In the present study involvement refers to the degree

In the present study, involvement refers to the degree of

Journal of Services Research, Volume 8, Number 1 (April-September 2008)
73 Liang, Wang
psychological identification and affective, emotional ties the consumer
has with a stimulus, which represents the information education services
content or specific services provider. Hence, the complexity and
intensity of consumers, attitudes and feelings toward services with which
they are highly involved can stretch far beyond simply preferring one
service to another.
Conceptualized and measured in a variety of ways, several
instruments have been developed in an attempt to measure the somewhat
illusive construct of involvement (Bloch, 1981; Martin, 1986; Traylor
and Joseph, 1984; Arora and Baer, 1985, and Zaichkowsky, 1985).
Particularly, Zaichkowsky (1985)’s 20-item generic scale was widely
used since then, which was condensed to ten items later (Zaichkowsky,
1994) and was the definition here we had used.
To all appearance, the use of these measurement approaches have
found that some consumers are more involved with some products
than are other consumers, giving rise to the effective use of involvement
as a basis of market segmentation (Bloch, 1981; Laurent and Kapferer,
1985; Longfellow and Celuch, 1993; Martin, 1986; Zaichkowsky,
1985). This suggests that the characteristics of the services/brands
themselves or their usage contexts may systematically act to arouse
consumers’ involvement. If so, it follows that the stimulus that arouse
involvement may be engineered into the services/brand, or highlighted
through promotional or other marketing efforts to raise involvement
levels, such as enhancing services/brand meaning and strengthening
consumer-services/brand relationships. Hence we make hypotheses as
follow:
H5: A higher level of product involvement leads to a higher level of
commitment.
H6: A higher level of product involvement leads to a higher level of
trust.
METHODOLOGY
Study object and sample
In order to observe the behavioral sequence of relationship efforts and
relationship outcomes, the largest information education services
institute in Taiwan, XYZ Company, which is anticipating going public
in 2005, is chosen (market share: XYZ Company about 35%, Secondary
Information education services Institutes about 15%, and others about
2-3% respectively). The sample company XYZ founded in 1986, now

Journal of Services Research, Volume 8, Number 1 (April-September 2008)
74 Do Loyal and More Involved Customers
has 600 employees, 100 professional lecturers, 500 part time lecturers,
accumulated members more than 500,000, 94 directly owned branch
stores and six value-added flagship stores. XYZ Company’s main
business items include computer education training, professional
certification training, courses for groups of corporate users, Web construct
planning and on-line education courses. On-line education courses focus
on consumers whose learning time is limited, and this service is provided
24 hours a day, seven days a week.