Maria Raciti

Transformative services have the power to shape lives, often with the goal of enhancing wellbeing. However, their potential to unintentionally generate illbeing remains underexplored. This study investigates life regrets as a negative unintended consequence of transformative service engagement. Life regrets are enduring harms such as psychological, social, or material harms that emerge during or after such experiences. Drawing on 30 semi-structured, convergent interviews, participants reflected on a transformative service that resulted in regret. Thematic analysis revealed a spectrum of illbeing, with contributing factors including organisational practices such as time pressure, siloed decision-making, partial information disclosure, and gaslighting consumers by overpromising outcomes. These findings challenge the prevailing assumption that transformative services are inherently beneficial. Given that consumers typically engage these services during periods of vulnerability and life transition, greater attention is needed to their potential to inflict harm. This research calls for a more balanced understanding of transformative services, being one that accounts for both positive and negative outcomes. Doing so will better equip providers to anticipate and address risks, ensuring that services intended to support do not inadvertently harm. Recognising and mitigating life regret can enhance the ethical and practical integrity of transformative service design.

This research explores the fundamental life regrets of Australian transformative service consumers. Life regrets influence consumers’ decisions and yet it is under-researched, especially the area of profound life regrets that may result from transformative service experiences. Life regrets are difficult, mostly irreversible decisions that may fundamentally reshape transformative consumers’ worldviews. Using semi-structured, convergent interviews with a convenience sample of 30 participants, rich data were collected, eliciting deep insights into the presence and consequences of fundamental life regrets emanating from transformative services’ experiences. Manual thematic analysis identified transformative service contexts such as family planning, higher education, and relationship legal services that left consumers with enduring regrets. Unlike the existing literature, this study found that some fundamental life regrets continue to haunt participants, with ‘decision ghosts’ of ‘what could have been’ sometimes lingering for decades after the decision. To the authors’ best knowledge, this study provides novel findings that extend the current stock of knowledge about consumer life regrets, is the first study undertaken in Australia and the first qualitative examination. The findings assist practitioners in recognising the potential for lingering consumer regrets to result from their transformative service and redesigning appropriate strategies and plans to deal with lingering dissonance outcomes.

This qualitative research seeks to understand the disengagement coping strategies used by student consumers in response to expectation-experience mismatches. Understanding the complex challenges of first-year, first-time regional and remote (FYFT-RR) university students will create a better understanding of the disengagement responses enacted by students in identified equity groups. By revealing disengagement responses of student consumers, it will support educational transformative services to redress social inequality. This research uses manual thematic analysis of 20 semi-structure interviews conducted via convenience sample at a single regional university, either by face-to-face or online intercepts. This research reveals FYFT-RR response to expectation-experience mismatches through specific strategies of evading, refutation and self-forgiving. These findings prove disengagement responses are applied in a complex service setting to manage expectation-experience mismatches. The findings provide timely insights for practitioners looking to create interventions to support FYFT-RR student consumers to self-manage expectation-experience mismatch.

Higher education can transform lives. In Australia, a university education enables social mobility for students from identified equity groups. The focus of the Australian Government on increasing the participation and success of students from regional and remote locations requires new research to better understand how pre-commencement expectations among regional and remote university students are formed. Fuzzy trace theory is an emerging area that examines how gist representations influence expectations and their subsequent impact on cognitive dissonance, satisfaction, and retention intentions. This research will examine these linkages as experienced by first-year, first-time regional and remote university students. A three-stage mixed methodology will be used, comprising qualitative interviews, a quantitative survey, and a quasi-experimental design. The findings of the interviews will be presented, revealing students’ gist-informed expectations of an ecosystem of connection. It is anticipated that this research will produce useful guidance for regional universities in post-pandemic times. 

Research into first-year students’ attitudes towards their studies has revealed there is often a gap between their pre-commencement expectations and their perceived experience. A qualitative research design comprising 20 interviews explores how Fuzzy Trace Theory (FTT) influences gist-based expectations for first-year, first-time (FYFT) regional and remote students and how they reconcile these expectations with their actual higher education experience through action or inaction responses to reach a state of satisfaction. Synthesising FTT, Festinger’s (1957) and Cancino-Montecino's et al. (2020) cognitive dissonance theories and Oliver’s (1989) hierarchy of satisfaction modes, the empirical model shows how FYFT students respond to mismatches when gist-based expectations are incongruent with perceived experience. The novel findings reveal the relationships between action-based responses to dissonance with increased satisfaction and inaction-based responses with decreased satisfaction. This research also provides practical insights for marketing practitioners to strategically shape gist representations through integrated communications and better manage FYFT pre-commencement expectations.

Australia’s Indigenous (Blak) business sector has grown substantially. Despite this, the Australian public knows little about Indigenous businesses, and what is known is largely drawn from the grey literature, such as news media and magazine articles. This research explored how Indigenous businesses are represented in the grey literature, as such representations are critical to attracting investors and customers. Led by Aboriginal researchers using an Indigenist theoretical lens, a systematic content analysis interrogated 544 articles published over 16 years from 2006 to 2022. Manual thematic analysis revealed several troubling trends, including persistent deficit perspectives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander businesses, that Indigenous authors and voices were largely absent, and the meagre frequency of articles in many Australian news media outlets. These novel findings shed light on prevailing biases in the grey literature that hinder Indigenous business success, thwarting social justice and progress towards the national Closing the Gap (2020) agenda.  

Educational inequality is a wicked problem in Australia and abroad (Raciti 2021). In Australia, students from regional and remote (RR) areas are an identified equity group with the recent national ‘Napthine Review’ highlighting the gap between tertiary education attainment between RR students and their metropolitan peers (Napthine et al. 2019). RR students are typically the first in their family to attend university, and those that do commence find that their actual university experience bears little resemblance to what they expected (Money et al 2017). This mismatch in expectations has the potential to make this transition into higher education a confusing experience with studies indicating students who are less satisfied with their university experience more at risk of withdrawing from their studies (Rivera Munoz, Baik & Lodge 2020). Unrealistic expectations have been a focus of first year research to better understand the drivers behind unmet expectations and how to mitigate negative impacts in a university setting (Maloshonok & Trentev 2017). Many RR students enter higher education without knowing exactly what to expect and are unaware of how significantly the university experience will influence their day to day lives, making the incongruence between expectation and their experience acute (O’Shea et al. 2021). Exacerbating the incongruence is the uncertainty around the continuity of education in the wake of COVID-19 (Brown & Finn 2020). The impacts of today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous (VUCA) world emphasise the challenges for students as they attempt to cope with the extreme conditions, which fall even further outside the realm of their regular expectations (Hadar et al. 2020).

Growth in Indigenous businesses in Australia has significantly increased over the last decade. This growth results from a combination of government support programs and policy mandates, along with the rise of community-based entities, such as Supply Nation, Indigenous Chambers of Commerce and Indigenous Business Australia (Commonwealth of Australia, 2018). These mechanisms have attempted to encourage corporate and government sectors to make real, targeted commitments to engaging with and procuring goods and services from majority Indigenous owned businesses across a variety of sectors (Commonwealth of Australia, 2018). Whereas these changes have stimulated demand for Indigenous goods and services in national, local and state government departments, the uptake by corporations and small to medium enterprises appears patchy and difficult to accurately measure.

This paper presents the findings of formative research conducted in the first quarter of 2021 in Queensland. In order to understand the mental models that underpinned Queenslander’s COVID-19 vaccine intentions, a segmentation approach was employed that focused on the generation of personas to capture key differentiating features to help inform and tailor communication strategies. The research question framing this study was: how does COVID-19 vaccine uptake intentions differ across Queensland’s residents?