Soon, you will be able to check your bank balance or transfer money through Facebook Messenger and Twitter as banks experiment with chatbots. Companies like Ikea have used customer service chatbots for close to a decade. But their use in financial services represents a new tension — do we want convenience or a feeling of security from our banks?

Research shows that when it comes to online banking, customers are prepared to trade security for convenience. But when customers think there is a threat to their security, this feeling reverses.

Researchers at QUT recently found that a sense of insecurity…

Self-checkouts in supermarkets are increasing as businesses battle to reduce costs and increase service efficiency. But looking at the numbers, it isn’t clear that self-service is an easy win for businesses.

Self-checkouts aren’t necessarily faster than other checkouts and don’t result in lower staff numbers. And there are indirect costs such as theft, reduced customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Worldwide, self-checkout terminals are projected to increase from 191,000 in 2013 to 325,000 by 2019. A survey of multiple countries found 90% of respondents had used self-checkouts, with Australia and Italy leading the way.

Employment in the Australian supermarket and grocery industry…

Consumer deviance — theft, fraud, aggression — is a significant issue for managers and to date, the common ways of deterring these negative behaviours are to say “it’s wrong, don’t do it” or to say “you will be caught and punished”. But these hard stick approaches do not seem to be working as we continue to observe deviant consumer behaviour in the marketplace.

In our research, published in the Journal of Marketing Management, we explore why these deterrence strategies might not be working as well as they should.

Strategy 1: ‘It’s wrong, don’t do it’

For this deterrence strategy to work it assumes that everybody agrees the…