullins; Sandra Dettmer

doi:10.23762/FSO_VOL12_NO3_5

Published : 2024-09-30

Vol. 12 No. 3 (2024)

Exploring Cross-National Differences in Consumer Engagement: A Comprehensive Study of Business Processes, Interaction Methods, Incentives, and ICT Utilisation in the HoReCa Sector in Poland and the UK

Monika Eisenbardt

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1133-0537

Roisin Mullins

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8090-5939

Sandra Dettmer

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7120-3986

DOI: https://doi.org/10.23762/FSO_VOL12_NO3_5

Abstract

This research aims to develop a framework for analysing companies' activities related to sourcing consumers' knowledge and apply this framework to the hotel, restaurants, and catering (HoReCa) sector in Poland and the UK. Data collection involves case studies within the HoReCa industry, and the research methodology considers the four key perspectives of companies' activities: (1) the business process, (2) methods of interaction, (3) incentives for knowledge sharing, and (4) ICT support. The research demonstrates that HoReCa companies actively engage consumers through diverse projects, emphasising feedback-related activities. While UK-based companies exhibit more extensive consumer involvement across various business processes, including product development, marketing, and customer service, Poland-based projects focus primarily on consumers' opinions. The study identifies significant differences in interaction methods, incentives, and ICT offerings between the two countries analysed. For academics, the study contributes to the understanding of cross-cultural variations in consumer engagement strategies within the HoReCa sector. From a practical standpoint, HoReCa businesses can tailor their consumer engagement strategies based on regional disparities highlighted in the study.

Keywords:

consumer engagement, HoReCa, cross-national differences, business processes, interaction methods, incentives, ICT utilisation.

Details

References

Statistics

Authors

Download files

pdf

Citation rules

Eisenbardt, M., Mullins, R., & Dettmer, S. (2024). Exploring Cross-National Differences in Consumer Engagement: A Comprehensive Study of Business Processes, Interaction Methods, Incentives, and ICT Utilisation in the HoReCa Sector in Poland and the UK. Forum Scientiae Oeconomia, 12(3), 93–113. https://doi.org/10.23762/FSO_VOL12_NO3_5

Altmetric indicators

Cited by / Share

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

References

Andrijauskiene, M., & Dumciuviene, D. (2018). National culture as a determinant of firms’ in-novative performance. Forum Scientiae Oeconomia, 6(1), 47–67.

APQC. (2020). Process Classification Framework 7.2.1. Houston: American Productivity and Quality Center. https://www.apqc.org/knowledge-base/download/426790/Cross%20Industry%20v7.2.1_Final.pdf

Baruk, I.A. (2019). The effect of consumers’ ethnocentric attitudes on their willingness for pre-sumption. Heliyon, 5(7), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2019.e02015.

Bhandari, M., Rodgers, S. (2019). What does the brand say? Effects of brand feedback to negative eWOM on brand trust and purchase intentions. In: Chu, S.-C., Kim, J., & Taylor, C.R. (Eds.). Electronic Word of Mouth as a Promotional Technique: New Insights from Social Media (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429432897.

Bolisani, E., Scarso, E., & Giuman, L. (2020). Collaboration for innovation in small KIBS com-panies: Implications for knowledge management. In A. Garcia-Perez & L. Simkin (Eds.), Proceedings of the 21st European Conference on Knowledge Management (ECKM 2020) (pp. 99-106). Coventry University, UK

Buczacki, A., Gładysz, B., & Palmer, E. (2021). HoReCa Food Waste and Sustainable Develop-ment Goals—A Systemic View. Sustainability, 13, 5510. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13105510.

Casolani, N., & Del Signore, A. (2016). Managers’ opinions of factors influencing HACCP appli-cations in Italian hotel/restaurant/café (HoReCa) sector. British Food Journal, 118(5). https://doi.org/10.1108/BFJ-09-2015-0312.

Ceynowa, W., Przybylowski, A., Wojtasik, P., & Ciskowski, Ł. (2023). ICT Adoption for Sustaina-ble Logistics Development in the HoReCa and Wholesale Sectors. Sustainability, 15, 3746. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15043746.

Chen, J.S., Weng, H.K., & Huang, C.L. (2018). A multilevel analysis of customer engagement, its antecedents, and the effects on service innovation. Total Quality Management & Business Excel-lence. 29(3-4), 410–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/14783363.2016.1203249.

de Jong, J.P.J., Gillert, N.L., & Stock, R.M. (2018). First adoption of consumer innovations: Ex-ploring market failure and alleviating factors. Research Policy, 47, 487–497. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2018.01.004.

Deloitte. (2014). The Deloitte Consumer Review. The growing power of consumers. Deloitte LLP. https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/consumer-business.

Deloitte. (2018). Customer-focused growth: Rising expectations and emerging opportunities. Quebec: Deloitte LLP. https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/ca/Documents/consumer-business/ca-en-consumer-business-customer-focused-growth.pdf.

Eisenbardt, M. (2019). The impact of incentives on prosumers knowledge sharing – The dimen-sion of their characteristics. Business Informatics, 2(52), 41-57. https://doi.org/10.15611/ie.2019.2.03.

Eisenbardt, M. (2020). Incentives as a trigger for consumer knowledge sharing with enterprises and public sector organizations. In A. Garcia-Perez & L. Simkin (Eds.), Proceedings of the 21st European Conference on Knowledge Management (ECKM 2020) (pp. 222-232). https://doi.org/10.34190/EKM.20.133.

Eisenbardt, M. (2021). ICT as a tool for gaining and sharing knowledge. In J. Watrobski, W. Salabun, C. Toro, C. Zanni-Merk, R. J. Howlett, & L. C. Jain (Eds.), Procedia Computer Science, 192, 1839-1847. 25th International Conference on Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Informati-on & Engineering Systems, KES 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2021.08.189.

Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989). Building theories from case study research. Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 532–550. https://doi.org/10.2307/258557.

Fandrejewska, A. (2017). Culture and its dimensions: Consumer behaviour in Poland and its main export countries. Handel Wewnętrzny, 4(369), 85–97.

Fernandes, T. & Remelhe, P. (2016). How to engage customers in co-creation: customers’ moti-vations for collaborative innovation. Journal of Strategic Marketing 24(3-4), 311–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/0965254X.2015.1095220.

Füller, J. (2010). Refining virtual co-creation from a consumer perspective. California Manage-ment Review, 52(2), 98–122. https://doi.org/10.1525/cmr.2010.52.2.

García-Madurga, M.-Á., Esteban-Navarro, M.-Á., & Morte-Nadal, T. (2021). Covid Key Figures and New Challenges in the HoReCa Sector: The Way towards a New Supply-Chain. Sustainabil-ity, 13, 6884. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13126884.

Gastronomy news. (2023). Gastronomy market in Poland. Raport 2023 (Special Issue) [Nowości gastronomiczne: Rynek gastronomiczny w Polsce. Raport 2023]. https://issuu.com/brogmarketing/docs/rg_2023_calosc_5

Hernández-Serrano, María-José, Renés-Arellano, Paula, Graham, Gary, and Greenhill, Anita. (2017). From prosumer to prodesigner: Participatory news consumption. Comunicar 25(50), 77–87.

Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions and or-ganizations across nations (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7967(02)00184-5.

Hofstede, G. (2019). Country comparison. https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison/poland,the-uk/.

Jin, J., Ji, P., & Kwong, C.K. (2016). What makes consumers unsatisfied with your products: re-view analysis at a fine-grained level. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 47, 38–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engappai.2015.05.006.

Kacprzak, A., & Dziewanowska, K. (2015). Does a global young consumer exist? A comparative study of South Korea and Poland. Journal of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour in Emerging Markets, 1(1), 47–61. https://doi.org/10.7172/2449-6634.jmcbem.2015.1.4.

Liu, W., Moultrie, J., and Ye, S. (2019). The customer-dominated innovation process: Involving customers as designers and decision-makers in developing new product. The Design Journal, 22(3), 299–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2019.1592324.

Ma, J., Lu, Y., & Gupta, S. (2019). User innovation evaluation: Empirical evidence from an online game community. Decision Support Systems, 117, 113–123. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.dss.2018.11.003.

Mintel (2022). UK Attitudes towards Lunch Out-of-Home Market Report 2022. https://store.mintel.com/report/uk-attitudes-towards-lunch-out-of-home-market-report-2022.

Oliveira, T., Araujo, B., and Tam, C. (2020). Why do people share their travel experiences on social media?. Tourism Management, 78, 104041. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2019.104041.

Pandey, S. C., Shukla, M. K., & Maurya, U. K. (2014). Managing customer knowledge in servi-ce economy: Proposing a conceptual model of CKM for services. In N. Ray & K. Chakraborty (Eds.), Handbook of research on strategic business infrastructure development and contemporary issues in finance (pp. 417-428). Hershey: IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-5154-8.ch029.

Planko, J., Chappin, M.M.H., Cramer, J., & Hekkert, M.P. (2019). Coping with coopetition-Facing dilemmas in cooperation for sustainable development: The case of the Dutch smart grid industry. Business Strategy and the Environment, 28(5), 665–674. https://doi.org/10.1002/bse.2271.

Potra, S., & Pugna, P. (2015). DFSS in marketing: designing an innovative value co-creation campaign. International Journal of Six Sigma and Competitive Advantage, 9(1), 21–36.

Prahalad, C.K., & Ramaswamy, V. (2004). Co-creation experiences: The next practice in value creation. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 18(3), 5–14. https://doi.org/10.1002/dir.20015.

Prentice, C., Wang, X., & Lin, X. (2018). An organic approach to customer engagement and loyalty. Journal of Computer Information Systems, 58(4), 326-335. https://doi.org/10.1080/08874417.2018.1485528.

Qiao, Z., Wang, G. A., Zhou, M., & Fan, W. (2018). The impact of customer reviews on prod-uct innovation: Empirical evidence in mobile apps. In A. Deokar, A. Gupta, L. Iyer, & M. Jones (Eds.), Analytics and data science. Annals of Information Systems (Vol. 21, pp. 95–110). Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58097-5_8.

Rather, R. A., Ramkissoon, H., Hollebeek, L. D., & Correia Loureiro, S. M. (2023). Customer engagement in tourism and hospitality research. In R. A. Rather & H. Ramkissoon (Eds.), Handbook of customer engagement in tourism marketing (pp. 1–24). Edward Elgar Pub-lishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781802203943.00010.

Retaildive. (2023). How Starbucks builds customer relationships to improve bottom-line figures. https://www.retaildive.com/spons/how-starbucks-builds-customer-relationships-to-improve-bottom-line-figures/651999/.

Robert, J. M., Maldar, M., Taraghi, M., & Seffah, A. (2019). User innovation, lead users, and crowdsourcing for the design of new products and services: Why, what, and how? In S. Bagnara, R. Tartaglia, S. Albolino, T. Alexander, & Y. Fujita (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th Congress of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA 2018). Advances in Intelligent Systems and Compu-ting (Vol. 824, pp. 730–743). Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96071-5_77.

Roy, S.K., Shekhar, V., Lassar, W.M., & Chen, T. (2018). Customer engagement behaviors: The role of service convenience, fairness and quality. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 44, 293–304. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2018.07.018.

Santiago, J., Borges-Tiago, M.T., & Tiago, F. (2022). Is firm-generated content a lost cause?. Journal of Business Research, 139, 945–953. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.10.022.

Schirg, F., & Reinsberger, K. (2016). The frequency of end-user innovation: A re-estimation of extant findings. Research Policy, 45, 1684–1689. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2016.04.012.

Seran, S., & Izvercian, M. (2014). Prosumer engagement in innovation strategies. Management Decision, 52(10), 1968–1980. https://doi.org/10.1108/MD-06-2013-0347.

Sołek-Borowska, C. (2018). The use and benefits of information communication technology by Polish small and medium sized enterprises. Online Journal of Applied Knowledge Management, 6(1), 211–225. https://doi.org/10.36965/OJAKM.2018.6(1)211-225.

Stankov, S., Fidan, H., Toskov, G., Dimitrova, E., & Nikovska, K. (2019). Traditional Bulgarian foods in the Horeca sector as a factor of choice for the tourist destination. Bulgarian Journal of Agricultural Science, 25(4), 654–660.

Strychalska-Rudzewicz, A. (2016). The impact of national culture on the level of innovation. Journal of Intercultural Management, 8(1), 121–145. https://doi.org/10.1515/joim-2016-0006.

Tian, M., Deng, P., Zhang, Y., & Salmador, M.P. (2018). How does culture influence innova-tion? A systematic literature review. Management Decision, 56(5), 1088–1107. https://doi.org/10.1108/md-05-2017-0462.

Vivek, S.D., Beatty, S.E., & Morgan, R.M. (2012). Customer engagement: Exploring customer relationships beyond purchase. Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, 20(2), 127–45. https://doi.org/10.2753/MTP1069-6679200201.

Vizzoto, F., Tessitore, S., Iraldo, F., & Testa, F. (2020). Passively concerned: Horeca managers’ recognition of the importance of food waste hardly leads to the adoption of more strategies to re-duce it. Waste Management, 107, 266-275. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2020.04.010.

von Hippel, E. (2017). Free innovation. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2866571.

Wang, L., Zhang, R-S., & Zhang, C-X. (2024). Live streaming E-commerce platform characteris-tics: Influencing consumer value co-creation and co-destruction behaviour. Acta Psychologica, 243, 104163. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2024.104163.

West, J., & Bogers, M. (2014). Leveraging external sources of innovation: A review of research on open innovation. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 31(4), 814–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpim.12125.

Wojciechowska, P. (2017). Inﬂuence of personality on buying behaviour: A cross-cultural study comparing Poland and the UK. Journal of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour in Emerging Mar-kets, 2(6), 54–76. https://doi.org/10.7172/2449-6634.jmcbem.2017.2.4.

Yamamoto, H., & Suzuki, T. (2018). Effects of beliefs about sanctions on promoting cooperation in a public goods game. Palgrave Communications, 4, 148. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-018-0203-8.

Ziemba, E. & Eisenbardt, M. (2016). Incentives encouraging prosumers to knowledge sharing – framework based on Polish study. Online Journal of Applied Knowledge Management, 4(2), 146–166. https://doi.org/10.36965/OJAKM.2016.4(2)146-166.

Ziemba, E., & Eisenbardt, M. (2018). The ways of prosumers’ knowledge sharing with organiza-tions. Interdisciplinary Journal of Information, Knowledge, and Management, 13, 95–115. https://doi.org/10.28945/4067.

Ziemba, E., Eisenbardt, M., & Mullins, R. (2017). Use of information and communication technologies for knowledge sharing by Polish and UK-based prosumers. In E. Ziemba (Ed.), Information technology for management: New ideas and real solutions. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (Vol. 277, pp. 49–73). Cham: Sprin-ger. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53076-5_4.

Ziemba, E., Eisenbardt, M., Mullins, R., & Dettmer, S. (2019). Prosumers’ engagement in busi-ness process innovation – the case of Poland and the UK. Interdisciplinary Journal of Infor-mation, Knowledge, and Management, 14, 119–43. https://doi.org/10.28945/4320.

Zollo, L., Filieri, R., Rialti, R., & Yoon, S. (2020). Unpacking the relationship between social media marketing and brand equity: The mediating role of consumers’ benefits and experience. Journal of Business Research, 117, 256–267. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.05.001.