Celebrating America’s Pastimes: Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Marketing?

Despite the strong “ethical ethos” that appears to govern business today, recent studies have questioned the usefulness of using the environmental argument in the luxury sector. Adopting a qualitative methodology involving 39 French consumers, our paper identifies five reasons why luxury managers may be reluctant to promote sustainable development, i.e., the perception of the low environmental impact of the luxury industry, socially related benefits, the gap between the universe of luxury products and that of sustainable development, a negative impact of ecological criteria when included in luxury items, and the many selection criteria that come into play when purchasing luxury products. We end our paper with some recommendations for responsible corporate communication.

In other words, humans perceive their possessions to be a representation of their identity or self. Display in the form of possessions, attire, or actions represent a person’s perceived or actual place in society, be it related to character traits, religious affiliations, professional associations, or even wealth and social standing. One of the recognized phenomenon of display as a representation is conspicuous consumption, defined as the intentional display of expensive goods by the nouveau-riche to indicate financial status (Veblen 1899). The concept has been inextricably linked with luxury goods, but conspicuous displays, whether of wealth or other affiliations, are a way of signaling belonging to any social group (Ashforth and Mael 1989) or possessing certain individual qualities (Connelly et al. 2011). Corporations and consumers are driven by a desire to be seen as responsible members of society and hope to thus command social respect. In essence, companies and consumers engaging in prosocial behavior may not be doing so for purely altruistic reasons (Basil and Weber 2006). It is possible that the purchase of visible luxury items and of items visibly associated with a social cause are both motivated by similar mechanisms of an attempt to be seen as belonging to a desirable social group.

When designer products become pervasive in the marketplace, sometimes the original products are compromised and sold as counterfeit goods. Consequently, the global counterfeit luxury industry has grown to be a lucrative market. Counterfeit goods are replicated inauthentic designer brands (e.g., Prada, Louis Vuitton) that are sold through various channels across the globe. Counterfeit goods generate nearly $200 billion annually in losses for global manufacturers (Chiu et al. 2009).

Consumers’ interest in healthy eating is increasing for a variety of reasons. As a result, several sugar-free and alternative products that use substitute ingredients for sugar are becoming pervasive in supermarket shelves. We investigate consumers’ implicit associations between these products and healthiness perception. Drawing on regulatory focus theory, we demonstrate that unhealthy products (e.g., chocolate bar) are associated with healthiness when they rely on labels that highlight the absence (vs. the presence) of a particular ingredient, like sugar-free (vs. milk chocolate). In contrast, healthy products (i.e., orange juice) are associated with healthiness when their labels emphasize the presence (vs. the absence) of a particular ingredient, which is the case of a product with natural juice (vs. sugar-free). We suggest that prevention and promotion focus can explain these effects.

While eating at restaurants, retail outlets, or at home, ambient temperature is an omnipresent feature. In this research, we examine whether varying ambient temperature in restaurant, retail, or home environments might influence food choices and consumption behavior.

Satiation plays an important role in consumption. Over the time, an individual will eventually get fed up by product with which he or she has been satisfied before. Our work has a psychological view of satiation, which is based on the premise that satiation is not determined by past consumptions but is constructed. Our work focuses on the cognitive process of preferences construction including the inferences about fluency of retrieval. We showed that in this case of difficulty of retrieval, the consumer can effectively infer that he or she has not consumed a particular product a lot. This perception of reduced past consumptions will consequently make the consumer have less feeling of satiation. We conducted an empirical study among 166 students who had responded to our online survey regarding different soft drinks in Peru. Participants who remembered the last three times they have consumed their favorite drink expressed more desire to consume the drink again than those who only remembered their last consumption. Moreover, individuals who were informed that the recall task is difficult had no relevant effect on their desire.

The competitive food marketing industry is fueled by demands of consumer constituencies to include processed or, alternatively, organic foods and beverages in their diet. Portrayals in the media further distinguish these two views. Linked to the processed food and beverage adherent and particular to our research, corn-fed beef and soft drinks made with artificial sugar offer consumers paltry health benefits. As both corn-fed beef and soft drinks are copiously offered in the food and beverage industry, we use these unhealthy food and beverage options as outcome variables in our proposed model.

The main objective of the present study was to determine the effect of website atmospheric variables on emotional states (pleasure and arousal) of the consumer, which consequently would influence consumer’s behavioral response (intention to purchase) in Lithuanian online apparel stores. Three atmospheric variables were chosen for the research: color, layout, and graphics. The study implemented the experimental design where consumers had a simulated shopping online experience. The experiment was designed to have eight different treatments; thus eight different online stores were designed with varying types of atmospheric variables. Three above mentioned atmospheric variables were tested to determine whether they have a significant influence on consumer’s pleasure and arousal. Atmospheric variables’ effect on emotional states was identified, thus giving practical examples of which types of separate atmospherics are advantageous to one another. Lastly, the effect of consumers’ emotional states on their intention to purchase was researched, which also distinguished the presence of significant relationship. Findings of the present study are giving useful implications for future studies, regarding atmospheric variables as influencers for consumer’s intention to purchase in apparel shopping activities online. Moreover, the present study proposes the necessity for the marketers to develop user friendly and esthetically attractive web stores.

At the same time that global internet usage has increased significantly in the past few decades, the number of online shoppers has also risen rapidly as internet adoption and penetration level increase. In addition to the slow acceptance of e-commerce around the world, e-retailers also must face the challenges associated with selling in a competitive marketplace: online shoppers can switch from one website to another effortlessly (Deng and Poole 2010) and so increased web traffic does not necessarily and automatically translate into sales (Doherty and Ellis-Chadwick 2009). Hence, it is crucial for e-retailers facing ever increasing global and domestic customer demands and competition to develop a deeper comprehension of the driving forces that not only attract online customers to a website but also motivate them to take a desired action and/or make a purchase.

Product returns are a phenomenon that seems to be closely interconnected with the rise of online retailing in the last decades. However, key questions in this area still remain unanswered. What specific factors drive customers to return merchandise purchased online? How does their cognition and behavior during the purchase process affect returns? Can online retailers adjust their websites to impact return behavior? The current research attempts to develop a better understanding of the association of the purchase decision process and product return intentions, while evaluating the utilization of website characteristics to decrease product returns. In order to do so, the paper presents the results of an experiment designed to test the impact of certain cues, such as the level of product information, on an online shopping website on the intention to return merchandise.

Old Spice cleverly used a handsome actor to play the Old Spice Man character for a Super Bowl commercial in 2010. After the game, this Old Spice commercial was viewed more than 13 million times on YouTube, a social media video-sharing site. This viral marketing campaign, also known as electronic word-of-mouth (E-WOM), propelled the Old Spice brand into the forefront of consumers’ minds, increased brand awareness, and inspired people to share the video links with their family, friends, and coworkers.

Brands are assets that are intangible in nature. This provides companies with the potential to extract higher rents or prices from customers (Keller and Lehmann 2006). Key to building strong brands lies in the way firms manage their brands. This capability called brand management includes all the activities that firms undertake to develop and maintain brands (Low and Fullerton 1994). Brand managers are the ones who manage brands and hence become an important resource in developing brands. Brand management capability has developed from being an administrative function to a more strategic function (Rust et al. 2004; Low and Fullerton 1994). Merz et al. (2009) trace the development of brand management originating from individual goods-focus (Copeland 1923; Low and Fullerton 1994) to value-focus (Park et al. 1986), relationship-focus (Aaker 1992; Keller 1993), and finally toward stakeholder-focus. Relying on the knowledge or capability-based perspective (Barreto 2010; Cohen and Levinthal 1990; Helfat and Petraf 2009; Kogut 1988; Levinthal and March 1993), we argue that for effective brand management firms need to have certain capabilities and knowledge. The brand management capability of an organization is an operant resource (Vargo and Lusch 2004, 2008), which enables an organization to achieve competitive advantage (Grant 1996; Hunt and Morgan 1995; Challagalla et al. 2014) by creating strong brands. This capability and knowledge is an idiosyncratic and unique resource which is hard to imitate (Barney 1991) since it is a combination of several organizational and personnel characteristics. However, despite its importance, few studies have explored the antecedents of brand management capability within an organization. Using Complex Adaptive System Perspective (Grant 2003; Arikan 2010; Paswan and Tran 2012), we argue that brand management capability is developed through the interactions between the senior management, other internal managers, external stakeholders such as advertising agency and channel personnel, external environmental factors, and brand managers. The importance of this study is highlighted by the fact that marketing function, especially brand management, has come under a lot of criticism for the lack of objective financial measures to determine its value (Nath and Mahajan 2011; Srivastava et al. 1998). With increasing importance of brands and brand management (Keller and Lehmann 2006; De Chernatony and Cottam 2009, Cui et al. 2014), it is imperative to identify factors that facilitate the creation and management of strong brands. Finally, this study contributes to the increasing calls to view brand management function as an application of knowledge, contributing to the viewpoint of marketing resources being dynamic capabilities (Day 2014; Kozlenkova et al. 2014). The proposed framework will help firms that are lagging in one or more of the dimensions of brand management capability (i.e., organizational, human, or relational).

The authors are currently developing integrated ERP and CRM courses based on the Microsoft Dynamics platform (chosen in part because the authors’ institution has a pre-existing membership in the Dynamics Academic Alliance). Students will co-register in both ERP and CRM with projects, assessments, and instructors flowing between courses to provide truly integrated content. Both employers and scholars call for greater curricular integration in business. Students will benefit from the integrated CRM/ERP courses by using multiple framing to address business issues, a practice shown to have positive impact on learning outcomes. Extant literature suggests that discipline-specific, content-centric learning outcomes from integrated curricula are as good as or better than those of conventionally delivered content. Measures of selected learning outcomes will compare students in the team-taught, integrated courses to student performance on equivalent measures in other upper-division business courses.

This research proposes and tests the concept of collaborative course development (CCD)—a pedagogy in which students are actively involved in course design, empowered to make decisions about class structure, and free to make choices in assignments. Over a period of three academic terms, researchers taught experimental course sections utilizing CCD methods (i.e., employing various pedagogical techniques including syllabus building, “flex-tures,” free-choice assignments, and exam writing), as well as control sections utilizing traditionally structured classroom techniques (i.e., professor-developed syllabi, structured lectures, forced-choice assignments, and professor-written exams). Results indicate that CCD classes yield significantly higher levels of student engagement, perceived learning, satisfaction, and ratings of professors. These main effects are consistent between and within professors. Interestingly, the positive effects associated with CCD teaching techniques are also consistent for students with high and low levels of two control variables (the preference for consistency and the separateness-connectedness self-schema).

Increasingly, marketing departments are recognizing the importance of teaching students the appropriate skills to adapt to the quickly evolving business environments (Granitz and Koernig 2011; Rinaldo et al. 2013; Tuten and Marks 2012; Wymbs 2011). This is especially relevant in marketing education where organizations expect marketing graduates to be equipped with skills in current information technologies used to manage communication with stakeholders and make complex data-driven marketing decisions (Granitz and Koernig 2011). Recent research indicates that at least some employers are currently dissatisfied with the technology skillsets of marketing graduates (Harrigan and Hulbert 2011; Kaplan et al. 2009). The purpose of this research is to determine whether there are significant differences in student attitudes toward faculty credibility, perceptions of learning, and attitudes toward digital marketing. We explore these questions within an experimental setting that manipulates whether the content of a digital marketing module was created by an industry expert versus academic and whether the delivery modality is face-to-face versus recorded. The results of this study reveal that whether or not an instructor presents themselves as from industry or academia and the modality of lecture delivery are important, though not interactive, factors in determining students’ perceptions toward a social media marketing lecture. Specifically, we find that in-person lecturing positively influences students’ perceptions of the lecturer across likeability, competence, character, and delivery variables. Face-to-face instruction was also positively associated with positive characteristics derived from a specific lecture such as how enjoyable it was and whether it should be taught to future classes.

Acculturation has become one of the most reliable constructs to understand consumption of a variety of ethnic groups. How culturally similar an immigrant is to its host or original culture is providing better power on predicting consumption. Previous empirical studies in marketing have not only tested scales to measure level of acculturation, but also used consumer acculturation concepts to capture beliefs, attitudes, and/or behavior (Alvarez et al. 2012).

Destination branding has become an increasingly important area of focus for academics and business communities. Destination brand equity is a strategic asset that can be the basis of competitive advantage and long-term profitability. Assessing the equity of destination brands provides destination marketers with information about the specific determinants that can help strengthen a destination brand (Floreck et al. 2006). The literature on destination marketing focuses on the three major dimensions of brand equity: brand image, brand value, and brand quality (De Chernatony and McDonald 2003). This study focused on tourists’ perceptions of destination brand image, brand value, and brand quality as factors in determining their future revisit intention in the Latin American destination Quepos, Costa Rica. No study thus far has simultaneously modeled the constructs hereby proposed into one theoretical model and assessed relationships among personal cultural orientation, destination brand equity, and revisit intention. This study filled these knowledge gaps by examining how destination brand equity is affected by the tourist’s personal cultural orientation and investigating the roles of destination brand equity and personal cultural orientation on revisit intention.

Our postmodern world is scattered with food offerings from all over the globe. When striving to satisfy our need for nutrition we are lavished with a broad choice of nearby restaurants serving Chinese, Italian, Japanese, or other foreign creations. The situation at the border between Texas and Mexico is no exception in the availability of international cuisine. Despite of no signs of an immigration wave from Asia there is a remarkable number of Chinese restaurants serving a predominantly Hispanic population. This observation allows the question as to why there are so many foreign offerings in this region. The purpose of this paper is to develop the conceptual foundations to address this question.

Interest in the subject of Financial Services Marketing, both practically and theoretically, has grown substantially over the last few decades. This growth in interest is recognition of the importance of the financial services industry to the economies of nations globally and the acknowledgment that marketing and consumption of financial services are different from the marketing and consumption of tangible goods and indeed many other intangible services. Few other industries have such wide-reaching impact on the welfare of individuals and nations. The decisions that consumers (and financial organizations on their behalf) make regarding saving, investing, and borrowing have significant implications on their ability to consume a wide range of other products and services, in turn affecting lifestyles, standards of living and how people spend their time. The recent financial crisis has brought this to the forefront of attention.

In recent years, the volume of research on the public’s lack of trust in business and government has significantly grown. Research has, for example, focused on drivers of public distrust in political entities and elected officials (Hetherington and Husser 2012), perceptions of trustworthiness of business leaders (Kramer 2009), and drivers of trusting relationships within organizations (Coutu 1998). In much of this research, the perspective of the inquiry has been on general levels of trust, both internally within organizations (Hurley 2006) and externally involving parties with competing interests (e.g., Hopkins 2011). While the accumulated research has provided a general macro view of trust, very little research has been conducted to pinpoint the sources of consumer distrust in specific business practices and especially related to financial services marketing practices.

Extant literature covering consumer decision making is concerned in the main with situations where consumers make decisions on their own initiative following information search and evaluation of alternatives. However, an alternative perspective posits that consumers in some cases delegate the responsibility for making a decision to a third party, engaging in what Aggarwal and Mazumdar (2008) termed “decision delegation.” The same phenomenon has also been referred to in the literature as “choice delegation” (Broniarczyk and Griffin 2014). The existence of decision delegation strategies has been shown by a number of studies (Chhabra and Olshavsky 1985). Broniarczyk and Griffin (2014) argue that decision delegation can alleviate the stressful emotions connected with making a decision and minimize the need for cognitive trade-offs and mental effort.

Due to the complexity and inherent risk associated with financial services decisions, many consumers seek advice and guidance from sales advisors and even delegate responsibility for decision making to them. The performance of financial services salespeople is therefore of critical importance to their clients in securing appropriate financial decisions and outcomes. Whilst different models of sales advising exist, many sales advisors work separately and at a distance from the firm, leading to a common perception of the financial services advisor as one of “lone ranger.” Monitoring the direct performance of advisors is thus difficult, if not impossible; a key factor leading to the blame of advisors following the recent financial crisis. Set against this context, this paper focuses on the role of feedback as a key factor impacting a financial advisor’s effectiveness and performance, specifically the extent of sales advisors’ feedback orientation.

Since marketers first entered the financial services arena they have sought to explain consumer purchasing behavior. To this end, a wide range of approaches have been utilized over the years, with mixed results. Many have attempted to profile consumers through the use of sociodemographic, psychographic, and other means [see for example, Branca (2008)]. The results, however, often had limited use for practitioners wanting to know not only who will buy and why, but also more importantly, when. The family life cycle (FLC) model went some way to resolve this, but, family patterns have changed and attempts to modernize the FLC have not always improved predictive ability (Wagner and Hanna 1983). Life events, which can provide an indication of FLC and identify a point in time when an event triggers changes in behavior, appear to provide a potential solution, and indeed are widely used by financial services practitioners. However, the life event concept has also been challenged, in particular, whether it is the life event itself that triggers a change in behavior or whether it is changes associated with the life event (such as an increase/decrease in disposable income) that result in the changed behavior.

Since the 2007 financial crisis there has been an increased awareness of risk governance in the banking sector among the wider public. The importance of banking to the economy is such that society in general has an interest in appropriate supervision. Financial institutions have a fiduciary responsibility toward the customers they serve, many of whom are not in a position to make fully informed and rational decisions and rely on the agency of experts in delegating decision making. Consumer trust and confidence in the industry are in part dependent on the assurance provided by risk governance. Deregulation of the banking sector, however, led to banks being given greater ability to determine their own level of risk, which was encapsulated in the Basel Accords. Yet, the financial crisis illustrated that banks had not acknowledged the level of risk to which they were exposed, thus calling into question the risk governance arrangements in place.

Over the last decades, comparative advertising which compares different brands of the same product category on the basis of one or more specific product characteristics (Wilkie and Farris 1975) has been increasingly used on an international level (Jeon and Beatty 2002) and in diverse industries (Thompson and Hamilton 2006). Many previous studies deal with the effectiveness of comparative advertising as compared to noncomparative advertising [e.g., Grewal et al. (1997) for a meta-analysis], as well as with how to phrase the comparative claim (e.g., Miniard et al. 1998). However, little is known about the relative effectiveness of different product characteristics such as price or attribute performance that could be used as a basis for comparison. In this context, it makes sense to additionally differentiate between goods and services because advertising for services faces challenges that do not exist for goods due to their unique characteristics (Stafford et al. 2011) and research on comparative advertising has so far not made such a differentiation. Furthermore, it is interesting to include consumers’ level of sensation seeking because it might influence consumers’ evaluations of the sensational value of comparative advertising, which is due to its attention drawing properties (Grewal et al. 1997).

Limited Edition (LE) products can be defined as uniquely designed products offered for a predefined time and/or at a predefined quantity within the same product category. Marketers are likely to promote both luxury and consumer goods’ scarcity as this method has proven to be successful not only in the luxury goods segment, but also in various consumer good product categories (Balachander and Stock 2009). Although consumer behavior has already been investigated in the context of scarcity, no study has focused on a rather comprehensive identification of the success factors that determine consumers’ intention to purchase scarce products in the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) context (Van Herpen et al. 2009). Our research focuses on a detailed investigation of FMCG limited editions, as they are one of the most popular product types whose availability is artificially limited (Gierl and Hüttl 2010). Based on a review of the relevant literature we identify crucial determinants influencing consumers’ purchase intention (PI) with respect to limited edition products. In particular, we investigated perceived scarcity, perceived product innovativeness, perceived credibility, and perceived product quality. Furthermore, we determine the influence of product familiarity by comparing a convenience sample of noninvolved consumers (study 1) with a sample of consumers highly involved in the product category used in our survey (study 2). Consequently, in order to support marketers to better promote and use scarcity signals in practice, as well as to reduce failure rates of newly introduced LE products, we aim at answering the following research question: What are success factors that drive consumers’ purchase intentions of LE products?

Within the global marketplace, the production and consumption of counterfeit goods represent a serious social problem. Scholars continue to suggest anticounterfeit education as a means to resolve this global problem and curb the demand for counterfeit goods, but no scholarly research has empirically evaluated the effectiveness of anticounterfeit educational campaigns. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to draw upon such suggestions within the literature and quantitatively assess the effectiveness of anticounterfeit education on consumers’ perceived knowledge, attitudes, and purchase intentions of fashion counterfeit goods. Convenience samples of male and female college students participated in the study. Utilizing a one-group pretest–posttest quasi-experimental design, the findings from a series of paired samples t-tests revealed a positive significant change in consumers’ perceived knowledge of fashion counterfeit goods after viewing the anticounterfeit campaign. Negative, significant changes in consumers’ favorable attitudes and purchase intentions of fashion counterfeit goods were also found after the campaign was implemented.

Making an appearance in the mid-1990s, blogs were first viewed primarily as “internet sites that served as a platform for open communication and detailed discussions” (Rocamora 2011, p. 408). Although blogs were promoted as a tool for everyone, at the time, the technology was mostly used for political and educational discourse. It was not until the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 that blog use achieved worldwide popularity (Rocamora 2011). As bloggers began to see the benefits of blogs as a communication tool, they started to expand beyond the topics of politics and education. Many researchers consider this moment in history to be the birth of personal blogging (Chittenden 2010; Rocamora 2011).

The importance of the language used in brand-consumer communications spans many areas of marketing including advertising, personal selling, public relations, service interactions, traditional media, and, within the last decade, digital and social media marketing. The present research provides an exploratory investigation on the use of first (e.g., “I”) and second (e.g., “You”) person singular pronouns in brand-consumer communications on the popular social networking platform, Facebook. In particular, archival data from brand administrator and fan posts on Facebook were collected for a period of 45 days. Initial findings suggest that first- and second-person singular pronoun usage is higher in consumer comments than in brand posts. On the other hand, brand posts contain a higher proportion of second-person (vs. first-person) singular pronouns, while consumer comments contain a higher proportion of first-person (vs. second-person) singular pronouns. Brand posts contain a higher portion of second-person singular pronouns than do consumer comments. Finally, consumer comments contain a higher proportion of first-person singular pronouns than do brand posts. Managerial implications and opportunities for future research are discussed.

Personalized advertising represents a new and emerging trend in the field of online advertising. Through the use of enhanced online data collection techniques, marketers can now craft seemingly made to order advertisements tailored to a specific individual. Numerous websites and services are hosting personalized banner and/or text ads, such as YouTube, Facebook, Hotmail, and Gmail. In addition, the technique is being used by more and more firms such as Amazon, MetLife, Dollar-Thrifty, Staples, Joseph A. Bank, Orbitz, Zappos, and T-Mobile.

According to a recent CNN national opinion poll, only 25 % of Americans believe that the economic recession is over (Silverleib 2014). The economic recession, which officially started in December 2007, has significantly impacted consumers’ behavior. According to Loechner (2009), “the recession has caused a profound, deep-rooted change in consumers’ spending habits in favor of a more restrained approach (p. 1).” Moreover, the economic downturn has forced firms to reformulate their marketing strategies as a new type of consumer has emerged, one who buys in a “frugal, careful, conservative, and commonsensical way” (Lindstrom 2008, p. 207).

Firms engage in horizontal mergers and acquisitions (M&A) to enhance financial performance through the realization of synergies—cost savings or revenue enhancement. The most fundamental theory that underlies the rationale behind M&A transactions is the resource complementarity theory. Firms engaged in M&A expect to add complementary resources to their existing asset base and thereby achieving synergy in various operation aspects of the business which would result in better firm performance in the post-merger years. Firm performance is a multidimensional construct and marketing performance, which is one of the dimensions, has received scant research attention in the M&A literature. This study sought to address this gap by investigating post-merger marketing efficiency using data envelopment analysis (DEA) on a sample of horizontal M&As among US commercial banks.

The present study examines whether market orientation moderates the effect of brand orientation on brand performance. As these two orientations are argued to build on differing and even conflicting logics, the question of how they work together for the benefit of the firm is highly relevant. That is, market orientation emphasizes the importance of identifying and satisfying customer needs to the fullest (Narver and Slater 1990), whereas brand orientation highlights that the satisfaction of customer needs should only be pursued when no harm to the brand is done (Urde 1999). Importantly, we follow Sørensen (2009), who notes that the different components of market orientation may not be equally relevant for different firms and that researchers should therefore consider decomposing the market orientation concept into its components. To this end, we draw on the model by Narver and Slater (1990) and focus on the three key components of market orientation, namely customer orientation, competitor orientation, and interfunctional coordination. We hypothesize that (H₁) the effect of brand orientation on brand performance is greater at low levels of customer orientation than at high levels of customer orientation; (H₂) the effect of brand orientation on brand performance does not differ between firms at low levels of competitor orientation and at high levels of competitor orientation; (H₃) the effect of brand orientation on brand performance is greater at high levels of interfunctional coordination than at low levels of interfunctional coordination.

Over the past decade, the importance of strategic flexibility has received a great amount of research attention. However, the current conceptualizations and measurements of strategic flexibility are at odds with different scholarly interest. This study therefore synthesizes extant knowledge on the subject and provides a basis for future research by classifying strategic flexibility into two dimensions, market-focused and technology-focused strategic flexibility, depicting a conceptual framework that contains determinants and consequences of the two types of strategic flexibility and developing research propositions. More specifically, this conceptual framework suggests that organizational culture (i.e., proactive and responsive market orientation), organizational structures (i.e., formalization and centralization), and organizational coordination (interfunctional coordination and alliance coordination) play important roles in cultivating market-focused and technology-focused strategic flexibility of a firm. In addition, the research propositions also demonstrate the respective impacts of market-focused and technology-focused strategic flexibility on product innovation outcomes (i.e., product meaningfulness and product newness) and financial performance. Importantly, this study further proposes that market-focused and technology-focused strategic flexibilities have opposite impacts on product meaningfulness. Implications of this study are discussed.

Fear appeals are often engaged in prosocial change marketing campaigns with the belief that these messages will raise severity and susceptibility beliefs among consumers. With effective advertising messages, persuasion models from the marketing literature suggest that if consumers believe the advertising claims, have positive attitudes toward the advertisements, that will produce both information seeking and medical care seeking behaviors. However, perceptions of the source or sponsor of the advertisement may influence consumers’ attitudes and therefore intentions along the way. This study seeks to examine the role of fear versus scare appeals and perceived social responsibility of the sponsor in social marketing campaign messages to motivate consumers to seek further information and medical care; in this study specifically for Type II diabetes.

The importance of utilizing active learning methods to enhance students’ skill sets is reflected in AACSB International’s Standard 13 (2013). The increased emphasis on active learning approaches has led to many fruitful efforts by marketing educators to develop methods that utilize such enhanced learning approaches (e.g., Camarero et al. 2009; Elam and Spotts 2004; Hart and Mrad 2013; Razzouk et al. 2003). While these and other approaches are critical in the development of active learning techniques for marketing education the need to assess various factors that may impact the effectiveness of various active learning techniques and contexts remains.

The difficulty of multiple-choice questions is one of their fundamental properties and that property serves many purposes. With this, the questions in published multiple-choice question banks accompanying textbooks are often classified into levels of difficulty. In light of the many purposes difficulty level may serve, the accuracy of those published classifications is important. Measuring that accuracy is the function of a recently created system of analyses, the Taxonomy Index (TaxI) Program (Dickinson 2013). It has been suggested (Bacon 2013), though, that rank correlation may perform this same function better than TaxI, better to the point of discounting the latter altogether. The present research demonstrates the invalidity of rank correlation for this application, the validity of TaxI for this application, and the numerous beneficial features of the TaxI Program not available with rank correlation (e.g., Spearman’s rho, Kendall’s tau_b).

Multiple-choice questions comprise, well, multiple choices. Those choices usually include the correct answer option plus several incorrect answer options, i.e., distractors (or foils or misleads). Distractors play an essential role in the effectiveness of multiple-choice questions. The present research investigates how the inability of some distractors to attract responses affects the capacity of the question to discriminate between better and poorer students, i.e., item discrimination, a fundamental purpose of multiple-choice questions. Dickinson (2013) has shown that for samples of multiple-choice questions from several question banks, high percentages of distractors in this way are not effective. Across five question banks accompanying introductory consumer behavior and retailing textbooks, the percent of sample questions having at least one distractor attracting no responses ranged from 53.53 to 70.89 %. The percent of questions with at least one distractor attracting 10 % or less of total responses ranged from 97.02 to 99.16 %.

Marketing scholars acknowledge the digital age’s unique capacity for empowering consumers (Day 2011; Labrecque et al. 2013; Ramani and Kumar 2008). Digital self-tracking (DST) opportunities such as mobile phone fitness apps are among these empowering technologies, enabling consumers to track and control everything from daily activity and health to productivity and financial records. Surprisingly, DST has not attracted much scholarly attention, despite its everyday significance. The present study provides an empirical examination of consumer empowerment in the context of running apps. Theoretically, this context contributes to the exploration of digital empowerment in relation to consumers’ self-tracking behaviors. Findings demonstrate that this form of consumer empowerment is associated with increased behavioral intentions toward engaging in running with cognitive evaluations mediating this relationship. Discussed are the theoretical consequences, practical implications, and the potential for future research.

Overweight and obesity rates are increasing all over the world (USDA 2010) and almost three million people die each year due to its consequences (WHO 2012). In the USA, for instance, where inexpensive, high-calorie food is ubiquitous (Young and Nestle 2002) about 154 million people aged over 20 are overweight or obese, leading to estimated direct and indirect costs of $254 billion (Mozaffarian et al. 2013). It is widely accepted that something must be done to change this reality and persuade people to switch to a healthier lifestyle (Wansink 2010).

For centuries, humans have been engaging their senses when assessing their surroundings. As consumers, haptic feel, visual cues, audio tunes, and other sensory aspects affect our perceptions and attitudes toward brands and purchasing behaviors. The sensory marketing literature argues that touch is the most influential sense of all sensory cues. However, scant research in the sensory marketing literature addresses haptic cues and how these cues affect brand attributes, such as brand personality. Therefore, this conceptual paper proposes a model of haptic cues and brand personality that identifies which haptic cue associates most with a brand personality dimension. In addition, need-for-touch is suggested as a moderator between the aforementioned relationships. While we cannot always touch products or may not have a high need for touch, determining which haptic cue relates most with a certain brand personality dimension provide much contribution to the sensory marketing and branding literature in determining sensory signatures for brands.

The Indian luxury market is projected to grow by 25 % yearly from 2013 until 2015 (ASSOCHAM 2013) but it is a market that is proving elusive for foreign brands to understand. Building on previous research, the current study investigates the role of country of origin (COO) on the luxury purchase behavior of Indian consumers.

Parental investment in education is a common phenomenon in many countries, but in South Korea this investment could be considered exceptional. Researchers have described Koreans’ enthusiasm for education as education fever, or “the national obsession with the attainment of education” (Seth 2002, p. 9). In Korea, household expenditures on education occur primarily for private education services, marketed by private companies rather than public/private preschools, which include a variety of educational programs, such as English, art, and sports academies, as well as reading, math, and writing tutoring (Korea National Statistics Office 2012). Today about 50 % of children in Korea under the age of six participate in one or more private education program and 49 % of Korean preschool parents said that they have faced financial burdens to support such participation (Shin 2014).

The study examined the moderating role of consumer and product involvements on product evaluation in a cross-cultural context. A 2 (product involvement: low vs. high) × 2 (time pressure, low vs. high) × 2 (self-construal: independent, interdependent) between-subjects design was used to test the hypotheses. One hundred and ninety-eight subjects participated the study. Results supported a significant interaction effect between self-construal and product involvements. When product involvement levels change from low to high, the increased level of elaboration magnifies the cultural impact on interdependent, but no such effect was observed among independents.

Immigration and ethnic diversification have been a defining characteristic of many Western, industrialized countries since the second half of the twentieth century. Immigrants often struggle between maintaining their original identity and commitment to their new nation-state (Verkuyten and Yildiz 2007). Identification conflicts at the individual level are often translated into consumers’ positive or negative sentiments, which emerge in their consumption behavior (Klein et al. 1998; LeClerc and Schmitt 1994; Sharma et al. 1995). Recently, the concept of consumer disidentification (CDI) has been introduced and validated (Josiassen 2011). CDI stems from national disidentification and entails consumers’ active rejection of and distancing from the perceived typical domestic consumer and is argued to have a significant impact on consumers’ buying decisions (Josiassen 2011).

Advertisements commonly employ visual imagery to not only demonstrate the functional aspects of a product, but also to emphasize its visually pleasing aspects such as style, look, and appeal. For instance, Apple’s recent launch, iWatch, was seen advertised at an angle such that it cast a shadow on the white space around it. Consistent with Apple’s design-centric branding strategy, its adverts portray the brand as visually esthetic. It is interesting to note that while some brands use the product’s shadow as a part of the visual imagery, others do not. Research under visual imagery in advertising has explored changes in product evaluations, attitudes, affect, emotional appeal, purchase intentions, and information processing (Rossiter and Percy 1980; Janiszewski 1990; Levy and Perachhio 1992). Surprisingly, however, the downstream effects of a product’s shadow when present in a brand-oriented ad frame have yet to be explored. This research attempts to systematically test the effects of the presence or absence of a product’s shadow on its brand evaluations. In doing so, it employs experimental design to test the impact of product’s shadow on the consumer perceived brand image.

Though much of the marketing literature has focused upon brand names and the importance of preventing genericization, this perception not only fails to take into account the value created by brand genericization, but also specifically to address the value created by the phenomenon known as “brand-as-verb.” This phenomenon offers not only insight into customer co-creation, but the fundamental premises of Service Dominant Logic, namely the concept that the category of products traditionally labeled, “goods,” subsumes into that of services (Vargo and Lusch 2004).

While there is a significant amount of research investigating the impact of firm’s unethical behaviors on consumers’ attitudes, limited amount examines the effect of brand age, which is a potential powerful contributor to consumers’ brand evaluations, on consumers’ attitudes to firm’s unethical behaviors. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the effect of brand age on consumers’ perceptions of the brand (e.g., brand personality) and its impact on consumers’ attitudes toward firm’s unethical behaviors.

As anyone who has experienced it can surely attest, love is an extremely complex emotional state. Traditionally reserved for those closest to us—family, friends, significant others, or pets—recent years have witnessed the incorporation of love into the marketing discipline’s attempts to understand consumers’ experiences of brands. Empirically, brand love has been associated with important outcomes such as word-of-mouth behavior, brand loyalty, increased willingness to pay, and even forgiveness of brand failures (Batra, Ahuvia, and Bagozzi 2012). In contrast to the research that established these relationships, this manuscript seeks to address a fundamental issue related to brand love: how it should be measured.

With the existence of the Internet, manufacturers of goods and services can bypass channel intermediaries and sell directly to the final consumer. Since the mid-1990s, the Web has continued to play a greater role in channel management strategy. The purpose of this longitudinal study is to document usage of websites in terms of channel member support and vertical competition over time. We examined the websites of 251 Fortune 500 companies that produce goods and services in business-to-consumer industries. Data was collected in 1996, 2000, and 2004. The results of the study show good industries lagged behind service industries in initiating disintermediation. Overtime, however, disintermediation was equally prevalent in both industry segments. In terms of channel member support, both in initiating and overtime, firms using their websites to refer and/or connect end users to intermediaries for product purchase were equally prevalent for both industries. Finally, during the 1996 to 2000 period, the number of firms engaged in disintermediation grew faster than the number of firms providing channel member support.

Relationship Quality has emerged as an important lens in which to investigate the value of B2B relationships. It has recently been highlighted that while the relationship marketing paradigm has become a mainstay of marketing practice and research, its application in the emerging web services industry has been minimal despite its potential. The operationalization of this higher-order construct shows conflicting consensus on which dimensions make up RQ. The directional link between RQ and other relationship concepts such as loyalty is also unclear and under-researched. This paper theoretically and empirically examines the role of RQ as a determinant of loyalty in an online B2B context. Using a data set from the web services industry, an understudied industry in its own right, the analysis, using structural equation modelling, shows support for service quality and power as additional RQ components. The findings suggest that different aspects of RQ namely, trust, commitment, satisfaction, and power show significant links to differing aspects of loyalty. Trust and satisfaction impact advocacy (attitudinal loyalty) whereas commitment and power show a significant impact on willingness to pay more for web solution services (behavioral loyalty). Facets of these relationships are explored and managerial implications are highlighted.

Hedonic products have been found to be advantageous for firms over utilitarian products. However, some research conducted on this topic uses two products from two completely different categories (inter-product category research) rather than two products from the same category but different in terms of hedonic and utilitarian benefits (intra-product category research). This practice, unfortunately, poses three issues for hedonic consumption research: spurious relationships, limited types of products researched, and confusing implications for marketing practitioners. The present chapter examines these three issues in detail and underscores the dynamic nature of hedonic/utilitarian dimensions of any product category, which implies the advantages of intra-product category research over the pervasive inter-product category research. This chapter will also discuss four important strategies for firms to create competitive advantage through hedonic/utilitarian benefits.

Bundling is defined as products or services sold together with two or more items at an equivalent or a lower price (Guiltinan 1987). Bagchi and Davis (2012) have demonstrated that the presentation order (price first or quantity first) affects consumer perceptions of a multi-item package. In addition, they proposed that unit price calculation difficulty moderates the relationship between presentation order and consumer perceptions. This study offers an extension of these findings by considering presentation timing (sequentially or simultaneously) along with presentation order. Scarce that few studies in extant literature have considered both presentation order and presentation timing together. In this research, we hypothesized that consumers would evaluate a bundled offer higher if the offer was simultaneously presented with price information first and quantity information second. This is because simultaneous price/quantity presentation order is more consistent with promotions which consumers typically encounter in daily life. In addition, simultaneous presentation does not require memorization of the offer, leading consumers to reduce their mental effort. As such, we anticipate that consumers will evaluate these offers more favorably. A 2 (presentation order: price first or quantity first) × 2 (presentation timing: sequentially or simultaneously) factorial between subjects design was conducted using MTurk to gather data. Results showed that in scenarios with simultaneous presentation of offer information, consumers considered products with price information presented first as higher quality than those with quantity information presented first. This study demonstrated how presentation order and timing jointly influenced consumer value judgments of bundled offers. In future research, unit price calculation difficulty will be added to evaluate how presentation order and timing can influence consumer value judgments of the product offered. In addition, multiple offers will be provided to consumers to better understand their value judgments. Based on this investigation, meaningful suggestions can be offered to marketing managers as they consider various pricing strategies.

Customers are usually confused with the difference between promotional price-off and value-added when they face with promotions for products. The author identifies a tendency among consumers to prefer which promotion when processing promotional extends change information and product price difference. In experimental studies, the author provides evidences in support of the effect and identifies managerially useful boundary conditions for when the effect is likely to manifest. Three studies reveal that customers prefer price-off for hedonic product (vs. Utilitarian product) and value-added for Utilitarian product (vs. Hedonic product) (H1, 2). Consumption guilty is used to explain these conditions (H3). Further, higher price and hedonic product, they tend to prefer higher price-off (H4). In utilitarian, on the other hand, customers tend to prefer higher value-added and lower price (H5). According to this state, I can find that the product preference is affected by promotions and price difference and the extent of promotional price discount and value-added is also changed on price in product type. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and managerial implications of the findings.

This research examines the movement of cell phones from not being perceived as necessities to being perceived as such by consumers over time. Thus far, research has greatly disregarded this movement and focused on classificatory explorations. The predominant focus in marketing research has been on the necessity–luxury and needs–wants dichotomies. We build on social constructionist literature (e.g., Firat 1988) to augment our understanding of consumer necessities and the process of becoming such concurring that necessities are not given by nature but are rather socially influenced. A qualitative approach is employed aiming to obtain a rich account of the movement towards becoming necessities. In particular, discourses in advertisements of the Rolling Stone magazine and consumer narratives are analyzed.

The current reality for many large, public higher education institutions is that mega-sections of traditional lecture classes are needed to balance increasingly-shrinking educational budgets. Furthermore, while “A” students are highly motived to learn and enter the classroom prepared to succeed, other students may feel overwhelmed or lost in a large class. As a teacher of large (200+), Introduction to Marketing classes, I have incorporated in-class experiential learning techniques to engage and excite students. Students’ responses to the in-class experiential learning activities were so positive, that I adapted a similar interactive teaching style to build a professional selling curriculum within our marketing department. Engaging students through in-class experiential learning has resulted in positive student feedback, an increase in student enrollment and ultimate success in job placement for students.

In keeping with the spirit of the above quote, my teaching philosophy centers on student engagement, experiential learning, and interactive methodologies as means to facilitate overall learning. I also blend theory with practice, along with incorporating the latest cutting-edge research findings. These broad teaching philosophies have shaped my approach in the courses that I have taught so far (Sensory Marketing, Brand Management, Basic Marketing, Marketing Research, Marketing Management, Global Marketing, and Digital Marketing, among others).

The contemporary landscape of the Ghanaian business environment is very different from the landscape of over 20 years ago; therefore, determining how firms pursue positioning strategies in Ghana is an important research task yet to be explored. In addition, the relative congruence among intended, conveyed, and perceived brand positioning has received meager attention in international marketing and business literature. Relying on the concepts of positioning and congruence, the purpose of this study is (1) to examine positioning strategies of indigenous and foreign retailers in Ghana, an emerging sub-Saharan African country, and (2) to explore whether there is evidence of fit among managerial decisions, actual firm practices, and target audience perceptions of positioning strategies.

Research on consumer-brand interactions is often dedicated to the scrutiny of how consumers relate to their brands and other users within the context of tangible product (goods) brand usage, e.g., in subcultures of consumption (Schouten and McAlexander 1995), consumer tribes (Cova and Cova 2002), brand communities (Muñiz and O’Guinn 2001; Schau et al. 2009), and online communities (Kozinets 2010), inter alia. The tendency to focus on goods may be due to the capacity of such tangible products to embody and convey meanings more effectively than intangible, service brands. However even in this latter case, studies on consumer collectives appear to assume that intra-group brand interactions are voluntary, thereby neglecting the analysis of “forced” bonds. Investigating the less conventional but increasingly popular label “brand Africa,” this chapter looks at how members of online African diaspora communities relate to the “brand” and make sense of other members’ emotions and perceptions. Based on the conceptualization of brands as socially constructed phenomena, a netnographic, inductive theory development approach is adopted in this chapter.

The literature on the informal economy remains rich in social sciences. At the same time, the informal economy and its related topics have not been thoroughly investigated in marketing. This chapter lays the foundation for a multidisciplinary review that aims at multifaceted discourses and analysis. Future research in marketing can benefit by looking at the informal economy and its multidisciplinary studies that add value in research and practice. The informal economy can be defined as those unreported and hidden activities that take place outside the legal domains and standard practices and may encompass shadow economy, underground economy, parallel economy, illicit trade, black market, unregulated entrepreneurial activities, etc. The informal economy takes different forms and shapes in the world economy and impacts international markets and consumption.

To identify or not to identify! This study addresses this issue as it relates to service firms, one’s profession and workgroup from the perspective of immigrant workers in the USA.

The authors examine the effect of a major customer data breach at a US retail firm on the market value of other US retailers. Using the massive breach at Target Corporation in the year 2013 as their empirical context, the authors discover the existence of a strong industry-wide contagion effect; the results from an event study of 168 publicly listed US retail firms indicate that the Target breach resulted in negative abnormal returns for other US retailers. The authors also explore the role played by marketing factors in insulating some retailers from this contagion effect. They find empirical evidence that retailers where the marketing function held a high degree of influence in the top management team (TMT), those with strong marketing capabilities, and those with strong corporate social performance (CSP), experienced less negative abnormal returns surrounding the news of the Target breach. These results highlight the shielding benefit that strong marketing resources and high corporate citizenship provide to retailers in the backdrop of an industry counterpart’s customer data breach.

Promotion of healthier eating (ProHE) gradually enters the range of perceived responsibilities for retailers and suppliers (Ye et al. 2014). This logical extension of CSR follows concerns about societal impacts of obesity, and mounting criticism of marketing resources directed at unhealthy food promotion (Chandon and Wansink 2012). As consumers grow more aware of firms’ capabilities and CSR motives for caring, they form expectations for ProHE (Golab et al. 2008). Thus, food marketers have both need and competitive opportunities to be more proactive in their ProHE actions. Neglecting this emerging CSR initiative could damage consumer loyalty, corporate reputations, therefore long-term profits, while also risking further government regulation.

Outshopping, the physical movement of consumers from their local trade area to a neighboring region or oftentimes to a foreign country with the intention to shop for goods, has been well documented in literature (Herrmann and Beik 1968; Lee et al. 2009). An unprecedented access to consumer goods online has further impacted this phenomenon giving rise to International Online Outshopping (IOO), thereby enabling the virtual movement of consumers to distant global marketplaces with the click of a button. With online shopping increasing by the day among US consumers in search of better deals and products on the World Wide Web, online retailers (referred to as e-tailers from now on) in developing countries are successfully leveraging this opportunity to target these consumers effectively. The resulting IOO effect may leave domestic US retailers, both online and offline, with loss of sales from these outshoppers. Though studies addressing cross-border outshopping exist (Piron 2002), international outshopping through the Internet has been hardly examined. The purpose of this chapter is to identify and develop testable propositions of factors related to US consumers’ intention to engage in IOO at e-tailers in developing countries. This study focuses on exploring factors influencing US consumers’ IOO at developing countries’ e-tailers only, because factors pertaining to other countries’ e-tailers might be different (Lee et al. 2009).

Sociopsychological research over the past four decades provides robust evidence for the existence of a pervasive physical attractiveness stereotype, illustrated by the phrase what is beautiful is good (Dion, Bersceid, and Walster 1972). Accordingly, individuals place particular importance on their personal appearance and try to improve their self-representations (Foustanos et al. 2007). Cosmetic surgery, considered to effectively contribute to the improvement of physical attractiveness, is one of the fastest-growing medical practices in the world (Pentina et al. 2009). However, consumer research literature on this topic is extremely sparse (Slevec and Tiggemann 2010). The present research aims to address the question of what motivates individuals to pursue cosmetic procedures. Objective self-awareness (OSA) is the theoretical basis for this research, as it provides a better understanding of the reasons why people conform their beliefs and behaviors to those of the larger society.

With the growing importance of branding strategies, it is important for companies to connect more with consumers and to create emotional brand connections (Malär et al. 2011). In the past years, one strategy that companies widely used to stimulate brand connections was the symbolic and self-expressive purposes of their brands. Products present utilitarian and symbolic functions (Park et al. 1986) and consumers use and buy products to construct, confirm, and express their personal and social self-concepts (Kleine et al. 1993). Past research has demonstrated that individuals can use brands to identify with a specific reference group (Escalas and Bettman 2005), to differentiate themselves from undesired groups (Berger and Heath 2007; White and Dahl 2006) and to boost their self-esteem (Sirgy 1982).

Absinthe, a once wildly popular spirit, was banned at the turn of the twentieth century as a consequence of its purported hallucinogenic effects. Now after nearly a century-long prohibition, recent de-restrictions in Europe and the Americas have allowed the opalescent green drink, nicknamed “the Green Fairy,” to return to the marketplace. This research uses netnography and content analysis as tools to help understand the historic marketability and consumption of this product and to reveal current consumption behaviors.

Like all scientific endeavor, our quest for truth regarding The Self requires continuous successful approximations of some objective construct that is in fact the self. Many such approximations have been put forth over time, each contributing in a significant way, to our current understanding of the self. This research is one such endeavor that revisits the previous conceptions of the self (including views from behaviorism, psychoanalysis, social interaction, information processing, etc.), and tries to extract value from each in putting forth a more complete model of the self. The more complete explanation examines how the different posited sub-facets that constitute the self interact with each other, in the process of determining consumers’ behaviors, and ultimately, their value-seeking endeavors on the path to consummation.

As the business world becomes less company driven and more customer-oriented, increasing loyalty becomes a critical factor to building a successful company (Zahay et al. 2012). Such loyalty is not easy to earn, but in the increasingly socially connected world, customers who are brand advocates serve as a key marketing tool (Sen and Lerman 2007). In effect, as a free resource that consumers can avail of at any time and from multiple sources, word of mouth (WOM) not only allows customers to tell their consumption stories and share their opinions, but it also allows them to research a seemingly independent view of a business (Moore 2012). As such, research abounds on the motivations driving WOM, whether positive or negative, such as self-enhancement, anger and retaliation, altruism, brand love, and many others (De Angelis et al. 2012).

Over the last four decades, several researchers have investigated the concept of integrated marketing communication (IMC). Particularly, in the last decade, IMC as a research area has generated a lot of debate, led to intellectual discourse, and overall, contributed to the evolution of IMC. This is reflected in about 150 research articles, 400 books, three special issues by Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, and Journal of Business Research, and a journal entitled International Journal of Integrated Marketing Communications. Furthermore, several universities (e.g., Florida State University, Northwestern University, University of Denver, and West Virginia University) have instituted undergraduate and graduate IMC programs. In fact, 31 universities across the world offer IMC programs (Kerr et al. 2008). However, these developments notwithstanding, IMC remains a controversial and theoretically underdeveloped domain within the marketing literature.

Crowdfunding is a phenomenon in which entrepreneurs are able to garner financial backing for ideas from a nontraditional source. Entrepreneurs are no longer confined to seeking financing from large banks and (or) angel investors (i.e., venture capitalists). Rather, individuals with innovative ideas can now seek financial resources directly from the public through the practice of crowdfunding. Scholarly research in this emerging area has not kept pace with its growth in practice. Since crowdfunding cannot exist without the willingness of individuals to invest in projects, it is important to clearly understand the motivating factors of the investors. This research analyzes an important group of crowdfunding stakeholders—the backers or investors of the project. Understanding what motivates these individuals to support an entrepreneur is the guiding question of our research. The purpose of this chapter then is to provide insight into the phenomenon of crowdfunding by examining the factors that lead individuals to support projects developed by entrepreneurs.

The influence of producer–supplier collaboration on new product development (NPD) performance has increasingly become a popular topic in academe and practice. However, our understanding of what leads to collaboration success remains limited. While it is clear that suppliers are becoming an integral part of the design team (Enkel et al. 2009), research regarding performance benefits is fragmented (Johnsen 2009). Many studies find a positive relationship between supplier integration and performance (Lawson et al. 2009) while others show either no relationship or a negative relationship (Koufteros et al. 2005). Further, while external environmental factors may influence internal strategic decisions, it remains unclear how these antecedents influence producer–supplier relationship factors, such as trust and knowledge sharing, which subsequently influence NPD success (Bstieler 2006). A more nuanced understanding of how producer–supplier collaborations impact NPD performance is necessary.

Most agree that innovation is crucial for enhancing competitive advantage. Further, Service-Dominant Logic (SDL) literature highlights the role of service in enhancing competitive advantage through value co-creation. Finally, most agree that services for a major part of most developed economies. Taken together, the topic of service innovation is critical, especially given the increasing prominence of service in most developed economies. While a lot of work has been done in this area, the literature on service innovation is somewhat scattered. This study attempts to integrate the existing literature and proposes a conceptual strategic framework highlighting the relationships between different domains of service innovation. In doing so, we also identify the gaps in the literature and suggest possible avenues for research. The proposed framework consists of three categories of antecedents that have been examined in the literature—internal to the firm, external to the firm, and interface dimensions. In addition, researchers have examined the outcomes of service innovation—the effect of service innovation on the process or the operations of service creation, nonfinancial outcomes, and financial outcomes. A key gap in the literature is the most studies have relied on product-based innovation studies to classify service innovation. We hope that study provides an impetus for more efforts in this area.

As global consumers are more aware of the social consequences of their purchases, will consumer social responsibility become a new barrier for international marketers? To answer this question, we conduct a survey on 210 American consumers and find that consumers with high social responsibility tend to have negative attitudes towards foreign products. In addition, demographic segmentation such as gender, income, and race would strengthen such observation. Consumers’ age and education have little impact on this trend. Marketing implications and future research directions are provided.

This chapter is the incentive literature review. It focuses on analyzing extrinsic versus intrinsic incentives. Specifically, it investigates different types of extrinsic influence on intrinsic motivation. This study categorizes previous research into four areas to analyze the fundamental characteristics of monetary and non-monetary extrinsic incentives. These four areas include effort–reward relationship, social signaling effect, utility versus hedonic benefits, and post-reward effect. At the end, it brings the research question on how to increase brand–consumer relationships through social media context.

The product which is the best used to our life can be said to be the smartphone. The people always do not place the cell phone in the hand and it means that cell phone is an essential part of their life. However, is it always bad? This research suggests that smartphone gives the benefit when we go shopping. Maybe some people guess that we can get a lot of information about products and promotion, but it leads to impulsive purchase because smartphone taught us to find out which store is selling cheap products and giving attractive promotion. This chapter does not focus on the application of smartphone but on the time how long we hold a smartphone. While the human technology has developed, the size of the electronic equipment becomes smaller. Cell phone also had become smaller as well. As smartphone had been introduced, however, the size has been bigger so people cannot put it in the pocket. The implication of this research is that first, as the customers make their grip strongly, this phenomena effects on their self-control. For this reason, this behavior leads impulsive purchase to be changed. The shop managers have to make their customers feel free while they are shopping. In a certain shop, the shop assistant gives their customer a shopping back when they come into the shop. According to this research, it is foolish behavior. In this case, the stores that greet the customers should try to empty the hands of most of customers at the most. They should make the customers putting down what they are holding on their hands instead of handing a shopping basket on their hands. This will lead to greater consumption than holding stuff on hands by increasing impulsivity. This may be an opportunity for the stores to change the customers’ shopping style. People tend to grasp their fists firmly when they want to show a willingness to improve self-control. People can grasp the fist with greater force than just grasping their fist by reinforcing the grip of holding the stuff on their hands. It is a same logic as making a pregnant woman to clench her teeth by putting cloth into the mouth when she applies strain to give birth. When people always carry a cell phone on their hands, they will not consciously think about these grips. However, self-control is going to be increased naturally and impulsivity, which is one of characteristics of self-control, is going to be weakened when holding the stuff on hands routinely and habitually and grabbing the stuff firmly for an effort to not lose it.

Recently, scholars have researched source effects of ambiguous or unidentified others on product evaluations in an online environment. For example, Holzwarth et al. (2006) found that using ambiguous avatars that represented service agents on a retailer’s website led to more positive attitudes toward the product than not using an avatar. Similarly, Naylor et al. (2011) found that subjects had higher preferences for online products when the source of an online review was ambiguous compared to when a Facebook profile picture of the source was displayed. The question that motivates this study is how robust is this ambiguity effect? To answer this question, we set out to replicate a 2012 study of an article entitled “Beyond the ‘Like’ Button: The Impact of Mere Virtual Presence on Brand Evaluations and Purchase Intentions in Social Media Settings” (Naylor et al. 2012). Their findings demonstrated that the ambiguity of the age of a product’s endorsers positively impacts the liking of the product. The purpose of this manuscript is to replicate the Naylor et al. (2012) findings and extend this research by examining an additional product type (Study 1) and a different operationalization of ambiguity (Study 2). We begin with a discussion of the pertinent literature related to source credibility; then the research design, method, and results sections are presented.

In this working chapter the authors document an additional way that CSR can be used by employees to improve customer relationships. That is, employees can use CSR as an adaptive selling tool. Employees use CSR as an adaptive selling tool to the extent that CSR fits with what their understanding of the company identity is, and to the degree that customers support the CSR program.This study proposes and tests empirically a novel framework that is linked to former research through the use of two control variables already existing in the literature. Additionally and based in their findings, the authors propose an empirical model intended to predict the extent to what employees would make use of CSR as an adaptive selling tool, in order to help assessing if a specific CSR initiative is worth to be developed within a company.

The new trend in the CSR practices reflects a shift from quantity (degree) of CSR actions to quality of such efforts. Instead of maximizing the number of CSR issues addressed, firms are identifying key strategic issues that also align with their business actions. For example, Coca-Cola invests in several African and Southeast Asian countries with an intention to increase brand penetration in the region and develop future consumers of their product in these countries (Sohn 2014). Similarly, Cargill Inc., one of the world leaders in processed food market, closely works with farmers in Ghana to improve their living conditions and provide education. Ghana is a huge cocoa production base for Cargill. By investing there, Cargill protects its own supply base for future (Sohn 2014). A report by As You Sow, a nonprofit organization, stated that retailers like GAP Inc., Timberland, Nike, and Nordstrom use internal organizational strategies to streamline CSR efforts. They are increasingly adopting responsible purchasing practices and have made changes in five areas of corporate culture: designing and buying, forecasting, production management, and pricing. These efforts have resulted in improved working conditions along with cost reductions (CSR Wire 2010).

We examine the effect of the marketing function of the firm, operationalized as the existence of a marketing executive position (CMO, VP of Marketing), on financial performance (return on assets) in a large global cross-sectional time-series dataset of publicly traded companies. We draw on literature on top management team influence within the firm, and theorize that the CMO, as the consumer advocate within the firm is tasked with a myriad of functions such as advertising, new marketing staff hiring, sales forecasting, marketing research and marketing planning, advising senior managers, and coordinating and controlling marketing activities at the divisional level, all of which require cross-unit and cross-functional integration across the firm. Thus, we hypothesize that as the complexity of the environment that a firm operates in increases, so does the value-added of the chief marketers’ role.

Global integration of knowledge and innovation transfers in the internationalizing firm has inspired a growing literature in the international business literature. Several streams of studies examined interesting dimensions of this phenomenon, but extant literature is still weak in research that focuses on how knowledge sharing among the headquarters and subsidiaries of the multinational firm can boost performance. In this chapter, we present propositions for future research based on a review of the strands of literature that have addressed innovation in the multinational firm and explore how the firm can utilize innovation as a dynamic capability in driving positional advantage, and by extension improved firm performance.

In this special session we reconsider how innovation and entrepreneurship influence the (re)creation of new markets by exploring and extending a service ecosystems approach, based on service-dominant (S-D) logic (Vargo and Lusch 2004, 2008). Importantly, S-D logic has been connected with emerging entrepreneurial theories (Read et al. 2009) and aligns with a focus on the creation of opportunities under conditions of uncertainty (Alvarez and Barney 2005, 2007, 2011). In addition, a service ecosystems view points toward institutionalization (i.e., (re)formation of institutions) as an underlying process that drives innovation, or development of new technologies and markets (Vargo et al. 2014). Based on this, markets are defined as “institutionalized solutions” that emerge and evolve (and dissolve) over time and space. In this light, we integrate emerging views on markets, innovation and entrepreneurship to address the questions: (1) What are markets? (2) Where do markets come from? and (3) How do markets evolve?

Customer participation has become an important firm strategy (Bendapudi and Leone 2003; Vargo and Lusch 2004). Companies are designing their offering(s) to allow customers to participate to various degrees in the process of creating and delivering the offering(s). In this strategy, not only do providers select a level of customer co-production, but also the level of control available to customers. This study examines the effects of control types (cognitive, behavioral, and decisional) and their interaction on customers’ affective responses in service contexts with varying levels of co-production.

While to date, the phenomena of employee deviance and customer citizenship behavior have overwhelmingly been studied in an isolated and disparate fashion. This empirical effort lays the ground for exploring the impact of employees’ deviant behavior under different conditions on repurchase intention, customer citizenship behavior (CCB) towards the company, and encounter satisfaction during a specific service incident. Understanding the impact of employee deviance on customers’ experience during the service encounter remains crucial as the costs of deviant behavior to the organization primarily impair service quality and possibly discourage customers from repeat business (Harris and Ogbonna 2012). Most relevant studies mainly focus on negative aspects of employee deviance, ignoring the existence of customer-oriented deviant behaviors which can positively affect customer experience during the service specific transaction (Stock and Bednarek 2014). Despite the focus on some organizational and individual determinants of deviant employee behavior such as job control or need for social approval (Brady et al. 2012), the extant research rarely acknowledges how various types of deviant employee activity affect customer perception of the FE or the organization (Daunt and Harris 2013). Equally important, the role of employee deviance during the service encounter for customer citizenship (or dysfunctional) behavior has never been considered, despite calls to identify the organizational-based determinants of customer deviant behavior (Boo et al. 2013; Gong et al. 2013).

Airline companies join airline alliances to cope with the high level of competition in the airline industry. However, pressure within an alliance is substantial. Few previous studies have investigated alliance selection and dynamic competitive behavior. This study used competitor mapping and awareness-motivation-capability competitive dynamics to analyze airline alliances. The results revealed that alliances compete to recruit airline companies, and the power differences in the alliances are considerable; only a few of the airline companies within the alliance possess power. In addition, we interviewed two senior managers to confirm the results of the analysis. A detailed content analysis was performed to test each hypothesis.

Whereas customer readiness has been found beneficial in the provision of tech-based services, its usefulness has not been thoroughly evaluated in the provision of non-tech-based services. Customer readiness seems to impact on customer participation in service delivery, and thus mediate the effects of many factors influencing such participation. This empirical chapter examines the role of customer readiness in customer participation in service delivery and its indirect effects on customer outcomes such as perceived service quality, customer satisfaction, and customer willingness to recommend. Because of its mediating role, customer readiness is also examined as the recipient of various antecedents of customer participation, such as previous experience, desire for control, need for interaction, product complexity, perceived risk, and customer organizational socialization. The results show that customer readiness has a significant impact on both customer participation and its outcomes, and that it effectively transfers the role of the four antecedents (previous experience, desire for control, perceived risk, and customer organizational socialization) to both customer participation and its outcomes.

Social media is increasingly recognized by companies as an important and efficient marketing channel to connect with consumers. Existing research on social media is focused on studying issues related to social media and branding from consumers’ side at the individual or group level including social media adoption and practice, the interactions and dynamics of brand communities, and online consumer behaviors. Furthermore, social media marketing activities are found to have strong influence on brand reputation and brand equity. Still, very little research studies the effect of different dimensions of social media marketing strategy on important customer-based brand equity (CBBE) outcomes such as brand awareness, brand judgments, brand feeling, and finally brand resonance. The questions of what level and what kind of social media marketing activities are needed to help firms build CBBE are not properly addressed. Furthermore, the differential impact of different social media activities on different components of CBBE is not clear. Yet these concerns are extremely important for any company to develop its social media marketing strategy effectively. This chapter contributes to the literature by introducing four important dimensions of social media marketing strategy: Variety, Diversity, Intensity, and Connectivity. Variety refers to how many different social media platforms and applications are being used in the brand social media marketing strategy. Diversity refers to the variety of marketing activities in which the brand utilizes social media efforts. Intensity of activities relates to how frequently the brand organizes online events and activities across the different platforms. Connectivity refers to how well those platforms are linked together and work as a whole to help brand achieve brand strategy. Our propositions suggest that while being in social media can generate brand awareness, different social media platforms establish different brand associations, creating different effects on CBBE. Particularly, blogs and microblogs are found to associate with building brand performance and brand judgment; content sharing sites can generate brand imagery and brand feeling; and social networking sites show the purpose of building brand resonance (brand relationship). Furthermore, different social media activities produce different impacts on CBBE pyramid. By providing promotion and entertainment information, companies can get their online users’ attentions. However, positive brand performance and judgment can be best generated by opening online sales and support and public relations. Finally by engaging online customers in marketing research and crowdsourcing activities, firms are able to strengthen their brand resonance with their surround communities. The successfulness of these activities is moderated by their frequency and connectivity with each other. The propositions in this chapter also convey some managerial implications. This chapter helps firms have a better and clearer view of how social media activities can be utilized effectively and efficiently. The results facilitate the uses of social media based on firms’ branding strategy because the choices of social media channels and activities are shown to help achieve particular branding objectives.

Social media was born from innovational technological changes and has now been recognized as essential communication platforms not only for different online users but also between companies and customers. More and more companies have begun to realize the influential power of social media and are now utilizing it in various fields such as customer relationship management and product innovation. However, applying social media to a real business environment still presents a challenge for most companies as it is a new communication platform without a long history. In fact, most companies appear to be just following the trend of using social media in business without understanding why their customers follow them via social media (Baird and Parasnis 2011). Moreover, detailed effects of companies’ social media marketing activities on customers have not been thoroughly explored. To our knowledge, few academic studies, mostly empirical ones, explore these issues.

This study examines how online conversations as electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) information via social media networks after business outcomes. Using data from movie industry, our goal is to show how conversation quantity and quality, defined here as volumes and valence of conversations, on social network sites affect important business outcomes such as sales. Using a dynamic simultaneous equation system, we find that social media conversations can be precursor to and an outcome of sales. Aggregate data from multiple sources show how social media variables and other key variables—volume, valence, and other information related to movies such as YouTube movie trailer views, ratings, advertising, production budget, number of screens—contribute to box office and home video sales through eWOM via social media. Findings highlight that eWOM volume correlates with box office performance and home video sales: the more positive and strong the conversation, the higher the box office and home video sales. The study extends prior research on WOM and offers insight into how film studios can strategically manage social media to enhance box office and home video sales revenue.

Collaboration with internal and external partners has been lauded as having a positive impact on the new product development (NPD) process (Atuahene-Gima 2003). However, given that incremental and radical innovations have different development trajectories (Eisenhardt and Tabrizi 1995), it is possible that the impact of integration on the NPD process differs across these two innovation types (Tatikonda and Montoya-Weiss 2001). Therefore, this study asks: How should organizations integrate internal and external NPD team members when developing radical innovations versus incremental innovations? Given that new product teams form the nucleus of an organization’s NPD efforts (Leenders et al. 2007), understanding the effects of team integration on new product processes and outcomes is crucial for new product success.

Literature on website personalization has adopted a demand-side perspective and studied either the direct effects of website personalization or the moderating effect of other demand-side variables on performance of website personalization. In so doing, the moderating effect of crucial supply-side variables, like technology choices for website personalization, has been ignored. To address the interaction between the supply-side and the demand-side, we ask the following question: What is the moderating effect of firm-level technology sourcing choices on the relation between website personalization and sales performance? We use the concepts of information efficiency and adaptability to develop our hypotheses. Using data from 500 US e-retailers, we contend that offering website personalization has a positive effect on sales, and that among firms that offer website personalization, the ones that use both internally and externally developed technology are likely to have greater sales performance than firms that use either internally or externally developed website personalization.

The Android project is one of the recent most successful open-source projects. In the Android community, the open-source firm (Google) and application developers co-create value through developing applications for the Android operating system provided by the open-source firm, and share profit from the sales of applications. Alternatively, using a closed-source strategy, a firm could keep the operating system proprietary and sell it to end users. As the first paper to apply the concept of imaginative intensity to analyze the benefits of an open-source strategy, we offer a new explanation for a firm’s selection of an open-source strategy over a closed-source strategy. We propose a model to investigate how a for-profit organization utilizes an open-source strategy, in contrast to a closed-source strategy, to enhance imaginative intensity and consequently profit. Our model suggests that an open-source strategy is more effective to manage the diminishing value of ideas than a closed-source strategy.

New product developers have increasingly utilized input from customers to co-create innovative new products. However, while much of the extant literature focuses on the positive side of customer participation on the new product development (NPD) process, significantly less work has focused on the negative side of co-creation. This study contends that a customer participation paradox exists: while customer participation in NPD may potentially help product performance, it could also lead to the development of products that are overly radical and are too difficult for potential customers to understand. To resolve this paradox, we argue that firms with higher levels of expertise will be able to rein in the negative aspects of extreme product newness to create products that will be in high demand by the marketplace. A survey of 305 firms involved in NPD activities was used to test our conceptual model. The results show that customer participation in the NPD process leads to overly new products that do not perform well on the market. Further, a multi-group analysis reveals that customer participation in NPD only has a positively influence on product performance for firms with high levels of expertise. The findings from this study demonstrate that while customer participation in NPD is beneficial for firms with high expertise, it may actually have a detrimental impact on product performance for those firms with low ACAP.

The metrics that are relevant for ranking firms by their financial performance may vary with conditions across different industries. For the pharmaceutical industry, we explore an approach that lets the Rasch model determine the performance metrics that are most important. Using an initial set of ratios spanning multiple dimensions of firm financial performance, we select the ratios that are compatible with the requirements of the Rasch model for this industry during 2002–2011. We identify the metrics, for which positive results were most difficult to achieve, and the firms that most frequently ranked among the top five performers. Our approach offers a new perspective or research method on the valuation of managers and their firms. Interestingly, our results suggest that the variables most relevant for a Rasch financial performance ranking of firms in this industry are not necessarily the variables that directly measure increases in investor wealth or returns.

Buyers tend to buy the usual things from the usual sellers. The inertia pervading consumer choices implies not only that their decisions are made the same way over and over, but also that the incoming information on products and brands is not changing in any meaningful way—e.g., not an enthusiastic recommendation or bitter complaint from someone close. This study tests the contention that the purchase of unusual products may stem from changes in the patterns of interpersonal influence that usually cocoon consumers and which, otherwise, keep them from trying new options. These patterns of interpersonal influence are called sociospheres, while the altered sociospheres possibly associated with choosing unusual products are labeled as deviant. Unusual products are products new to the consumer, either new to the world or simply different.

This paper applies deductive logic to two fundamental premises of formative measurement: that formative constructs are linear combinations of their indicators, and that they have linear effects on their outcomes. These premises lead to several important conclusions: (1) Formative constructs are determined as much by their outcomes as by their indicators; (2) formative constructs completely mediate the effects of their indicators on their outcomes; (3) using reflective indicators as outcomes in formative models does not test the formative conceptualization; (4) the formative disturbance term plays no meaningful role in estimating or interpreting formative models; (5) formative models need not account for the correlations between the outcome variables, and (6) allowing correlated measurement errors between the outcomes make formative measurement models equivalent to canonical correlation analyses such that (7) the causal influences and roles of indicators versus outcomes are ambiguous. These results logically call for changes in how researchers conceptualize, analyze, and interpret formative measurement models.

In experimental design, manipulation checks are often employed in order to test theoretical notions (Laczniak and Muehling 1993), and it is posited that manipulation checks are required, in most studies, to establish cause-and-effect relationships (Cook and Campbell 1979; Perdue and Summers 1986). Although manipulation checks are often discussed in research design literature, little to no consideration has been paid to attention checks, which are a type of manipulation check. Attention checks are often used by researchers in scale development to ensure that respondents are actively participating (i.e., paying attention) in the research at hand. For example, the question “Please select answer choice ‘Agree’” might be placed randomly in a scale to assess that survey takers are reading and paying attention to all questions. Respondents who fail the checks are usually discarded from the final analysis. It stands to reason that attention checks are successful at discarding “bad data,” as researchers should want to exclude those respondents who are not attentively participating in the survey they are completing. However, no current research has assessed whether these attention checks are successfully “weeding out” bad data. Further, if it is only that the attention check confused the respondent causing them to fail, it is possible that the rest of the data is still useful in the researcher’s analysis.

Compared to the rapid growth of the online auction market, the network exchange market starts relatively slowly. Driven by environmental protection and energy saving, commodity exchange behavior has become part of real life and even a new way of the social marketing or the green marketing. In past studies, Blau (1964) thought the social exchange theory focused on intrinsic rewards. Meanwhile, in the social exchange theory, the interactions of intangible social costs and benefits are also investigated. However, even though the network exchange platform has developed rapidly in the recent years, there are few literatures related to barter as well as the reasons why exchange behavior happens or the mentality of exchange behavior. But in fact, exchange behavior of barterers happens from a series of complex external and psychological factors which mutually influence. If it fails to understand the considerations and decision-making process of consumers in the process of exchange behavior, it will not be able to promote exchange behavior and effectively provide consumers valuable commodity disposal activities in the face of global resource constraints and poor world economy.

Opportunities exist for marketers and other business researchers to connect one-on-one with consumers using avatar interviewers that may facilitate disclosure of sensitive and personal information, without the costs of personal interviewers. This research reports findings from an exploratory study designed to reveal factors that facilitate greater levels of self-disclosure for sensitive interview topics for human versus avatar interviewers. Results reveal conditions in which computer-generated avatars can increase self-disclosure for sensitive topics in personal interview situations as an alternative to costly data collection conducted by human interviewers.

Social media has integrated into the everyday lives of individuals and has transformed the communication process for both individuals and businesses alike. With nearly three-fourth of all online adults having a social media account (Pew Research 2013), this has not only impacted the way in which consumers communicate with each other, but consumers have gravitated to communicating and complaining with service providers through social media (Xia 2013; Pinto and Mansfield 2011). The pervasiveness of social media and its importance as a channel of communication is something that marketers have become aware of, as the majority of firms now have some form of social media presence (Obal et al. 2011). In fact, 92 % of marketers indicate that social media is important for their business; however, 89 % of those are unsure of the most effective social tactics to engage their audience on social media (Stelzner 2014).

This chapter investigates the effect of objective and subjective knowledge on exploratory acquisition in consumers’ purchase of wine. The main research questions investigated are whether there is a link between a consumer’s objective knowledge of wine (what they really know) is linked to their subjective knowledge (what they think they know), and whether these impact on the extent to which the consumer engages in exploratory purchasing behavior (tries new brands, tries different wines, etc). The literature for the three constructs is reviewed, and hypotheses are developed. The study then investigated these questions among an online sample of consumers in the USA. Data is analyzed, results are provided, and the implications for management are discussed. Limitations are also noted and directions for future research are indicated.

Sport sponsorship is supposed to be one of the most effective means in the marketing communication mix. In particular, sponsoring worldwide events such as the Olympic Games or the FIFA World Cup is of great interest for major brands such as Coca Cola in order to improve their global brand performance (e.g., brand equity). Although vast research has been done to explore the various facets of sponsoring success, literature lacks two important aspects: First, most research relies on explicit indicators (mostly verbal) to measure sponsoring effectiveness, denying the fact that most experiences occur unconsciously and cannot be expressed verbally by participants of an event. Second, the vast majority of studies do not take into account how visible the brand of a sponsor is at the sport event itself—the FIFA World Cup, e.g., prominently presents all major sponsors during each soccer game, whereas the Olympic Games do not allow any sponsor mentioning during all of the Olympic contests. Therefore, the goal of this chapter was to examine the explicit and implicit effect of a visible versus a non-visible sport sponsorship before and after two major sport events. Moreover, Coca Cola was chosen as one of the most active brands sponsoring major sport events such as FIFA World Cup or Olympic Games. In detail, two studies were run in order to test the effectiveness of the respective sponsorship activities on brand-related motivation. Our results suggest that a visible sport sponsorship of Coca Cola during a sport event has much greater influence on explicit and implicit brand-related motivation associations toward Coca Cola compared to non-visible sport sponsorship. In addition, the results show that it is of great importance to measure sponsoring success on both an implicit and explicit level in order to identify all relevant association facets in their full complexity.

We examine how queuing pattern, in terms of how children line up at school cafeterias, influences their eating behavior. To elaborate, we compare single-line queuing, in which students stand in one central line and the student at the head of the line is sent to the first available cashier, with multi-line queuing, where a separate queue is formed in front of each cashier; we investigate how these two types of queuing influence students’ healthful food choices.A critical difference between multi-line and single-line queuing is that in the former case, individuals spend a higher amount of time near the sales counter and hence have greater amount of time to go through the items and reflect on their choices than in the latter case, where they are close to the sales counter practically only right at the time of their purchase.We tested our hypotheses with the help of a field study at a high school cafeteria in one of the largest school districts in the USA. The study was carried out in collaboration with the school district administration. Over 1000 students are served daily at this school cafeteria. We analyzed data across two different months, with two different queuing patterns in place. That is, in one random month, there were multi-line queues, while in another random month, there were single-line queues, whereby all the students lined up in one central area and then they were sent to different sales counter based on availability.The results of the field experiment in the school cafeteria show that multi-line queues facilitate a greater degree of healthful choices than single-line queues. We theorize that this effect is driven by lower time pressure and a greater degree of systematic processing with multi-line queues.In terms of implications, while prior studies have examined a host of different factors influencing choices between healthy and unhealthy options, the present research is the first one to examine the effects of queuing behavior in a cafeteria context.The findings suggest that utilizing multi-line queues might be one way to influence choices towards more healthful options.

As many firms adopt chain operations, it is worth investigating whether the operations are efficient enough to support the firm’s growth and if opening new retail outlets actually provides economies of scale. This study examines the effect of increasing the number of stores on retailers’ operational efficiency and tests the effect empirically. The number of stores is considered an important indicator affecting retail efficiency. However, previous studies have returned conflicting results and arguments about the impact of the number of stores on efficiency. A log-linear regression analysis reveals that while retailers gain advantages in terms of reduced purchasing costs, they increase the costs for store operations. This paper aims to contribute to the field by clarifying the impact of retailers’ growth on operational efficiency based on empirical research.

As cross-channel and omni-channel strategies become prevalent among retailing practitioners, existing research calls for further investigation about important issues in relation to the implementation of cross- and omni-channel strategies (Brynjolfsson et al. 2013; Gallino and Moreno 2013; Lewis et al. 2013; Strang 2013). There is a need for explaining how to go omni-channel and for exploring the ways to address challenges faced when implementing an omni-channel strategy (Brynjolfsson et al. 2013). This chapter proposes to address this call by investigating an in-depth single case study of an eyewear retailer Direct Optic. By observing the orchestration of the convergence of bricks and clicks in an omni-channel perspective, this chapter answers the following research questions: (RQ1) What is the process of moving towards an omni-channel strategy? (RQ2) What are the challenges faced in this process? This research provides one of the first in-depth case studies on how a multi-channel retailer moves towards an omni-channel strategy. This research contributes in clarifying the differences between multi-channel, cross-channel, and omni-channel strategies. We also underline that moving from a multi- to an omni-channel strategy first involves organizational changes, then followed by operational evolutions. Omni-channel strategies can be considered as the optimum situation of the cross-omni-channel continuum, meaning that all the identified challenges have been overcome when reaching the extreme end of the continuum.

The adoption of branded store-within-stores by retailers is an innovative approach aimed at improving customer engagement, retail store design and layout, and ultimately, value creation for both customers and retailers (Jerath and Zhang 2010; Sorescu et al. 2011). In a typical branded store-within-store format, specific brands enter a rental or profit sharing agreement with a retailer to have a standalone existence within a retail store’s layout with the brand’s vendor partly or wholly managing activities such as pricing, merchandising, staffing, and stocking in an autonomous manner (Jerath and Zhang 2010). Although there are different manifestations of the store-within-store format, the focus of this study is on formats where third-party owned product or retailer brands are presented in an independent arrangement within a retail store. The Sephora store inside JCPenney, Armani, and Gucci stores inside Neiman Marcus, the DKNY store inside Bloomingdale’s, the North Face store inside Sports Authority, and the Samsung store inside Best Buy are examples of this phenomenon.

This paper investigates how consumers regulate their post-consumption guilt and their rumination through positive reinterpretation. Two studies show that guilt and rumination lead people to engage in positive reinterpretation. They also show that guilt and rumination interact such that high guilt leads to high positive reinterpretation whatever the rumination level, while low guilt feelings lead to high positive reinterpretation only when rumination is high. Also, results from study 2 reveal a mediating effect of positive reinterpretation on the guilt-satisfaction relationship. Further, regulatory focus is shown to moderate the effect of positive reinterpretation on satisfaction, with promotion-focused consumers exhibiting more satisfaction than prevention-focused consumers when positive reinterpretation is low.

Research suggests that the cultivation of and engagement with brand communities may generate positive outcomes for firms; therefore, the understanding of consumers’ membership and behaviors in brand communities represents an important area of inquiry for marketing researchers (e.g., Gruner et al. 2014). This study examines communities constructed around massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs). In MMORPGs, players access an online game environment, interact with other players in real time, and achieve the game’s objectives in a symbiotic manner. Online player communities formed around each MMORPG facilitate player interaction and socialization and, hence, closely resemble brand communities.

Brand extensions serve as an important marketing strategy for many new product introductions. Given that new products are prone to failure, the use of an established brand can help facilitate acceptance of the new product by reducing consumers’ perceived risk, enhancing efficiencies associated with distribution and promotional activities, and reduced overall costs associated with launching a new brand. Prior research on brand extensions has clearly demonstrated that the fit between a parent brand and its extension is an important driver of the extension’s success. Apart from the level of the fit, research has also found other drivers of brand extension success, like extensions’ marketing support and retailers’ acceptance. In addition consumers’ perceptions of parent brands’ characteristics like parent brand conviction or the perceived quality of the parent brand are identified as brand extension success drivers.

Meaning is all around us each and every day, yet the intricacies that determine these meanings for individuals are dependent upon many external components. Meanings are not only a part of the activities in which we participate and the products and services that we purchase, but may be contained in the objects and services around us that we do not purchase, or in activities in which we do not participate.

Consumer engagement has received a lot of attention as an innovative strategic approach to managing consumer–brand relationships (Brodie et al. 2011; Hollebeek 2011; Kumar et al. 2010; Mangold and Faulds 2009; Van Doorn et al. 2010). The beneficial effects of an engaged consumer base are believed to be numerous and include enhancement of viral marketing activities (Harvey et al. 2011), increased brand support through product recommendations (Brodie et al. 2013), greater brand exposure in consumers’ social networks, and finally potential prospect acquisitions (Kumar et al. 2010). Despite the established relevance of consumer engagement particularly in brand-supporting behavior, extant literature mainly addresses the conceptualization of consumer engagement (Brodie et al. 2011; Hollebeek and Chen 2014; Van Doorn et al. 2010; Kumar et al. 2010), investigating the consequences of engagement (Bowden 2009; Chan and Li 2010; Gruen et al. 2006; Gummerus et al. 2010; Hollebeek 2011). What remains under-researched however are the driving forces of consumer engagement, surging the necessity to work in this direction (Bolton 2011; Verhoef et al. 2010). This research comes to address this gap by developing a conceptual framework that includes various content characteristics and empirically testing it using four brands that have a social media presence.

To say social media is popular amongst online users vastly understates the sheer volume of social media activity that takes place on a daily basis. For instance, the users of Facebook, the largest social media site in terms of size and activity, generate more than 2.5 billion items of new content per day, including over 250 million photos, and 10 billion instant messages sent between users (Facebook 2013). On the surface, Facebook users also appear to be highly engaged with the platform. According to Ajmera (2013), 26 % of Facebook’s 1.36 billion users check their account more than five times a day. While Facebook remains the most popular site across nearly all demographics, Twitter (285 million) and Instagram (150 million) are the second and third largest social networking sites, respectively (Pew Research 2013). However, despite their smaller size, Twitter and Instagram have recently overtaken Facebook in purchase decision influence for the teen and young adult demographic (Pipar, Jaffary, and Company 2013). In fact, Instagram, the smallest of the three major social media sites in terms of size, was the most influential.

The rise of social media has been heralded as the greatest paradigm shift for business and marketing since the industrial revolution (Qualman 2014). Over 97 % of businesses are using social media as a marketing tool and 84 % have plans to increase their use of popular social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in the next year (Steltzner 2014). As a result, marketing communications are beginning to evolve from mass-media “sermons” where companies do all the talking to direct, two-way conversations with niche consumer audiences in social media outlets (Gillin 2009). Ninety-two percent of marketers say that social media is important to their business and they cite increased exposure for the business, increased traffic, development of loyal customers, the ability to gather market intelligence, and improved sales as some of the chief benefits of social media marketing for the organization (Stelzner 2014). However, the number one fear of marketers is that consumers will be negative on social media sites dedicated to the organization (Gillin 2009). This research explores consumer complaint behavior on social media outlets for an organization.

There is a growing trend for organizations to participate in business-to-business relationships, such as inter-organizational networks, as a strategy to spur innovation and respond to market conditions. Despite significant growth in inter-organizational arrangements, limited knowledge exists on the market and organizational characteristics associated with inter-organizational network participation, particularly for emerging networks such as those in healthcare. This paper develops a framework and propositions to better understand the influence of market and organizational characteristics on inter-organizational network participation.

Managing inter-firm relationships is important in industrial marketing for stable and timely procurement/supply, safeguarding investment, etc. In addition, there is more expectation toward business relationships. Both supplier and manufacturer companies expect to capture value from their ongoing relationships, also known as relationship values. Relationship benefits are considered a part of relationship values. This paper focuses on relationship benefits and aims to examine the enabling effect of information and communications technology (ICT) on relationship benefits and business processes, which influence business performance.

Using 122 dyadic data collected from customers and suppliers of industrial air conditioning systems, the authors examined the role of relationship quality and supplier’s competence in a business network context. The findings suggest that business network connection is an antecedent to relationship commitment and relationship outcomes (i.e., repurchase intention and value creation). The present study also indicates that sales planning competence is a mediator between relationship quality and relationship outcomes.

Nowadays, companies treat their customers differently based on their merits (i.e. rewarding desirable customers with the royal benefits while disengaging undesirable customers). The latter was the case when Sprint Nextel terminated mobile phone contracts of over 1000 customers due to excessive calls to its call centres (Mittal et al. 2008). Despite the strategic importance of customer disengagement in terms of its impact on firm’s profitability (Narayanan and Kaplan 2001), firm reputation (Alajoutsijärvi et al. 2000) and customers’ negative behaviours (Haenlein and Kaplan 2012; Mittal et al. 2008), existing empirical research is limited. Existing research tends to focus on specific types of disengagement strategies (e.g. direct and indirect firm-oriented strategies) and lacks an examination of the impact of other disengagement strategies on disengaged customers’ perceived justice and negative behavioural responses. More specifically, empirical examinations of consumers’ perceived fairness of service termination have been very limited (Mayser and von Wangenheim 2013) and only examined among other existing and prospective customers (Haenlein and Kaplan 2010). Therefore, this study examines the effects of two direct disengagement strategies (e.g., fait accompli—a firm oriented strategy and state-of-the-relationship talk—a customer oriented strategy) on customers’ perceived justice and in turn their negative behaviours. More importantly, the study investigates the extent to which using a specific compensation type (e.g. monetary compensation, explanation, and apology) can influence customers’ perceptions of justice and in turn their intended negative behaviours. The study will also examine the moderating effect of the severity of termination strategy on effectiveness of different compensation types. Given the limited resources available to marketing managers, it is important to establish whether offering any compensation can have a positive influence on customers’ fairness perceptions. In the end, this study will improve our understanding of the disengagement process and will also help practitioners manage the termination more effectively.

An important question confronting organizational strategists is how to best organize transactions between firms. Multiple streams of literature have attempted to address the inherent governance challenges that exist when two distinct, but complementary firms choose to enter into an exchange agreement with one another. The transaction cost approach (TCA) to organization proposes that firms incur transaction costs owing to the costs of conducting exchanges in the market over the costs that would be realized by organizing the exchange within the firm (Coase 1937). According to the TCA, when the transaction costs of market governance are high, it makes more sense for firms to vertically integrate rather than engage in exchanges with another firm. In response to the TCA, relational exchange theory posits that market exchanges can be governed by the cultivation and strengthening of relationships between two exchange partners (Palmatier 2006, 2008). That is, the relational perspective suggests that many of the costs identified under the TCA can be reduced or eliminated in the presence of strong relationships to govern the transaction between parties in a market exchange. The introduction of relational governance mechanisms to an exchange featuring specific assets should serve to quell the threat of opportunism while at the same time enhancing the commitment of both parties.

The value of a brand is inextricably linked to consumers’ values, attitudes, and lifestyles, underscoring the complexity of developing global brand identity and equity. While technology-enabled globalization has produced synergies in the marketing and logistics of branded goods, it has also challenged brand managers to accommodate the heterogeneity within and across markets and cultures. Market entry and expansion in emerging markets are particularly timely as the demand for branded products increases in two of the largest emerging consumer markets, China and India (Wilson and Purushotaman 2003). While developed economies such as the USA and Canada have experienced sluggish population growth and competitive retail density consistent with economies in a maturation stage, big emerging markets such as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) market offer opportunities for garnering increased market share (Berner et al. 2001). Understanding subtle nuances and differences in new markets has become a resource advantage for multinational consumer goods marketers (Golub and Hopkins 2003).

Sport consumption creates a vast array of personal connections which are often expressed as, for example, values, attitudes, and behaviors (Meir 2000; Westerbeek and Smith 2003). Attempting to understand the behaviors of sport consumers has been the subject of an extensive research stream for many decades (Stewart et al. 2003) yet only recently has a more holistic approach been taken to model spectator sport consumption (Trail and James 2011). Missing in the literature is research pertaining to how one’s perspective, developed through participation and as a fan consuming the same sport, of contemporary sport related issues and how those issues are addressed may impact consumption behavior. The purpose of this paper is to utilize the method of Subjective Personal Introspection because of the privileged access this method provides to the author’s American football consumption experience as a participant and fan of the sport. The resulting existential-phenomenology (Thompson et al. 1989) based impressionistic interpretation of the researcher’s private experiences is intended to lead to an enhanced view of the consumption experience.

This article investigates how participation in fantasy leagues has changed fan consumption habits towards actual sports franchises and leagues. Various fantasy sport leagues (FSL) have become popular in today’s sports markets. According to the Fantasy Sport Trade Association (FTSA) the number of players has grown from 500,000 in 1988 to 41.5 million in 2014 in the USA and Canada. Out of those male represent 80 %, and 78 % have at least a college degree or more. Football is the favorite sport played (69.4 %). This shift is recognized in popular culture as the FX channel airs a sit-com titled “The League” where characters’ lives revolve around a fantasy football league that illustrates the popularity of FSL. The popularity of FSL arguably effects the lifestyle and sport consumption of many people in today’s world. Howard (2009) argues that the growing interest in FSL may diminish sponsorship opportunities because of the lack of desire to attend actual sporting events. These actions could potentially threaten sport franchises around the world by eliminating important revenue streams. Howard (2009) also warns of diminishing revenue streams from event purchases such as game tickets, food, and merchandise sales. Specifically, Howard (2009) warns that fans may shift from following their favorite team to following specific players from their fantasy teams. Rather than buying tickets and going to games of one specific team as many loyal fans do, fantasy players prefer to watch and follow many teams not because they are fans of those teams, but to track the performance of specific players. The preliminary analysis suggested that avid fantasy league players tend to be engaged more in real sports leagues than previously imagined. Fantasy participations lead to increased consumption, but on the level of the entire league rather than specific teams. In other words, there is tendency to support their favorite team and all their fantasy players. These findings contradict previous findings and show that fantasy leagues are a tool that promotes a deeper desire to consume games on TV and person therefore making the said league a part of everyday life.

Fantasy sports have witnessed remarkable growth in the USA and around the world. While most fantasy sports players prefer free leagues, pay-to-play (P2P) fantasy sport contests are growing in popularity, with 46.9 % of players paying league participation fees (FSTA 2014). The nature of P2P fantasy sports, with its focus on entry fees, uncertain outcomes, and cash prizes, leads many to classify fantasy sports as a form of gambling. The trend toward P2P fantasy sports also raises questions regarding the nature of fantasy sports players and their motivations.

Customer behavior in service offerings may emerge either in the form of in-role behavior or extra-role behavior (Bettencourt and Brown 1997). Extra-role behaviors are referred to customer citizenship behavior (CCB) which entails customers’ inputs in terms of time, information, idea, and even physical possession (Bettencourt 1997; Bitner et al. 1997; Groth 2005; Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004). CCB originated from the notion of prosocial behavior in the social psychology field (Brief and Motowidlo 1986; Motowidlo and Scotter 1994). Prosocial behavior has been conceptualized by two behavioral stipulations of voluntary and benevolent performances (Walster and Pilivian 1972). CCB is rooted in the notion of prosocial behavior in social psychology studies, but most of the previous studies neglected the benevolent aspect of this concept.

In brand transgression context, some consumers forgive the brand because they want to gain the relationship back while others might forgive the brand because they do not want to lose the relationship. Using a regulatory fir perspective (Avnet and Higgins 2006), this research investigates how a match of motivational approach between consumers’ goal orientation and brand apology impacts on brand forgiveness. The results show that consumers with a dominant promotion focus are more likely to forgive a brand when they receive a promotion-focused brand apology, while those with a dominant prevention focus are more likely to forgive a brand when receiving a prevention-focused brand apology.

Acts of gun violence at shopping malls have been occurring with greater frequency in recent years (O’Donnell 2014). These incidents can have a devastating impact on business if consumers do not return to the mall after the incident (Morris and Stevens 2014). While managing consumer perceptions of the shopping mall is very important, little research has been conducted on post-incident consumer behavior at shopping malls. The purpose of this exploratory research was to investigate consumers’ emotional, attitudinal, and behavioral responses to acts of gun violence at shopping malls. The research is grounded by the stimulus-organism-response framework (Mehrabian and Russell 1974) as well as the attitude-behavior connection (Ajzen and Fishbein 1977). Data were collected via an online questionnaire. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk was utilized to recruit participants to complete the questionnaire. A total of 244 usable questionnaires were completed by U.S. consumers. The questionnaire contained four sections. Participants were first asked to respond to Likert-type scale items to assess their current intentions to visit their favorite shopping mall (Stoehl et al. 2004). In the second section of the questionnaire, participants read a fictional newspaper article about a shooting that recently occurred at their favorite shopping mall. The newspaper account was based on a collection of actual newspaper articles about recent mall shooting incidents. In the fictional newspaper article, the act of gun violence was described as being a random event in which one customer was killed by a gunman who later killed himself. After participants read the fictional newspaper article, they completed a semantic differential scale designed to assess their feelings of pleasure and arousal associated with visiting their favorite shopping mall following the shooting incident (Donovan et al. 1994). Next, participants were directed to respond to Likert-type scale items designed to assess their attitudes toward the mall following the shooting incident (Yoo and MacInnis 1998). Participants then responded to the same items from the first section of the questionnaire again to assess their post-incident intentions to visit the mall. Demographic information was collected in the fourth and final section of the questionnaire. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses. The structural model exhibited a moderate, but acceptable, fit. Participants’ intention to visit the shopping mall following an act of gun violence was predicted by their attitudes toward the shopping mall. Although level of pleasure and level of arousal were both hypothesized to be emotional antecedents of consumers’ post-incident attitudes toward the shopping mall, only level of pleasure was significantly related to attitudes in the model. Hence, mall managers should perhaps try to emphasize the pleasurable aspects of the shopping mall to encourage consumers to re-patronize the mall following a shooting episode.

Drama, which is defined as a situation or series of events having vivid, emotional, conflicting, or striking interest or results, contributes to and is reflected in the development of products and services. Products and services “perform” for consumers (Deighton 1992). Marketers use drama in advertisements, product placements, and retail events in an effort to develop affective bonds with consumers since these “stories” are processed less evaluatively than arguments (where the marketer’s persuasive intent is clear) (Deighton et al. 1989). Drama is also important because it can appeal to consumers in a way that affects consumption behavior. For example, in July 2010, NASCAR considered changes to the race format to make it more dramatic because it thought doing so would entice lost NASCAR viewers to return (Long 2010).

In increasingly competitive and complex retailing environments, the overall brand image, or a customer’s expression of their global attitudinal impressions of the brand, represents a critical construct with many close associations with key performance indicators and metrics (e.g., satisfaction, loyalty, etc.). Although prior research highlights the importance of overall retail brand image to key performance outcomes such as customer satisfaction and intentions to recommend, this research seeks to answer a more fundamental question: how does the overall retail brand image of one brand compare to another brand? In this paper, we examine a specific type of overall retail brand image—a restaurant’s overall brand image—to determine the composition, strengths, and weaknesses of the restaurant’s overall brand image for four known restaurant brands (Applebee’s Grill & Bar, Chili’s Grill & Bar, Morton’s the Steakhouse, and Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse). In addition to identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the restaurant’s overall brand image, we compare the restaurant’s overall brand image between casual-dining and fine-dining restaurants. To answer our main research question, we employ a multiple methods research methodology, combining insights gathered from qualitative in-depth interviews with restaurant customers and a broader online restaurant survey with American restaurant customers. Data from the online restaurant survey was analyzed through importance performance analysis, a hybrid method useful for understanding the strengths and weaknesses of a product, brand, etc., based on the underpinnings of confirmation/disconfirmation theory, latitudes of performance, and perceptual mapping (Ortinau 2008; Tillman 1967). Counterintuitively, the importance performance analysis reveals that customers are willing to accept lower levels of performance on some attributes for fine-dining restaurants (e.g., convenience, competitive prices), while preferring higher performance on all attributes for casual-dining restaurants. This finding suggests the type of restaurant needs to be considered as a moderator of overall restaurant brand image. Results further suggest that there exists little differentiation between competitors’ performance on important attributes within the restaurant category, unveiling an opportunity for managers to focus resources on achieving meaningful comparative advantage on key restaurant attributes.

The financial crisis that began in 2008 offers an opportunity to examine consumer behavior in response to an industry crisis. Focus groups were used to gather consumer narratives of retail banking in the financial crisis. The personal narratives are useful in themselves as managerial touchstones and were further used to create possible archetypal narratives of groups of consumers and a cultural narrative or “big picture” view of the crisis. The narratives are examined through frameworks of both the humanities and psychology (narrative identity). The narrative results revealed the impact of the crisis on consumer’s identity, views of other entities, and retail banking activity to yield actionable information for branding and communication. Narratives are shown to be a useful tool in examining consumers’ reactions to an industry crisis and in formulating branding and communication responses.

Historically, sales reps’ main source of influence came from their ability to demonstrate that their products and services were the best fit after the customer had defined their own needs and requirements (Farrell and Schroder 1996). However, as Tuli et al. (2007) point out, customers are including suppliers much earlier in the organizational buying process. In many cases, customers have come to expect suppliers to be an integral part of needs identification and requirements definition, a step in the process traditionally owned solely by the organizational buying center (Galbraith 2005; Handfield and Giunipero 2009). This has led sales organizations to realize that sales people who are able to influence the buying center much earlier by helping to identify customer problems or opportunities will have a significant advantage over reps consulted later in the buying process.

Recent research highlights the importance of market orientation in service providers. In the current knowledge-intensive economy, salespeople act more as a knowledge brokering role by transferring knowledge to customers instead of only convincing customers to buy products so as to create superior customer value. Therefore, this paper proposes a research model to identify the antecedents of salesperson market orientation behavior (SMOB) as well as its impacts on working smart behaviors (i.e., sales planning and adaptive selling) and sales performance. More specifically, the research model comprises three sets of antecedents of SMOB: salesperson goal orientation; sales control systems and sales management support. The research model and hypotheses are tested using data obtained from a sample of 264 Taiwanese salespeople in the financial service industry. The empirical findings suggest that salesperson learning orientation and behavioral controls are significantly and positively related to SMOB. The results also show that SMOB has positive impacts on both sales planning and adaptive selling, which in turn achieve better sales performance. These results provide some new insights into the sales management literature.

The Global pharmaceutical sales for 2014 were projected to reach $1 trillion (Thomson Reuters 2014). The pharmaceutical market is characterized by a derived demand process relying on intermediaries (physicians) to influence the end consumers (patients) of the product. The pharmaceutical industry mainly targets physicians using push strategies to influence their prescribing decisions (Brennan et al. 2010; Spiller and Wymer 2001).

Keeping a high level of job satisfaction in the sales force is an essential prerequisite to ensuring sales force motivation and, consequently, high performance (Walker et al. 1977). One of the efficient ways to ensure job satisfaction is to enhance its antecedent. Drawing from the social and applied psychology, job satisfaction is determined by one’s psychological comparison between the perceived job experience and a reference point (Locke 1969; Rice et al. 1989; Weiss et al. 1999). Salespeople who are assigned sales objectives frequently experience a gap between these objectives and their actual performances. The perceived discrepancy between expected and actual performances is known to directly induce salespeople’s job satisfaction/dissatisfaction (JS/D) (Silvester et al. 2003). Specifically, the causal attributions to explain this discrepancy should be a major antecedent of a salesperson’s JS/D. However, sales managers have often overlooked this key antecedent of JS/D.

Little research have explored purchase as a task. What is the decision process of the employee when asked by the boss to purchase a printer for the office? In a purchase task scenario, the onus is on the retailer to provide organized information for consumers. We offer a human factor’s perspective. Information organization influences decision time and decision accuracy. This relationship is moderated by the decision process of the shopper. We predict that when faced with information organized into paragraphs, consumers who use type 1 (heuristics) decision processes would make less accurate decisions than those who use type 2 (rational) processes. A similar relationship exists for information organized into matrices, but we predict the difference in accuracy would be smaller. The results would have implications that suggest retailers should better organize their information to facilitate purchase decisions.

No firm can completely escape service failure, and when a failure occurs, a firm’s reaction has implications on the customer and the employee. While customer cocreation of value is an important part of the service recovery process (Vargo and Lusch 2004), frontline employees (FLE) are a critical part of the equation as well. FLEs are different from other employees in that they are often the first point of contact for customers and are seemingly placed directly in between the company and customers (Anderson and Onyemah 2006). When a customer experiences a service failure, the FLE has an opportunity to provide a solution to the customer’s needs. The customer usually wants a fair and efficient response, and while the employee would prefer to provide a positive and swift solution, it is unknown if they would feel more comfortable providing the service recovery or passing the customer on to a superior.

Retail is the typical appearance of consumer behavior. Today, many large shopping malls are established and consumers have come here for many reasons. Bloch et al. (1994) explained the shopping mall as consumer habitat and shopping mall for a place to show the typical appearance of consumer behavior. Consumers can get two values through the shopping. We visit to shopping malls for several reasons: to buy a product that we need (utilitarian shopping value) or to focus on the atmosphere and to enjoy the environment (Hedonic shopping value). Many current studies showed utilitarian and hedonic value. Most of the shopping malls have been made with a focus only, such as price and convenience on the practical side. However, today, the shopping mall will try to provide special things such as appearance and feel of the buildings and other events. Previous research focused only on store environments, not on the relationship between shopping value and shopping orientation on purchase intention at shopping mall especially those located in suburb outlet. Therefore, in this study, first, we check the relationship between the values of consumers’ shopping behavior. Also we verify if the shopping orientation has a mediate effect between shopping value and purchase intention.

The research objective is to develop and test a business sustainability framework (BS-framework) consisting of economic, social, and environmental dimensions and items. This study follows a quantitative research process based upon the results of a 5-year qualitative research process. Companies employing more than 100 employees were identified to take part in this study. A sample of 261 Norwegian companies was selected, achieving a response rate of 40.6 %. An exploratory factor analysis generated a 17-factor solution out of 20 dimensions originally identified from the 5-year qualitative research process indicating satisfactory convergent, discriminant, and nomological validity, as well as reliability of each dimension. The study proposes a BS-framework, and it concludes that the measurement metrics of the BS-framework developed and tested are valid and reliable. Suggestions for applications, research limitations, and further research are provided. The BS-framework is a second-order construct that companies may use to assess and monitor their sustainable business practices in the marketplace and society. It provides managerial structure and guidance in terms of the dimensions to be taken into consideration and also the items to measure each one of the dimensions of the BS-framework in the market and society. A principal contribution of this research is the empirically developed and tested BS-framework (a second-order construct), uniquely consisting of economic, social, and environmental dimensions and items. The BS-framework is furthermore based upon a first-order construct of the triple bottom line approach.

The increasing interest in the wider societal responsibilities of the business community has highlighted the call for the employment of transparent and accountable commercial practices (Initiative for Responsible Investment 2014). This pressure for transparency in business activities has resulted in a growth of information disclosure methods. The most recent addition in the approaches used to convey the responsibility message has centred on the disclosure of nonfinancial information, involving both mandatory and voluntary actions taken by companies (BIS 2013). This focus has now entered an increasingly monitored period, with laws, directives and regulations being introduced at an international level. According to research headed by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP et al. 2010), this is aimed at strengthening compliance and comparability of corporate social responsibility (CSR)-related initiatives.

It has been found that social ratings have a positive association with corporate success. Institutional investors are more likely to invest in socially responsible companies (Graves and Waddock 1994; Teoh and Shiu 1990). There is also a positive link between social rating and performance (McGuire et al. 1988; Wokutch and Spenser 1987). Waddock and Graves (1997) have noted that the most serious problem with studying social responsibility in the past has been issues with measurement.

As the demand for air transport services has risen much faster than that of other goods and services in the world economy, it is extremely important that airlines retain their passengers to remain profitable (Wang 2014a) by differentiating themselves to increase their perceived value (Woodruff 1997). Among various marketing strategies, celebrity-themed aircraft campaigns (Budd 2012; Wang and Ngamsiriudom 2014a, b) and celebrity endorsements are arguably very effective ones. Celebrity endorsement in airlines is not a new phenomenon (Basusta 2009; Virgin Atlantic 2013; Air New Zealand 2013; Emirates 2014; China Airlines 2006a, b; Ricki 2013). Through these campaigns, airlines hope to gain more brand awareness, model a better corporate image, expand the market share, and increase its profit margin.

Postmodernists suggest that necessities are socially influenced. Therefore, products that are not perceived as necessities might come to be viewed as such over time. This study attempts to shed light on the role of marketing strategies in this necessitation process. Three companies whose products are considered necessities are identified. In employing content analysis, aspects of their marketing strategies are examined. The investigation is guided by a theoretical framework adapted from postmodern literature, including image is the product, fluctuating feelings, fragmented images, and inseparability of production and consumption.

Today, many companies have the resources and expertise to make meaningful contributions to worthy causes. They also possess the visibility and advertising wherewithal to lend credibility to these causes and generate awareness for pressing social issues. This special session highlights the evolution, current development, and potential changes in the world of cause-related marketing (CRM) since its inception in 1983 by the American Express. Moreover, although countless campaigns have generated successful outcomes for various stakeholders of the firm, CRM is far from a foolproof marketing communication tool. This panel presents its own primary research findings focused on how companies, consumers, and nonprofits are affected by this type of corporate social responsibility. This session also illuminates some of the challenges and shortcomings that currently exist within a CRM context. For example, although many companies are drawn to social sponsorship that is easily marketable (e.g., helping sick children), still, less marketable important social issues are left unaddressed (e.g., needs of the homeless). Our intention is not only to celebrate the successes of CRM but also develop an agenda for future research to combat the current weaknesses to ensure the health and longevity of this valuable marketing tool.

Distraction occurs quite often when consumers do not engage in an effortful justification of a marketing message (e.g., product descriptions). It has been known that distraction affects negatively an individual’s ability to process a marketing message in a decision process and consumer attitude toward the decision task. However, growing evidence demonstrates that distracted consumers may make better decisions of complex tasks than those who fully focus on the tasks themselves (Lerouge 2009). That is, this research shows that distraction (vs. conscious thinking) can indeed help consumers evaluate weak-tie brand extensions more favorably. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

Over the past decade, the price index for college tuition grew by nearly 80 %, a rate nearly twice as fast as the overall consumer price index during the same period (Kurtzleben 2013). College graduates in the class of 2014 are the most indebted ever, with an average student loan debt of $33,000, and over 70 % of bachelor’s degree recipients are leaving school in debt as compared to less than 50 % just 20 years ago (Izzo 2014). The present research examines one stratagem for influencing student responses to tuition increases. It explores how the framing of tuition increases may affect the decisions students make regarding school choice, financing, and accommodating tuition increases by adjusting their other expenditures.

When a service failure occurs, this negative disconfirmation of expectations is likely to result in a variety of unfavorable consequences such as customer dissatisfaction, negative word of mouth, increased costs, and customer revenge. Therefore, understanding how companies can effectively respond to service failure has become a very important area to both academicians and practitioners. Despite the topics of service failure and service recovery that have attracted considerable research attention in the past decade, customer’s psychological reaction to firm’s effort to address the service failure remains understudied. Drawing on equity theory, this study examines how customer’s perceived interactional, procedural, and distributive justice influence customer return intention through the impact of perceived forgiveness. This study focuses on the neglected, but important, mediation effects of perceived forgiveness. Based on a survey of 501 customers, the results find that distributive justice has the strongest impact on perceived value followed by procedural justice and interactional justice, respectively. In addition, customer forgiveness positively and strongly affects customer return intention.

Celebrity endorsement is one of the popular means of communication in advertising (Biswas et al. 2006; Pringle 2004; Spry et al. 2011; Tong and Hawley 2009). But does celebrity endorsement enhance long-term market performance of the firm? Extant literature does not answer this question. It generally focuses on effectiveness of overall marketing or advertising expenditure (Joshi and Hanssens 2010; Luo and Jong 2012). However, celebrity endorsement is a very specific, expensive, and significant form of advertisement technique (Thwaites et al. 2012) and calls for specific attention in terms of long-term financial returns. Furthermore, depending on national culture, its effectiveness may vary (Choi et al. 2005). Celebrity endorsement is the most commonly used means of advertising in India. According to an estimate, endorsement business in India is more than US$321 million (Mithel and Hector 2013). Given the significance of celebrity endorsements in India, it becomes vital to explore how such endorsement impacts long-term valuation of Indian firms. Since India is an emerging economy, many multinationals intend to expand their market in India. It is inevitable for managers intending to operate in India to understand if endorsements financially pay off or not in this country. To explore long-term financial effectiveness of celebrity endorsements in India, we rely on source credibility model (Ohanian 1990) and efficient market hypothesis (Fama 1970).

This study tests the French ad-evoked nostalgia scale in a nomological network of related constructs. Findings reveal significant differences in consumer reactions in France, as compared to earlier research based on American samples. Among the French, nostalgic advertising evokes personal memories and cultural nostalgia, contrasted to reports of past imagery and physiological and emotional reactions in the USA. Further, while cultural nostalgia is an important component of the French personal nostalgic experience, it is the personal memories that are the key to the creation of positive impressions about the ad and brand (brand heritage, brand bonds, and attitudes), as well as drive behavioral intentions.

The research objective of this study is to develop and test a stakeholder construct in the context of companies’ business sustainability efforts within their business networks, the marketplace and the society by identifying underlying dimensions and items. A mixed-method approach was used. Firstly, qualitative research involving a case study approach was followed so as to describe how companies in different industries in Norway implement and manage sustainable business practices. This was followed by a quantitative research phase to empirically measure and test a stakeholder construct in the context of business sustainability efforts, which is reported here. The results report both an initial factor solution as well as a refined factor solution. The factor analyses confirmed five stakeholder dimensions related to business sustainability in a cross-industry sample of organisations, their business networks, marketplace and society. These include (1) the focal company, (2) downstream stakeholders, (3) societal stakeholders, (4) market stakeholders and (5) upstream stakeholders. The results indicate satisfactory convergent, discriminant and nomological validity, as well as reliability of each dimension. The study provides a stakeholder construct in the context of business sustainability efforts in focal companies and their business networks, the marketplace and the society, based upon five common dimensions. The multidimensional framework may be used in both qualitative and quantitative research in the future. It may also be used to assess stakeholders’ business sustainability efforts. The study provides a general stakeholder construct in the context of business sustainability efforts in business networks, the marketplace and the society. The proposed framework can be incorporated in further studies and could be used to assess the general status of stakeholders’ sustainability efforts in their networks, the marketplace and the society.

How and why firms jointly compete to achieve superior performance has been examined in marketing strategy by both relational governance and supply chain management scholars, who have approached the issue from different perspectives and offered different, but not necessarily exclusive, findings. Recent efforts to reconcile their theories and results suggest looking at the issue from a broader perspective. Based on a qualitative study of managers that interface with their firm’s trade partners, the authors propose a framework that views relational governance and supply chain management constructs as a combination of unilateral capabilities, collaborative capabilities and environmental factors.

Sustainability, a holistic corporate responsibility, has emerged as a business buzzword and megatrend, to redesign the competitive landscape among firms (Carter and Easton 2011; Lubin and Esty 2010). The idea has led the traditional firm responsibility of shareholder value creation morph into a much broader perspective to envelop environmental and social impact of business operations (Closs et al. 2011; Hazen et al. 2011). Thus, firms are challenged to “reinvent” their businesses to adopt various sustainability strategies and become more environmentally conscious and socially responsive while creating economic value to their shareholders and customers. However, research exploring the relationship between performance outcomes and sustainability initiatives in supply chains is sparse (Hazen et al. 2011; Markley and Davis 2007). Thus, sustainability in supply chains is a rich area for academic research. The limited research so far has yielded conflicting outcomes on the relationship between sustainable supply chain management and competitive advantage or other performance outcomes (Kim 2011; Zhu and Sarkis 2004).

In this paper, we discuss the effectiveness of community-based social marketing by using a successful youth littering abatement program called “Be the Street” as an example. A precampaign online survey was conducted to assess motivators for and barriers to littering behavior and perceived social norms of target audience, Gen Y youth in California Bay Area. The collected data was established as a baseline against a follow-up survey, which mirrored the precampaign survey to ensure data compatibility and to determine the overall impact of the program.

After six consecutive years of declining motor vehicle crash-related fatalities, their number increased by 3.3 % in 2012, from 32,479 fatalities in 2011 to 33,561 in 2012 (USDOT NHTSA 2013). The number of traffic-related injuries saw a similar increase from 2.22 million in 2011 to 2.36 million in 2012; additionally, there was a 3.1 % increase in the total number of police-reported traffic crashes between 2011 and 2012. High-risk behavior and high-speed mobility combine to create this externality of the automobile industry (Williams and Haworth 2007). To make matters worse, when individuals are faced with highly familiar activities such as driving, research shows that they tend to underestimate the possibility of a negative outcome (Douglas 1985).

Sustainability has become a movement with tremendous influence in the way organizations and policy makers design their strategies (Griskevicius et al. 2010). Despite the wide availability of pro-environmental options, barriers to adopting pro-environmental behaviors are still common (Dietz et al. 2003), and past strategies undertaken by government and nonprofit organizations to encourage such behavior have achieved only limited success. This research aims to better understand what motivates consumers to express sustainable intentions and what factors interfere in their decisions. This research evaluates under which conditions diverse factors (perceived support H1a, green attitude H1b, self-identity H1c, and perceived control H1d) may have a more significant effect on green behavior. In addition, this paper explores how the impact of these four factors will vary depending on the perceived degree of difficulty of the behavior (H2). Indeed, the more difficult is the behavior, the more we expect factors other than attitude to influence individuals’ behaviors.

In every country in the world, consumers rely on retailers to purchase the products they need for everyday survival and to satisfy their most specialized needs and wants. Retailers from tiny “mom-and-pop” stores to giant modern stores such as supermarkets, hypermarkets, and “big-box” stores provide the retail distributive institutions needed to make vast arrays of products conveniently available to millions of consumers when and where they desire to buy them. And despite the rapid penetration of online shopping in many countries around the world, brick-and-mortar stores still dominate retail structure because “Shoppers want to feel the fabrics, look at the colors, try out styles—all those things that can be lost online…” (2013 Interbrand Best Retail Brands Report, p. 4). Therefore, retail structure, which refers to the number, size, and type of physical retail stores in a given geographic area, will continue to play a crucial role in the everyday lives of millions of consumers around the globe.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the symbolic representations of non-consumers compared to live experiences of consumers related to a luxury brand, particularly, the non-owners and the owners of a luxury brand Mercedes-Benz (MB) together with the country image and the country-of-origin effect. A total of 275 consumers coming from the community of higher education in Finland are investigated concerning the country-of-origin effect for both non-owners (243) and owners (32). The study reveals that the country-of-origin effect for both non-owners and owners of a Mercedes-Benz has a similar impact, as the model developed, has a good fit and is statistically significant. The paper suggests the ‘extended self-congruity context for hypothetical purchases of non-consumers/non-owners’ which is developed and tested and leads to its approval. Moreover, it concludes that there are statistically significant differences between owners versus non-owners, and these differences relate to the constructs of country image, brand familiarity, partly purchase involvement, brand commitment, product design and product experience. This study provides the ‘extended self-congruity context for hypothetical purchases of non-consumers/non-owners’ of a luxury brand which has the attribute to be a strong brand with a strong country image. Furthermore, it reveals that ‘price consciousness’ is irrelevant to a luxury brand.

How stable are shopping styles of women and men across cultures? To find out, the authors develop a new scale that reliably measures differences between male and female shopping styles and is stable across cultures. They develop a conceptual model and hypotheses to test whether observed differences in gender shopping styles are likely to be innate or arise from socialization. Through a survey of consumers in seven countries, they show that males and females are evolutionarily predisposed to have different shopping styles. Counter to social structural theory, the observed differences in shopping style between females and males are greater in low-context cultures (higher gender equality countries) than in high-context cultures (lower gender equality countries). Empathizing—the ability to tune into another person’s thoughts and feelings—mediates shopping style more for female shoppers; systemizing—the degree to which an individual possesses spatial skills—mediates shopping style more for male shoppers. Therefore, retail segmentation between females and males appears to be of more managerial relevance than segmentation between cultures. Other managerial implications are also discussed.

The international market arena is characterised by country-specific governance and sociocultural factors, the effect of which determines the context of the arena where marketing activities take place (Li and Filer 2007). The effect of the national context impacts consumer behaviour in international markets. The current qualitative study examined how differences in developed and emerging international market contexts (e.g. political structure, legal system, regulatory framework, law enforcement and sociocultural contexts) affect consumers’ evaluation of service value. This research examined British and Nigerian consumers of retail banking services. The two countries represent a good example of developed and emerging markets’ national contexts because of differences in their human development index, political stability, national development and economic power (Burgess and Steenkamp 2006). We conducted 52 semi-structured interviews, 26 in each country, and used thematic content analysis approach to analyse the data (Braun and Clarke 2006; Kolbe and Burnet 1991; Saldana 2013). Our findings indicates that the (1) value of service patronage, (2) value of service content, and (3) value of service process differ among developed and emerging market consumers, due to the impact of differences in national contexts. We proposed service adaption (Wills et al. 1991) rather than standardisation (Szymanski et al. 1993) especially in emerging international markets both in the content and process of service delivery due to the heterogeneity of their service value expectations. We identified some limitations of the research and recommended areas of further research. Despite its limitations, the current study extends international service marketing research to a less-researched emerging international market segment. It equally extends international service literature to a less-researched topic (national context in evaluation of service value) and sheds light on areas that require immediate attention. We posit that our findings fill an important gap in the literature by demonstrating the differences in evaluation of service value between developed and emerging markets’ consumers.

Natural disaster is inevitable and people’s cooperation is indispensable. With the power of advertising, in-group and out-group donors perceive a different “need” to donate to the respective groups of victims (domestic vs. international). However, past research has yet to clarify the type of messages that differentiates individual’s donation behavior. This study seeks to further the understanding of prosocial behavior by exploring the motivation behind donation, attitude toward helping others, one ethnic identity, and one’s attitude toward different types of donation ads and their impact on charitable donation advertising effectiveness that is tied to one’s ethnic identity. By utilizing TPB and ELM theory as well as the SIT, this study looks at how ethnic identity on donation behavior can influence donor’s attitude toward the different types of ads and advertising effectiveness based on their feelings toward their ethnic identity.

Consumption related to the past is trendy. The successful new retro products are often modified to fit today’s taste and functional and performance standards. Many product categories including those that traditionally focused on innovation and creativity, such as cars and music, are influenced by the retro movement. Despite its popularity, few empirical studies (Brown et al. 2003a, b) have embraced the consumers’ reactions toward a retromarketing offer. Retromarketing is a wise marriage between the past and the present in a way to offer the best of both worlds (Brown 2001; Brown et al. 2003b). Nostalgia and retromarketing look like concepts that are interlinked, but few studies have assessed how nostalgia can impact the consumers’ reaction toward a retro product. Therefore, the objectives of this study are twofold: to assess how the mix of the old and the new in a retro product influences consumers’ behaviors and, specifically, if nostalgia ever plays any kind of role.

Religion is a key source of core values that influence consumer attitudes and behaviors; however, limited research has explored religion’s influence on consumer behavior. Therefore, we take a broad-based approach to show that religion acts as an individual difference variable to influence a variety of consumer behaviors, and, in doing so, we address criticisms of past research in the field. First, we greatly reduce cultural bias by conducting our research within one country. Second, we examine both the consumer’s belief system (i.e., religious affiliation) and the degree to which consumers hold their belief system (i.e., internal and external religiosity). Third, we explore several consumer behaviors in a within-subject design, showing that religion’s influence on behavior is not just a onetime accidental occurrence.

Why do people post on Facebook? Nascent evidence suggests that nostalgia (a longing for the past) occurs in social media; more specifically, users indulge in nostalgia (remembering the good old days) while interacting on Facebook. This nostalgic longing appears to occur among all age groups; even 20-year-olds are known to exchange nostalgic posts on social media. Although a rich body of knowledge exists around, little academic research currently explores nostalgia within Facebook conversations. This research aims to fill this gap in the literature by examining 10,000 nostalgic posts and a baseline sample of 10,000 general posts, both obtained from a database containing private and public posts.

More than 80 % of consumers search for information on products online before buying (McPartlin et al. 2012). Therefore, companies regularly attempt to influence buying behaviour by making reasonable investments in online advertising (oAD). By 2018, oAD (e.g. websites, banner ads) will be poised to overtake TV as the largest advertising segment (PwC 2014). However, the effectiveness of oAD is in jeopardy as consumer dependency on marketer-developed communication has declined over the last decade. Today, consumers seem increasingly to disconnect from companies. At the same time, they turn towards consumer-generated information sources like other shoppers’ opinions and recommendations. In particular, the importance of online consumer reviews (eWOM) has increased significantly. Consumer reviews are peer-generated, text-based product evaluations posted on company or third-party websites by former, actual or potential customers (Hennig-Thurau et al. 2004). The shift towards alternative information sources evokes some important questions for marketers: Are investments in classic oAD meaningful in the era of social media? Which consumers can (still) be influenced by online ads? Is the majority of shoppers’ product purchase/non-purchase primarily dictated by the opinions and recommendations of others or by marketers?

Contradicting anecdotes can be found on the question of whether or not having millions of followers on Twitter and Facebook offers a competitive advantage when it comes to selling products. Also, regarding academic research on this matter, we find that little is known about the incremental effect of social media activities. This is especially noteworthy as marketing managers in several industries are investing heavily to harvest the social media power of so-called human brands. These human brands such as Vin Diesel, Cara Delevingne, or Christina Aguilera are prominently used in an entertainment media context but also to sell, for example, clothes and perfumes.

Social media communities provide its members to connect socially and parasocially. Whereas social interactions and relationships require reciprocity, parasocial interactions and relationships are one-sided in nature and create an illusion of intimacy at a distance (Horton and Wohl 1956). Nevertheless, they share the same characteristics as social interactions and are considered to be an extension of real social behavior rather than replacing them (Cohen 2004, 2009; Giles 2002; Klimmt et al. 2006). This study focuses its inquiries on these parasocial interactions and relationships (PSI/PSR) in social media communities. Although PSI/PSR is a widely studied area in communication and psychology literatures, the concepts have not attracted much attention from marketing scholars (cf. Labrecque 2014). This study contributes to the marketing literature on social media communities by investigating online personal accounts in reference to PSI/PSR research. For this, the study adopts a grounded theory methodology (Glaser and Strauss 1967) triangulating netnographic data (Kozinets 2002) with data from in-depth interviews. For the systematic organization, analysis, and interpretation of the triangulated data, the study utilizes Cohen’s (1999) BASIC IDS framework for dimensional qualitative research (DQR), which was introduced as a sophisticated psychological research tool for qualitative marketing studies. This results in an integrative framework that theorizes PSI/PSR in social media communities, crafting an empirical exploration of PSI/PSR in relation to their dynamics in online personal accounts. Furthermore, in relation to methodological advancement, it contributes to the application of DQR in marketing studies by extending it to bridge with netnography principles.

Coaching is an essential attribute of effective managers and leaders (Ellinger et al. 2008; Hamlin et al. 2006) particularly in sales environments (Deeter-Schmelz et al. 2002, 2008), and it is becoming progressively more important for managerial practice and research (Grant 2011; Pousa 2012). In the sales literature, scholars have proposed that research must shift from traditional approaches to new, collaborative ones, like coaching (Dixon and Tanner 2012; Ingram 2004; Ingram et al. 2002, 2005; Pousa and Mathieu 2014c).

Marketing and sales have distinct thought-world differences that often inhibit their ability to work together. As a result, firms promote integration between the two groups with the ultimate aim of improving relationship effectiveness and customer performance. This study introduces the concepts of realized integration and desired, or future, integration and the difference between the two (the integration gap). Through the lens of self-categorization theory, this study examines how both functional and firm behaviors interact with several internal and external environment factors to impact both types of integration. The study shows how these factors impact both realized and desired integration in several ways, providing a more complete view of the relationship between the two. Finally, the study finds that desired integration can negatively impact relationship outcomes reducing the positive benefits of the realized level of integration. As a result, managers need to not only promote integration but also manage the integration gap by increasing levels of realized integration or decreasing levels of desired integration.

As consumers are often exposed to price-related advertising in purchase situations and as, among other factors, both prices (Chang and Wildt 1994) and product attitudes (Spears and Singh 2004) affect purchase decisions, it is important to examine possible negative effects of price promotions on product attitudes. Some previous studies provide evidence for positive effects of price promotions on purchase intentions (Ailawadi and Neslin 1998; Grewal et al. 1998), but other studies show that discounts can negatively affect future sales (Kalwani et al. 1990; Lattin and Bucklin 1989). A possible explanation for such opposite findings might be that sales promotions have direct positive effects on purchase intentions but indirect negative effects through more negative product attitudes on purchase intentions (Davis et al. 1992). The objective of this study is to focus on effects of price promotions on product attitudes and to examine in which conditions such effects are more or less negative. This study goes beyond previous studies that analyzed possible negative effects of price promotions (Dodson et al. 1978; Raghubir and Corfman 1999) by considering conditions in which price-related advertising can have more or less negative effects on product attitudes. The conditions are the number of consumers’ ad contacts (1 vs. 5), the saving format used to display the price reduction (percentage off vs. amount off), and the salience of the regular price in the ad (yes vs. no) as well as the perceived levels of discount information credibility (low vs. high). We simultaneously analyze direct and interaction effects of marketer-controlled factors and consumers’ perceptions that play a role in the context of consumers’ responses to price promotions in terms of product attitudes. An analysis of effects of marketer-controlled factors helps marketers to choose the combination of factors that produce the most positive consumer responses. The effects of price promotions on consumers’ attitudes could be moderated by as how credible consumers perceive the price claims displayed in the ad. Perceived ad credibility is the extent to which consumers perceive the claims as believable (MacKenzie and Lutz 1989). When consumers perceive a discrepancy with prior perceptions, they might perceive price claims as less credible (Lutz et al. 1983). The findings provide marketers with insights in which conditions a sales promotion leads to comparatively negative product attitudes and thus enables them to avoid such constellations when launching a sales promotion.

The objective of this research is to extend the existing research on consumers’ discounting of discounts to the online shopping channel. We investigate consumers’ perceptions of and behavioral intentions with regards to advertised price discounts for online and bricks-and-mortar stores as well as for name brand and store brand products. Specifically, the extent to which consumers discount the advertised discount level is examined. Lastly, the price discount thresholds and saturation points are determined and compared across the two retail channels and product brands. Overall, this research provides a contemporary analysis of consumers’ perceptions and responses to advertised price discounts and offers a comprehensive analysis of all possible discount levels (from 10 to 90 %). This is the first research to include an investigation in an online retailing context and compare the results to a traditional bricks-and-mortar context. Results demonstrate that there is a greater discounting of discounts online versus in a bricks-and-mortar retail context, and, for low reputation brands, the promotion threshold level is higher in an online context, compared to bricks-and-mortar.

Price discounts are a popular pricing strategy because discounts increase the perceived economic value of a purchase. Prices are used as referents to assess the economic value of a purchase (Blattberg and Neslin 1990; Grewal et al. 1998). Accordingly, price discounts are offered to increase consumers’ perceived economic product value and thus increase purchase intention (Dodds and Monroe 1985). However, social, rather than economic, value is the primary concern in gift choice. Accordingly, consumers are often willing to pay a premium for gifts with high social value. This social value of gifts is important because it helps societies maintain social norms (i.e., reciprocity) and reaffirm social values through symbolic social conventions (i.e., achievement) (Camerer 1988; Belk and Coon 1993). Interestingly, price discounts remain ubiquitous during gift-giving holidays.

The use of social media in the university classroom is growing in popularity and is transforming learning and teaching in significant ways (Li and Pitts 2009; Tess 2013). According to Lee and McLoughlin (2008), social networking sites have become educational tools onto themselves. However, while students have both developed and embraced the use of social media in their personal lives, little research has been done into the mix of social media used by teachers and students in their traditional courses (Li and Pitts 2009). Instead, most research to date is social media specific. Mödritscher (2010) states that both educators and learners need to rethink the way they teach and learn. Li and Pitts (2009) discuss that there is much to learn about the use of web-based communication tools and the impact they have on traditional measures of students’ success in higher education. Yet research has not explored the effects of the characteristics of social networks used primarily by students (Mazer et al. 2007), and more empirical research is needed (Barcayk 2013; Tess 2013).

Social media has transformed the way information is exchanged and delivered. The current research uses an expanded form of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to explore students’ perceptions of Twitter as a pedagogical tool. A model is tested in which Twitter’s perceived ease of use and usefulness are used as predictors of student’s attitudes and usage of the social media platform in a classroom setting. Results of a structural equation model support the hypothesized relationships.

Providing an educational experience that scholars value, students appreciate, and practitioners respect is a consistent goal of modern academia, especially those in the applied disciplines like marketing. In this study, the authors provide a template for designing and teaching an advanced undergraduate advertising course employing Fink’s (2003) taxonomy of significant learning with experiential projects and an example of a current application of the taxonomy. The authors discuss the application of the taxonomy in the context of student conceptualization and participation in a campaign designed for a regional group of four Chevrolet dealers in Oklahoma and Texas. Students were tasked with incorporating the automobile group’s brand with social responsibility while also staying within the clients’ budget of $5000. In addition to educating the students and fulfilling the client’s needs, the efforts resulted in the students winning an ADDY, a respected advertising award, and thus increasing the perceived value of these students to potential employers.

This special session intends to explore the use of wearable technology in greater detail. Current perspectives identify a number of fundamental questions regarding wearable technology. Wearable technology is emerging as one of the key areas companies are investing in. In March 2014, Facebook announced that it had plans to acquire Oculus VR, a firm that produces virtual reality headsets. In May 2014, Apple announced its $3.2 billion purchase of Beats Electronics. Within the next 3 years, wearable technology is predicted to be worth $10 billion, with 170 million wearable technological devices in general use.

Research in the area of sales promotion has shown that a combination of tactics that include but are not limited to cash discounts, coupons, product premiums, rebates etc. is effective in driving consumer action such as purchase, new product trial, stock up, encourage habitual purchase, and brand switching. In studying the efficacy of promotional offers, some research has attributed deal proneness to a number of sociodemographic and personality traits. Though traditional economic theory predicts deal proneness to be positively correlated with income, research in marketing has instead supported a negative relationship where low-income consumers tend to be more price sensitive, instead. Despite this consumer marketers continue to spend marketing funds in promotional offers in the fast moving consumer good (FMCG) category targeted toward low-income consumers. A growing stream of research under the labels of bottom of pyramid (BoP) and subsistence consumers has increasingly pointed out the market attractiveness of this low-income population to multinational companies especially in the FMCG sector. These poor consumers are individuals who earn approximately $2 per day. The largest BoP market in the world by size of population is in India where, according to a 2011 World Bank estimate, 69 % of the country’s total population (approximately 1.2 billion) earns $2 per day. Companies that compete in the FMCG market aggressively target the BoP consumer where, according to several industry sources, companies have seen a double digit growth in spending on advertising and promotional offers.

With the potential economic, political, and strategic values inherent in developing a favorable country image, country branding has received increasing scrutiny from both practitioners and researchers in the last decade (Anholt 1998; Dinnie 2008; Olins 2002; Popadopoulos and Heslop 2002; Sun and Paswan 2011, 2012). The country as a brand represents the intangible assets of the country, encompassing various dimensions such as politics, economics, culture, history, social psychology, and technology. Although extant studies focus on various factors relevant to country brand and country branding (Fan 2006; Florek and Conejo 2006; Loo and Davies 2006; O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy 2000), there is a lack of an organizing mechanism to connect the factors identified in the literature. This study focuses on the outcome factor of country branding foreign direct investment (FDI) and intends to clarify the associations between different antecedent factors of country branding and FDI.

Recent research in marketing has identified the importance of flattery (e.g., Chan and Sengupta 2010, 2013), as has research in other areas of social science (e.g., Gordon 1996; Vonk 2002). For example, dual attitudes theory implies that “even when ulterior flattery by marketing agents is accompanied by an obvious ulterior motive that leads targets to discount the proffered compliments, the initial favorable reaction (the implicit attitude) continues to coexist with the discounted evaluation (the explicit attitude)” (Chan and Sengupta 2010, p. 122). In any interpersonal marketing activity, social strategies will be important contributors to results. Although consumer and business ingratiation process is shaped by culture and social values, only a few studies have examined consumer ingratiation processes in cross-national settings. Increasing interactions between the world’s largest economies calls for an increased mutual understanding of ingratiation strategies in the major countries.

It is widely recognized that service encounters between a service provider and a customer in a retail banking environment are often prone to service failures. When these service failures occur, it is encouraged that customers engage in complaint behavior. Based upon the service recovery efforts undertaken by the service provider in response to a complaint, the customer experiences a sense of justice relating to the degree of service failure, known as perceived justice. The perceived justice customers experience from service recovery efforts could restore a sense of satisfaction amongst customers and could ultimately lead to desired behavioral responses from the customers concerned. Perceived justice and its influence on satisfaction and behavioral intention have not been investigated in the competitive South African retail banking environment that is often fraught with service failures. This paper therefore examines the influence of two dimensions of perceived justice, namely interactional justice and distributive justice on service satisfaction and behavioral intention in this context in a post-complaint setting. A sample of 281 South African respondents who experienced a service failure with a bank and who complained to the bank were surveyed using a self-administered questionnaire. A confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling (Jöreskog and Sörbom 1976) were performed using SPSS/AMOS 19.0 software to test the measurement and structural properties of the research model. The research model generated satisfactory findings, and the goodness-of-fit measures were acceptable for both the measurement model and subsequently for the structural model. The results indicate satisfactory convergent validity and satisfactory reliability. The model also demonstrates acceptable discriminant validity. The empirical findings of the structural model also suggest that the tested structural model is satisfactory. All three hypothesized relationships were significant, which confirms nomological validity. The empirical findings support the notion that interactional and distributive perceived justice in banking service encounters influence the satisfaction, and in extension, behavioral intention of customers in the retail banking environment in South Africa. A service provider operating in the banking environment within this particular context has to consider the post-complaint service encounter as a critical opportunity to recover from a service failure in such a way that the customer is left with a sense of perceived justice since it influences satisfaction and ultimately behavioral intention of customers. To create a sense of perceived justice, the service provider has to ensure it interacts with customers in the post-complaint service encounter in such a way that these customers perceive the interaction to be fair, respectful, ethical, and effective. The service provider also has to ensure that the outcome of the post-complaint service encounter is perceived by these customers as being fair.

Marketing is about more than just a number. From a long road trip to a half empty arena, adjectives carry numerical associations. The research within this paper builds on that idea while focusing on markedness, a linguistics theory, which has been called the evaluative superstructure of language. Asking “How tall is the person?” is not an indication that the person is tall but merely a neutral way to ask about a person’s height. Asking “How short is the person?” however implies the person is actually short in addition to asking for their height. This paper shows how a marked term, such as half empty, results in significantly different, and lower, estimates of attendance than an unmarked term, such as half full, in addition to influencing other aspects of the consumer judgment scenario. The research contributes to theories on linguistics and consumer judgment by showing how mathematically equivalent frames result in different numerical perceptions.

The main goal of this study was to respond to the call by self-service technology (SST) researchers to investigate consumer evaluation of SST value in a unique context. The self-service app context is relevant in our modern-day contemporary e-commerce society where consumers increasingly rely on apps to make consumption decisions. For instance the video streaming service from Netflix’s self-service app is a global network phenomenon, according to tech analysts on Wall Street

In most online commercial transactions, customers’ feeling of uncertainty about the success of an exchange can be attributed to its faceless and intangible character (Beldad et al. 2010). Uncertainty eventually may lead people to search for certain cues to minimize uncertainty’s discomforting effect and to aid them in deciding whether or not to engage in an exchange in which success is not guaranteed. Whenever people encounter uncertainty in an online exchange, they look for cues that could increase their confidence in the exchange partners. These confidence-enhancing cues or trustworthiness features, according to Beldad et al. (2010), may be either attributes of the exchange partner (e.g., reputation) or characteristics of the channel used for the online exchange (e.g., website design, security seals).

Previous research has defined three main types of value creation processes including (1) firm value creation, (2) customer-firm join value creation, and (3) customer value creation (Dong et al. 2008). Although the customers–customer interaction is highly emphasized in establishment of individuals’ experience in service encounters including online platforms, it is ignored in the value co-reaction process.

Product ratings and reviews have become effective tools, providing consumers information about the consumption experience without the actual purchase (Herr et al. 1991; Chatterjee 2001). Although much attention has been paid to the influence of product ratings on perceived quality and purchase intentions (Liu 2006), no research has examined their effects in the context of bundles. Since bundling has become a common practice (Brough and Chernev 2012; Harris and Blair 2006), providing a better understanding of how product reviews affect purchase intentions would seem important. This research investigates whether consumer purchase intentions improve when individual product ratings in a bundle increase.

This paper applies the well-known stochastic NBD model to attending behavior at sporting events. Using data from a large national survey across a range of sporting events in Australia including Australian football, rugby league, soccer (outdoor), horse racing, cricket (outdoor), netball (indoor and outdoor), basketball (indoor and outdoor), and tennis we show that the NBD is very robust in describing sporting event attending behavior. This result suggests that attendance at sporting events is largely random in nature. The stochastic assumption has important implications for sporting event marketing activities such as which segments of attendees should be targeted, as well as predicting future attending behavior.

Highly identified fans are often the focus of brand strategists as they are usually investing time and money to follow the team (Richelieu and Pons 2009). However, highly identified fans represent some challenges for sports teams since they sometimes have mixed emotions toward the team and can engage in dysfunctional behaviors such as the use of abusive language, excessive drinking, and constant complaining of team decisions (Wakefield and Wann 2006). This study focuses on the latter manifestation among these dysfunctional fans and aims at better understanding the mechanisms that explain why these fans experience such strong conflicting emotions toward their favorite sport team. Another goal is to provide a typology of these fans using their rationales and motives to adopt such behaviors.

Rapid advances in technology have influenced the ways in which consumers experience live events, both in person and via television. One of the most prevalent of recent trends has been an increase in the use of “second screens,” or the simultaneous consumption of an event and use of an electronic device, such as a smartphone or tablet (Galily 2014). A recent study of US consumers found that 86 % said they participated in multitasking during television consumption, up from 72 % in 2011 (Deloitte 2014). Research has suggested that this trend is particularly pervasive among sport fans (Gantz and Lewis 2014). There are a number of entertainment options available to sports fans via such devices, including accessing statistical information about the event, viewing other camera angles, and participating with other fans on social media.

The Super Bowl is an annual grand event celebrated not only by football fans but also by advertisers. In 2013, the Super Bowl was the most watched American television broadcast with more than 108 million viewers (Siltanen 2014). Because of its wide viewership, many brands invest in television commercial spots during the game. The cost for a 30-s advertising spot on US television during the Super Bowl has steadily increased in the last decade. In 2014, the cost for a 30-s spot reached four million dollars (Farhi 2014). Is it worthwhile to spend such a huge amount of a company’s advertising budget on the Super Bowl? According to a survey taken after Super Bowl 2013 (Crossmedia 2013), 70 % of the participants recalled Super Bowl ads from that year, whereas only 40 % reported an increase in brand consideration. Thus the effectiveness of Super Bowl advertising remains unclear.

The term “showrooming” refers to a situation in which an individual consumes the services of a full-service retailer and then uses the knowledge and services gained from that retailer to make a purchase from a limited-service retailer, which often boasts lower prices (Singley and Williams 1995). The phenomenon of showrooming is increasingly becoming a problem for brick-and-mortar retailers as consumers are using traditional retailers as “showrooms” for products, gathering information about products at a retailer, and then ultimately purchasing the item from an online retailer at a discounted price. This behavior is not new; however, the ease of comparing prices and ordering products online from home or via mobile technology has caused a sharp increase in showrooming recently, with as many as 50 % of online shoppers stating that they first viewed products in a brick-and-mortar retailer before making their online purchase (Zimmerman 2012).

Collecting is a widespread consumer behavior, as an estimated third of all adults collects something. According to Belk, collecting is “the process of actively, selectively, and passionately acquiring and possessing things removed from ordinary use and perceived as part of a set of non-identical objects or experiences” (1995, p. 67). It is an intensely involving form of consumption that can become an addiction, obsession, and compulsion (Belk et al. 1991). Compulsive collecting can lead to a host of problems, including individual, family and societal. A scale measuring compulsive collecting has been recently developed and validated (Kukar-Kinney and Ridgway 2013). In this paper, we use that measure to examine the relationship between consumers’ reaction to price and compulsive collecting.

The first stage of this project was an observational study conducted 2 years ago at an upscale shopping mall in Guadalajara, Mexico, with the aim of exploring group shopping using a simple measure of consumption (González et al. 2013). Individuals and groups of shoppers were observed as they came out of major stores in the mall. Researchers counted the number of bags carried by individual or group, as well as the number of people in the group and observable demographics (e.g., gender, age range, family group). A u-shaped relationship between number of bags and group size results after controlling for those observables. This increase in shopping utility past a critical group size of three shoppers was called “social lift.”

While practitioners frequently present people in distress to induce pity in fundraising campaigns, no research to date has examined the potential efficiency of ads that aim to induce the emotion of pity to increase charitable behavior. Thus, knowing whether—and understanding how—pity can lead people to give (more) money to charities appears of particular importance. In this chapter, we thus start by providing a clear conceptualization of pity and reviewing the various existing research on charitable behavior that may explain how pity-inducing advertisements can influence charitable behavior. We then tackle the question of the efficiency of pity-inducing ads through two experiments.

In light of negative environmental trends (US Environmental Protection Agency 2014; Global Footprint Network 2014), it is apparent that smarter consumption by the collective of society is necessary, as it is only in the aggregate that the negative effects of harmful consumption patterns can be lessened and a more sustainable future achieved (Stern 2000; Peattie 2010). However, in interdependent fashion, the ability of the collective to have a positive impact on these environmental issues is a direct result of an individual’s inclination to engage in environmentally and socially responsible behavior.

Magazines and advertisements depicting ideal bodies are inescapable today. The way consumers compare themselves with these images may lead to negative consequences, such as low self-esteem (Ferreira, Gouveia, and Duarte 2013) and eating disorders (Corning et al. 2006). However, some consumers compare themselves with this “ideal” beauty more often than others (Gibbons and Buunk 1999). For example, Buunk and Dijkstra (2011) show that gender affects the frequency with which people engage in social comparison, with women comparing themselves more often than men. Extant research also focuses on personality traits to explain differences in the frequency with which consumers compare themselves with others (Schneider and Schupp 2014). For example, neuroticism seems to be a potential antecedent of social comparison frequency (Van der Zee et al. 1998). Beyond personality traits, this chapter proposes and demonstrates that personal values can explain the frequency with which consumers engage in social comparison. Through three studies, we show that people with a strong need for power and achievement—two personal values associated with the quest for social status, success, prestige, and control (Schwartz 2012)—compare themselves more often than those with little need for these values do. We also show that power and achievement values not only affect the frequency with which consumers engage in comparison, but also increase the intensity of the consequences of social comparison. Marketers and public authorities can use need for power and achievement minimization to decrease the impact of unhealthy social comparisons while retaining the positive marketing results associated with exposition to such advertising.

With the growing research on the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs, there is relatively little research on the makeup of the socially conscious consumer. This is particularly true with regard to their response to socially responsible initiatives. We address this gap through a qualitative study which ascertains the general mindset and makeup of the socially conscious consumer. Results indicate that socially conscious consumers use rational economic models in their consumption decisions, weighing the costs and benefits of their choices. This group also displays a general skepticism with respect to CSR tactics. This has distinct implications for managers, as it becomes more important for them to change the consumer’s view towards marketing than to enhance the existing social viewpoints of the consumer.

Throughout time advertising has proven to be a vital organism for the functionality of the market. Every day individuals are faced with numerous advertising, whether it is print, online, TV or other commercial stimuli. Advertisers have put hard work into generating as much value as possible out of their ads. Cross-media campaigns, sponsoring and other formats are all efforts in augmenting consumer realisation and ensuring loyalty. The functionality and efficiency of such techniques have not always proven to be successful. Advertising is supposed to construct value through incorporating consumers into their value chain. Advertising could sometimes result in the deconstruction of value, especially when the value of an offer or a product is demolished by another. More and more broadcasting institutions use split-screening as an innovative form of advertisement. They compete against the various actors of the value network of a live sport event for spectators’ attention. The frame conditions are different. On the one side you have media rights and on the other hand it is dealt with advertising rights in the live case. The aim of our work is to analyse the destructive interaction of varied advertising methods which are broadcasted at one event. The interaction between stadium sponsoring and split screening is the chosen example. When the audience interacts with the ad they become part of the value creation. New technology has created the opportunity of multiple forms of advertising to be broadcasted at the same time in the same place. An example of this is when using background advertising in addition to split-screen fading which is broadcasted on television. Is it necessarily a co-destruction or can the participating actors convert it into co-creation? Therefore we have to ask the following questions:

This research analyzes the opportunities that sport organizations can generate by co-creation of value through social media. After examining two virtual sporting communities, a content analysis of posts in this community provides valuable information about sports brand communities. The results of content analysis show that virtual communities offer online social support and enriched relationship quality to their clubs. These findings create a picture of how virtual communities can support co-creation of value for sport organizations. The primary contribution of the present research lies in exploring the relationship perspective in sport clubs and the key role of online social support through social media and virtual communities. The research found that online social support attracts fans to the community and through social media encourages them to participate, which in turn produces value for the club and for the fans. This offers a new theoretical foundation for investigating co-creation of value in sport management.

Hedonic consumption is often characterized by joint social experiences (Arnould and Price 1993; Holt 1995). Joint experiences involve sharing emotions with each other (Argo et al. 2008; Ramanathan and McGill 2007) and a certain feeling of belongingness may lead to increased hedonic value (Raghunathan and Corfman 2006). Customers of a hedonic mass service, e.g., spectator sports, may experience a variety of emotions during the course of consumption. These feelings vary from positive to negative, from strongly felt emotions to more subtle feelings, and have an impact on the value that a customer draws from the experience. However, to our knowledge the emotional state that arises because a customer feels connected to the collective of other customers has not been described yet. From the field of community research we know that people may feel relational bonds to others (McMillan 1996; McMillan and Chavis 1986). Such a feeling of connectedness may be viewed as the “emotional glue” between all customers in a spatially and timely limited frame. This emotion is qualitatively and semantically different from other feelings such as joy, fear, or anger and can be seen as a sign of homogeny of the group of customers. Despite the fact that customers differ strongly in psychometric and sociodemographic variables, they are all equal in the characteristic that they form a collective gathering. To a certain extent, a feeling of social connectedness may arise between consumers who do not even know each other.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities can be an important tool for businesses to connect with their stakeholders. While there is growing research on the impact of CSR, there is relatively little research on how socially conscious consumers respond to socially responsible initiatives. We address this gap by quantitatively investigating the role of consumer’s social attitudes and their response to social message advertisements. Results indicate that some socially conscious consumers are generally leery of advertising and this can extend to CSR tactics. A consumer’s general attitude towards advertising mediates the relationship between their pro-social viewpoints and their attitude towards the brand, and this process is moderated by the content of the advertisement (i.e., CSR focused or neutral). The findings show that pro-social consumers do react differently to pro-social vs. traditional advertisements. This has distinct implications for managers, as it becomes more important for them to understand the pro-social attitudes of the audience before investing in CSR-focused advertising.

Communication and public relations play a pivotal role in crisis management (Tirkkonen and Luoma‐aho 2011). Due to the high levels of uncertainty created during a crisis, stakeholders have a strong need for fast and accurate information (Seeger and Griffin Padgett 2010). For public sector organizations, crisis communication is perhaps even more challenging and complex, given that government agencies have democratic obligations to serve and communicate with all citizens (McCoy 2014). A main goal of crisis communication is to restore reputation and regain customers’ trust (Utz et al. 2013). It seems likely that individuals have different perceptions of the information quality of crisis communication, which in turn may influence their trust in government. We also suggest that the level of perceived information quality is related to the extent to which people find positive meaning in a crisis (Fredrickson et al. 2003), and to their level of crisis involvement (Claeys and Cauberghe 2014). In this chapter, we identify segments of citizens based on their perceptions of the information quality of local governments’ crisis communication, and assess whether there are differences between these segments in terms of their post‐crisis trust in government, perceptions of positive meaning, and crisis involvement.

Different temporal frames are often used in health communication to convey persuasive messages. This work investigates how temporal frames can be used more effectively depending on an individual’s accessible self-view. This study found that a distal temporal frame is more effective with an independent self-view whereas a proximal temporal frame is more effective with an interdependent self-view. In addition, this chapter examines two mediating variables as being important in understanding the relationship between temporal frame and self-construal on behavioral intentions: persuasiveness and message concreteness. This study revealed that the cognitive information processing of the match effect varied depending on how concretely one construes health-risk-related information. This chapter adds to the existing literature by explaining the underlying mechanisms of the match effects between temporal frame and self-view.

Brands determine marketing activity effectiveness, drive marketplace performance, command premium prices, and, ultimately, impact shareholder value (Ailawadi et al. 2003; Keller 1993; Srivastava et al. 1998). Building brands that customers value is the work of marketing departments. The latter frequently staff brand managers to coordinate a given brand’s marketing activities, deliver brand-development objectives, and be accountable for brand performance (Low and Fullerton 1994). However, a more traditional marketing department-based view of managing brands is narrow. In reality, brands can be built (or destroyed) by employees company-wide, as employees interact with various stakeholder groups (De Chernatony 1999; King 1991). All customer interactions (customer experiences) have brand implications (Brakus et al. 2009; Grace and O'Cass 2004; Sirianni et al. 2013). These interactions are especially crucial for brands in a services context, wherein front-line employees represent—or become—the brand in human form (e.g., Long-Tolbert and Gammoh 2012; Morhart et al. 2009). When the customer experience is suboptimal, the brand is held in the hands of customer service personnel or front-line call-center employees, for example, far from the reach or formal authority of marketing and brand managers. Before the sale, marketing communications (e.g., advertising, salespeople) naturally lead customers to expect positive brand experiences. After the sale, however, things can go wrong. Service failure is inevitable (Bitner et al. 1990; Hart et al. 1990) and can quickly destroy slowly developed goodwill and long-standing relationships (Bitner 1995; Gassenheimer et al. 1998).

Developing economies present many challenges for foreign business-to-business (B2B) firms: unfamiliar cultures and exchange systems, in-group biases, state-driven forms of capitalism, and weak legal systems—each and all intensifying transaction cost economics (TCE) in channel development and the resulting relationships. Yet the right local partners can provide cultural wisdom, market centrality, and other long-term performance advantages, including strategic, organizational, and financial strengths (Luo 1998; Liu et al. 2014; Shi et al. 2014). The many risks and rewards in China’s markets make informed and successful partner selection imperative. And while guanxi capitalism (McNally 2011) presents many indigenous and highly successful enterprise networks to choose from, these are complex and sometimes unforgiving in foreign-local entry and performance relationships (Luo 2007; Liu and Gao 2014).

Consistent with the research attention afforded to market orientation’s impact on logistics firm performance, the present study empirically investigates three seminal constructs underlying market orientation. Specifically, the research explores the relationship between customer orientation, customer trust, and customer commitment on logistics firm performance. More than 500 logistics employees and managers in one of the world’s most vital supply chain hubs, Taiwan, participated in the study. The posited measurement model was estimated using structural equation modeling. The data analysis revealed support for a customer orientation, customer trust/customer commitment, and firm performance causal chain. This causal chain suggests that the customer relationship management paradigm aligned with a market orientation approach is paramount to logistics firm performance.

Previous research has not fully considered how value and satisfaction may in combination contribute to satisfaction and loyalty (Kumar et al. 2013). The present research considers multiple dimensions of value and satisfaction. Value is measured based on price value and quality value (Sweeney and Soutar 2001). Customer satisfaction is also measured in two dimensions, store satisfaction which contains elements related to the store including the merchandise that is sold, and service satisfaction which relates to the customer’s interaction with store personnel and the customer service that they experience (Dabholkar et al. 1996; Mittal et al. 1999). The inclusion of value with satisfaction as determinants of loyalty addresses calls in the literature for this type of research that explains loyalty beyond the satisfaction antecedent alone (Kumar et al. 2013).

The question of why customers patronize small stores is important to academics and practitioners alike, but the perspective of rural and local retail patronage is understudied and underdeveloped (Pan and Zinkhan 2006; Brown and Dant 2006; Runyan and Droge 2008). Also, store patronage from the standpoint of local communities seems to have been only little investigated (Runyan and Droke 2008).

Sales promotions are an important strategic tool for firms wishing to increase sales, attract new customers, or retain existing customers. The proliferation of customer relationship management systems has allowed firms to more easily implement referral reward programs, where a firm’s current customer is offered a reward (i.e., rebate, coupon, and discount) in exchange for recommending the firm’s product to another consumer. These referral reward programs both improve retention of current customers by rewarding word-of-mouth (WOM) behaviors and attract new customers (Ryu and Feick 2007) through positive WOM and referrals.

Recent research in the marketing literature indicates that while consumers’ interest in ethical products is growing, demand for such products still remains weak. Previous research indicates that anticipated guilt can be an antecedent to ethical consumption. Thus, the objective of this chapter is to identify three possible moderating variables: socially responsible consumer behavior (SRCB), consumer attachment style, and perceived similarity that may impact the link between anticipated guilt and ethical consumption. Further, we discuss the possible underlying mechanisms of these effects. By identifying the role that these potential moderators play in the relationship between anticipated guilt and ethical consumption, this research provides propositions that future researchers can test with empirical studies in order to close research gaps and assist marketers in understanding when an anticipated guilt ad is an appropriate strategy in marketing ethical products.

In the 1990s, some called it the issue of the decade (Kirkpatick 1990; Roberts 1996). In this new millennium, it continues to grow in importance as issues such as global warming are further highlighted. Many companies have begun to use green marketing as a way to appeal to consumers. Green marketing is the most often used term; however, it has also been called ecological marketing, environmental marketing, greener marketing, enviropreneurial marketing, green advertising, and sustainable marketing. All of these terms refer to the study of marketing’s impact on the environment and how the environment is included in marketing decisions (Chamorro et al. 2007). Previous research indicates that green marketing can lead to many positive outcomes, such as positive product image, corporate reputation, purchase intentions (Ko et al. 2013), brand attitude (Matthes et al. 2014), and positive image toward the retailer (Lavorata 2014).

Establishing the public’s trust is a critical issue for charities and for the entire nonprofit sector (Herrington 2007). Although most kinds of charities are well regarded (O’Neil 2009), the public is weary of trusting charities (Sargeant and Lee 2002). In addition, the public expects charities to be transparent and accountable (Bryce 2007). For example, in a survey of nearly 15,000 Canadians, 46 % agreed that they did not give more donations because they did not think the money would be used efficiently (Hall et al. 2001). Yet, Saxon (2004) proposed that the real modern-day challenge is whether donors and the public in general understand how a modern charity works. Further to this point, McDougle (2014) found that awareness of the nonprofit sector (i.e., familiarity/knowledge) was a significant predictor of confidence (i.e., trust) in the performance of nonprofits.

While most university settings expect and aspire for researchers to share their findings with policy makers, industry, and society (Tatari et al. 2012), there are several barriers within this process (Sa et al. 2011). In this conceptual chapter, we describe findings from an interdisciplinary investigation of existing work on knowledge use by policy makers and identify opportunities to incorporate marketing theory to facilitate knowledge transfer.

Today’s salesperson is pressured to do more in less time, and technological advancements have become an integral part of the personal selling process (Rapp et al. 2008). During the last 30 years researchers from a diverse set of disciplines, such as information systems research, innovation research, social/organizational psychology, and marketing, have paid a lot of attention to examine the antecedents of individual technology acceptance and use (Brancheau and Wetherbe 1990; Kwon and Zmud 1987; Moore 1987; Taylor and Todd 1995; Venkatesh et al. 2003). The sales studies on the antecedents of technology acceptance primarily deal with features of the technology tools, such as perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness and salespersons’ individual traits and disposition toward technology (Jelinek et al. 2006; Jones et al. 2002; Mallin and DelVecchio 2008; Schillewaert et al. 2005). Little attention, however, has been paid to management policies and actions. Similar to findings related to IT (information technology), the majority of findings in the sales literature suggest technology use positively and that it significantly influences sales performance (e.g., Hunter and Perrault 2007; Jelinek et al. 2006; Mathieu et al. 2007; Rodriguez and Honeycutt 2011; Senecal et al. 2007). Clearly sales are important, but they do not consider salespeople’s feelings, emotions, and psychological aspects of the job (Karasek 1979).

In this study, we measure the roles of individual performance motives, team goal commitment motives, and managerial support on the acceptance of disruptive technologies amongst sales force members. Disruptive technologies are unique in that they require the end user to drastically change their work processes in order to fully integrate the technology. As this transition to a disruptive technology takes both time and effort, a salesperson is likely to be distracted from their primary goals (e.g., hitting deadlines or goals). We explore the interaction of these factors with an online survey of 163 sales force members. A confirmatory factor analysis was run to confirm the validity and reliability of the data while OLS regression was used to analyze the results. To facilitate this analysis, we develop a new, five-item scale that measures technology disruptiveness at the employee level.

The provision of high-value integrated solutions that address customers’ business or operational needs can lead to potential competitive advantages (Davies 2004). Formally, “a solution is a set of customer–supplier relational processes comprising (1) customer requirement definition, (2) customization and integration of goods and/or services and (3) their deployment, and (4) postdeployment customer support, all of which are aimed at meeting customers’ business needs” (Tuli et al. 2007, p. 5). Solving customers’ problems is critical and providing customized solutions that may consist of tangible products; application of specialized competences (knowledge and skills) through deeds, processes, and performances; or combinations that solve customer problems could lead to competitive advantages in the marketplace (Vargo and Lusch 2004).

Structural equation modeling (SEM) has become a quasi-standard in marketing research when it comes to analyzing the cause-effect relationships between latent variables. For most researchers, SEM is equivalent to carrying out covariance-based SEM (CBSEM) or variance-based partial least squares (PLS), whose performance has been researched in a multitude of simulation studies. However, recent research has brought forward a variety of different methods for estimating structural equation models, which have not been researched in-depth. We extend prior research by (1) examining a broad range of SEM methods, several of which have not been analyzed in-depth in prior research (CBSEM (Jöreskog 1978), PLS (Wold 1982), extended PLS (PLSe; Lohmöller 1979), consistent PLS (PLSc; Dijkstra and Henseler 2015), generalized structured component analysis (GSCA; Hwang and Takane 2004), and sum scores), (2) analyzing null relationships in the structural model, (3) considering measurement model results, and (4) reporting additional performance measures that allow a nuanced assessment of the results.

The weak representation of case study research in marketing may in part be attributable to a lack of clarity in demonstrating and assessing rigour. The issue of rigour is ever present in research and in case study research has been the subject of investigation in several discipline-specific studies (for example Beverland and Lindgreen 2010; Dubé and Paré 2003; Gibbert and Ruigrok 2010). These studies have generated an array of insights and recommendations for management and management-related researchers whilst observing that extant advice is sometimes overlooked. In marketing, the lack of published papers means that case study researchers unlike quantitative investigators have few models with which to engage and thus limited guidance on how to deal with the vexatious rigour issues such as generalizability. The purpose of this chapter is to review claims for generalizability through a synthesis of the theory underpinning sampling and the nature of case study research. We offer important propositions for case study selection, which illuminate the burning issue of generalizability. The structure of this chapter is as follows: an overview of case study research rigour, sampling theory as applied to case study research, conclusions and further research.

The concept of switching generally assumes that customers have choice and the ability to change from one service/product provider to another. Yet, not all situations present consumers with the same degree of choice or ability to switch. In the UK, lack of competition, choice, and switching barriers are cited as particular problems facing consumers in switching from one bank to another. Previous studies of switching have tended to focus only on certain aspects affecting switching behavior, such as switching factors (Keaveney 1995; Gerrard and Cunningham 2004) or staying factors (Patterson and Smith 2003; Panther and Farquhar 2004; Colgate and Lang 2001). Other studies have combined elements (Bansal and Taylor 1999) such as switching and sociopsychological factors; but few studies have combined factors affecting both switching and staying. We attempt to provide a more holistic analysis of the factors prompting switching intentions including those factors that serve to promote or inhibit switching or staying. We take as our theoretical basis migration theory and the theory of planned behavior.

Scholars emphasize the role of front-line employees for customers’ experience with the brand, as they constitute the original source of brand equity for external stakeholders while their performance affects customer perceptions of the brand and brand equity (Baumgarth and Schmidt 2010). Current knowledge mostly captures individual brand-related antecedents of employee-based brand equity (EBBE) ignoring how employees’ perceptions of other aspects of the organizational environment shape their levels of EBBE received from the company’s brand (King and Grace 2012). Existing studies also consider brand equity as the outcome of the internal branding process, bypassing whether higher levels of EBBE are actually associated with employees’ reciprocal behavior towards the company or its customers (Lohndorf and Diamantopoulos 2014). Little research scrutiny is attracted to what drives employee brand-based equity (EBBE) as well as its value for successful internal branding outcomes.