Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography

Melnyk, V., Osselaer, S. M., & Bijmolt, T. H. (2009). Are Women More Loyal Customers Than Men? Gender Differences in Loyalty to Firms and Individual Service Providers. Journal of Marketing, 73(4), 82-96.

The main arguments in this article are that men and women have different ways of interacting, in this case, with employees. It states that women tend to have a more interdependence attitude while men are more independent. Women tend to make close personal intimate relationships and men usually bond with larger groups of people. Women want to feel connected to other people and build social relationships and this is more important to them than for men. Men strive for individuality and usually put themselves before society, family or other people. With this theory in mind, this article suggests that employees should have a different selling method for both male and females. The authors believe that because women strive to keep a relationship with people that they will most likely do the same for companies and other service people. They also suggest that; “this may imply that women are more loyal to individual employees but that men are more likely to be loyal to companies, which may be construed as a more group-like phenomenon (pg.83).” Gender and loyalty were the two main focuses throughout this article and the correspondence between the two is vital when employees interact with customers. This article attempts to prove that men and women should be stereotyped and that it is ethical to do this in an employee’s standpoint to make the customer feel comfortable by communicating with them in different approaches.

This article is useful for my project because it focuses on how stereotypes can be beneficial to employees not just for their own benefit but to make the customers feel comfortable. I was always looking at stereotypes to be a negative thing when observing in my fields but after reading this article I got a different perspective....