Creating Marketing Magic and Innovative Future Marketing Trends

Social and economic disparities prompt the need for services provided by many non-profits as well as most corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Many firms donate resources to non-profit organizations as part of broader goals related to CSR. Non-profit organizations designed to serve individuals, and their communities must therefore use marketing efficiently to foster awareness of what they offer both to the firms looking to engage in CSR and to individuals in need of the non-profit’s services. This marketing message is often designed to communicate how the non-profit makes lives better. It is here where social marketing and public policy intersect, connecting the goals of a non-profit with those who seek to give (i.e., contributors) and its services to those who seek to receive (i.e., clients). Yet few studies exist which examine the services marketed by non-profits to potential contributors from the client’s perspective, that is, those who use these services. Thus, the purpose of this study is to understand how clients view the services they receive from a non-profit and to explore the implications of these views for developing effective social marketing and public policy.

Despite its growing popularity, the implication of point-of-purchase solicitations is unclear. Some research has shown that CRM activities are positively viewed by shoppers (Ellen et al. 2000), and others have shown that it can backfire (Osterhus 1997). It is specifically unclear if point-of-purchase solicitations boost a retailer’s reputation, sales, and shopper loyalty or result in any other competitive lift. Although understanding the impact of point-of-purchase solicitations on retail performance is important, research to date has not addressed this issue in sufficient detail. We fill this gap with the goal of exploring how CRM activities which involve direct participation by the shopper impact retailers.To determine the impact of point-of-purchase charitable solicitations on retail performance, we conducted three survey-based experiments. Together, our results highlight important trends. First, we demonstrate that point-of-purchase donation programs have a grossly negative impact on retailers. We specifically demonstrate that shoppers asked to donate to charities during checkout exhibit significantly lower satisfaction levels than those not asked to donate. Given what the field already knows about the link between satisfaction and performance (e.g., Anderson et al. 1993), this means that checkout-based donation programs adversely impact retail performance. Thus, retailers that solicit point-of-purchase donations are likely to underperform relative to comparable peers. This is not to say that retailers should avoid CRM activities but understand that the structure of such programs is critical to retail success. For example, instead of inviting shoppers to participate in charitable programs at checkout, retailers may be best served by maintaining charitable relationships at corporate levels and showcasing these partnerships through advertising or in-store displays. And retailers that want to maintain charity at checkout programs should work to build communal relationships with shoppers before soliciting such donations. For instance, retailers should repeatedly commit to initiatives that support shoppers and host free events that benefit shoppers.While the managerial implications of this research are quite clear, it makes key theoretical contributions as well. We add to the rich literature on retail performance by demonstrating that shoppers tend to respond to point-of-purchase solicitations negatively; shoppers who do not donate to charities are less satisfied with their shopping experiences than their counterparts. We specifically find that soliciting donations violates the norms of the traditional shopper–retailer relationship which in turn produces negative emotions that are projected onto the retailer.Overall, our results show that the use of donation programs at checkout will lead to an overall decrease in shopper satisfaction. Those that do not donate will experience and even larger decrease in satisfaction levels compared to those that do donate. Moving forward, it will be important to explore what factors eliminate the negative effects of donation solicitation on satisfaction as this has become an important fundraising tool for charities.

Over the past few decades, checkout charity initiatives have spanned numerous retail categories. However, many service retailers, specifically casual sit-down restaurants, have not yet embraced checkout charity. This may be due to the potential impact that money requested for charity has on servers’ gratuities. Thus, this research aims to examine the relationship between checkout charity and service quality and the subsequent effect it has on charitable donation amount and a server’s gratuity. To achieve this objective, this research employs a 2 (donation request: yes/no) × 3 (service quality scenario: excellent/average/poor), between-subjects experimental design. The findings demonstrate that implementing checkout charity does not negatively impact a server’s gratuity when service quality is excellent or average but does so when service is poor. Furthermore, for those consumers who decide to donate money to charity, the donation amount is higher when service quality is poor than when it is excellent or average. This suggests that customers engage in mental accounting when deciding on the amounts to donate to charity and provide to servers via gratuity. These findings have implications for service retailers, as the presence of a charitable donation can have potential negative downstream consequences on management in regard to increased turnover intention and decreased customer willingness to re-patronize the service retailer.

It is hard to overstate the importance of service recovery. One estimation is that companies lose $83 billion annually from bad customer service (Loechner 2010). At the same time, emerging research and practice has begun to focus on moving customers from being merely satisfied to being connected with a company at a deeper level. As an example, consider customer-company identification (CCI), which represents the extent a customer thinks and feels a company represents cherished aspects of his or her self. CCI is highly motivating, such that a customer willingly supports a company through identity sustaining (e.g., patronage) and promoting (e.g., word-of-mouth) behaviors.

Online complaint sharing has grown increasingly popular in recent years, and researchers have chosen to frame such complaints within the negative word-of-mouth domain instead of the customer service domain. The reason for this is quite logical, when considering the type of the Internet sites that researchers examine, such as online review sites, anti-brand sites, or blogs (e.g., Grégoire et al. 2010; Hennig-Thurau et al. 2004; Ward and Ostrom 2006). These types of sites are non-firm-managed online environments (i.e., neutral third-party sites), which foster consumer-to-consumer communication. Reasons why consumers complain on such sites include warning other consumers, altruism, venting negative feelings, or seeking revenge against a firm by sharing negative experiences with others (Grégoire et al. 2009; Hennig-Thurau et al. 2004; Sparks and Browning 2010), which are appropriate to classify as word-of-mouth activities.

Past research has shown that the status of the apologizing service personnel in offline medium impacts fairness perceptions of service recovery differently in cross-cultural settings. The tremendous growth in the global online retailing industry with their ever-increasing consumer base belonging to Eastern cultures makes it imperative to find a cost-effective way to manage service recovery from this cultural group about which there is very little literature. This paper addresses this issue by first showing that what works for Eastern consumers in offline service recovery may not necessarily work in online without suitable modifications. We then further reveal a novel cost-effective way using social media to increase fairness perceptions even in the impersonal online medium. Two experimental studies were conducted using nonstudent samples from a Western country (Germany) and two Eastern countries (India and the Philippines). Our empirical findings indicate that a public apology from a high-status service provider in the online medium that is conveyed through social media would result in higher justice perceptions for consumers in Eastern cultures as compared to Western cultures. For managers of global online retailers, we thus show a powerful yet cost-effective way to deal with consumer complaints.

The US retail industry makes billions of dollars a year by engaging customers to participate in their business (design, production, delivery of goods and services); however, the psychological implications of such participation by customers have recently began gaining scholarly prominence. This paper explores the role of potent upward counterfactual thinking (the process of looking back at events and thinking about how things could have turned out better) in a participatory setup. More specifically, the role of upward counterfactual potency on perceived ownership toward the coproduced good is examined. Additionally, the role of consumer’s self-assessment of participation as an antecedent to upward counterfactual potency and the moderating role of opportunity to return the product on the aforementioned are explored.

Obesity is a leading health crisis in the United States; however, there is almost no research in the arena of obesity within the social space of a retail environment. While some studies examine prejudices toward thin and obese people in general, there are no studies that investigate how shoppers judge one another based on body size. This is an important aspect of consumer behavior as consumer interactions are relevant criteria for determining customer satisfaction (Huang and Hsu 2009). We attempt to bridge this gap in research and provide initial empirical insights into how brand attitudes and the emotional response people have toward other shoppers are affected by other shoppers’ body size (thin, average, obese) and their shopping basket (healthy, unhealthy).

Retailers increasingly utilize private label branding strategy in an effort to simultaneously increase store loyalty and compete with national brands (Ailawadi and Keller 2004; Nies and Natter 2012). Previous research suggests consumers are not only receptive to the notion of private label consumption but in many cases prefer retailer brands over their premium brand competitors (Neilsen 2011; Thomassen et al. 2006). From a supply perspective, many national brand manufacturers, or “dual branders” (ter Braak et al. 2013: 87), produce private label brands to optimize outcomes from the channel relationship (Chen et al. 2010; Kumar et al. 2010). Dual branders do not volunteer this information to prevent loss of the national brand market share due to narrowing gaps between quality perceptions of premiums and private labels (Sethuraman and Raju 2012; Steenkamp et al. 2010). Consequently, consumers are often only able to rely on superficial signals (e.g., packaging or price) to evaluate the origins and quality of private-label products. However, consumers can be inadvertently exposed to dual branding knowledge through other communications such as a manufacturer’s announced product recall or word-of-mouth from others. Thus it is important for marketing researchers to understand how consumers react to the knowledge that two differently priced, competing brands are sourced by the same manufacturer. In response, this research examines the influence of dual branding on customers’ respective brand evaluations through the mechanism of their comparative quality perceptions. Results of the analyses suggest that exposure to dual branding does influence consumers’ comparative quality perceptions between competing private and premium brands, which in turn significantly impacts respective brand evaluations. Specifically, comparative quality perceptions facilitate the indirect effects of dual branding information, which positively (negatively) influences private (national) label evaluations.

Consumers are able to interact with thousands of products and brands throughout their life, but they develop a strong emotional bond by a subset of them (Schouten and McAlexander 1995). It is really interesting the likelihood that consumers might develop strong emotional bonds with brands (Thomson et al. 2005). The analysis of the degree of consumers’ emotional bond will be studied by examining the nature of the influence of the attachment and attitude toward the brand. Retail environment is perfect for this study because retailers come in direct contact with the final consumers (Swarbrooke and Horner 2005). Furthermore, the richness of the retailing environment adds significant more variables, which influence consumer buying decisions (Levy and Weitz 1998). Therefore, the retail environment offers an ideal stage upon which the concept of emotions, attachment, attitude, and brand interacts.

Today, websites try to suggest us everything, ranging from our next sweatshirts to our next holiday destinations and even our next friends. Based on past behavior or preference statements, recommender systems implemented on marketers’ webpages generate personalized predictions about the products, countries, or people we presumably like and preselect a small subset comprising only potentially relevant choice options from the large number of available alternatives (e.g., Ansari et al. 2000; Bodapati 2008; Resnick and Varian 1997). This preselection is intended to reduce decision efforts and uncertainty (e.g., Ansari et al. 2000; Herlocker et al. 2000; Tam and Ho 2005) and, thereby, to increase sales, customer satisfaction, as well as loyalty (e.g., Fleder and Hosanagar 2009; Jannach and Hegelich 2009; Senecal and Nantel 2004; Pathak et al. 2010; Pu et al. 2011). While extant studies are typically based on the assumption that a recommender system’s effectiveness depends on its ability to identify consumers’ preferences and, therefore, is measurable by the number of individuals who follow the generated suggestions, the present study, in contrast, focuses on the impact of recommendations on the construction of preferences. In line with the large body of research on behavioral decision-making, preference structures are often not well defined or stable (e.g., Bettman et al. 1998; Slovic 1995) such that preferences are frequently formed during decision-making rather than before and, thus, might be sensitive to recommended items.The results of two experimental studies, conducted in different contexts (i.e., backpacks and hotels), reveal that recommendations provided by recommender systems cause an anchoring effect on consumer choices which is reflected in biased decisions toward (even randomly) generated suggestions. More precisely, even if recommendations do not match preferences, people still seem to adapt their decisions to the characteristics of recommended items. Thus, this research contributes to research on recommender systems in the marketing discipline (e.g., Ansari et al. 2000; Bodapati 2008; Senecal and Nantel 2004; Ying et al. 2006) by uncovering an anchoring effect on decision-making which has been neglected by previous studies. In addition, the findings of our studies have important implications regarding the employment of recommender systems in practice. On the one hand, our results imply that marketers could use such systems not only to help their customers with purchase decisions but also to “nudge” consumer choices in a desired direction. On the other hand, this research raises important questions in terms of customer protection issues in online shopping environments.

The majority of companies have now adopted social media. The initial euphoria framing social media as a golden opportunity to build harmonious communities of consumers has faded. Marketers now take a more balanced view, giving attention to disharmonious interactions between consumers on social media. Specifically, social media conflict attracts increasing interest from academics and practitioners because of its disruptive nature and potential destructiveness. It has a strong influence on value formation, whether by creating or destroying value. However, existing monitoring tools fail to adequately detect social media conflict, leaving marketers unable to manage conflict effectively. This research develops an instrument to automatically detect social media conflict. In this paper, social media conflict is first conceptualized before presenting the methodology and findings and discussing implications.

Our research goal is to devise a social influence model with sentiment analysis to help organization discover real influential people on social media. This research takes into account retweet and reply as the most important metrics in the proposed social influence model, which is also considered as the quality of post. The sentiment behind retweet and reply is more important than numbers. Our model not only measures the influence from retweet and reply but also considers the factor of sentiment. This research selected four targets from Twitter to examine the proposed model. The results revealed the sentiment ratio of celebrities is higher than politicians because the celebrities usually posted random issues. The politicians’ tweets are easy to provoke a conflict. That is, fans or followers sometimes may have emotional expressions. Sentiment analysis can adjust it based on qualitative perspective of content. The main goal of this study is to fill up the gap by taking into account quantitative and qualitative perspectives. The proposed model can appropriately calculate the social influence of a specific person in the social media to help companies provide adequate marketing campaigns.

Indirect comparative advertising (ICA) is a comparative advertising format that compares the advertised product to vague targets such as “all other brands” or “everyone else.” The scarce past literature dedicated to the effectiveness of ICA suggests that advertisers have little reason to use it (Pechman and Ratneshwar 1991). However, Miniard et al. (2006) convey a different story about its effectiveness. Building on the so-called framing correspondence hypothesis (Rose et al. 1993), Miniard et al. (2006) suggest that the indirect format has potential for positioning the advertised product depending on the goal. They find that a direct comparative ad quoting a specific competitor is more effective than an indirect one in positioning the advertised brand against that specific competitor, while an indirect ad claiming superiority over all other brands is more effective in positioning the advertised brand against the entire market.Participants were randomly assigned to one condition of a 2 (comparative advertising type: DCA vs. ICA) × 2 (with vs. without precise comparative information) between subjects factorial design. The target comparative advertisement depicted a fictitious pain reliever medicine brand promoted along two typical attributes for the product category: “fast acting” and “long lasting” (cf. Miniard et al. 2006). In order to create a more realistic (i.e., non-forced) advertising exposure environment, we did not draw participants’ attention to the comparative ad which was embedded in a 12-page magazine with other ads and articles. Participants were asked to browse the magazine as they usually do when they have a magazine in their hands. The results partially support the hypotheses. The findings call for a better understanding of comparison brand users’ (vs. nonusers) comparative advertising information encoding, resultant mental representations in their memory, and subsequent retrieval of these representations.

A 4 × 3 × 2 between subjects full-factor experiment using homeowners who were some form of pet lover was developed. Subjects viewed an advertisement for a fictitious realtor with either a dog or a cat. The ad copy expressed one of the following experimental conditions: individualism, independence, dependability, or security. Subjects were asked to describe themselves as one of the following: a cat lover, a dog lover, or an animal lover. Further, subjects were classified as either “high” or “low” in terms of scoring on a summation of the list of values (LOV) scale. Outcome effects were attitude toward the ad, attitude toward the realtor, and purchase intentions. A main effect was found for LOV. “High” LOV subjects preferred the ads, preferred the realtor, and had greater purchase intentions than “low” LOV subjects. A significant interaction was found among the four experimental conditions and the three categories of cat lover, dog lover, or animal lover. Cat lovers preferred the ads, preferred the realtor, and had higher purchase intentions regarding the ads conveying individualism and independence in comparison to dog lovers. Dog lovers preferred ads, preferred the realtor, and had greater purchase intentions regarding ads that conveyed dependability and security compared to cat lovers.

Skepticism, denial, and social stigma are just a few of the challenges faced by scholars and practitioners alike as they employ health messaging techniques to communicate the danger of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). With 20 million new cases diagnosed each year and incurring approximately $16 billion in related medical costs (CDC 2014), STDs represent a substantial threat to the public welfare. Unfortunately, even with the identification of effective prevention methods, as well as national and local efforts, STDs, as an overarching category, have not gone into decline (CDC 2014) and have increased their prevalence among certain segments of the population (CDC 2014).

The article focuses on slice of life (SOL) and slice of death (SOD), as two types of semantic differential advertising appeals. We developed and validated a scale for measuring slice-of-life and slice-of-death (SOL&D) advertising appeals through our conceptualization of SOL&D advertising comprising of three factors: advertising complexity, advertising relevance, and advertising valence. SOL&D appeals use these three factors to evoke both positive and negative emotions in advertising, which in turn contribute to attitudes toward the ad and brand. Utilizing the theory of emotional information management (EIM), which draws on the emotional intelligence (EI) literature, we generated three indicators of advertising complexity, three indicators of advertising relevance, and four indicators of advertising valence. The authors make conceptual, measurement, and managerial contributions to the research dealing with slice-of-life versus slice-of-death advertising appeals. The research extends message framing and emotional advertising literature by utilizing emotional informational management framework for measuring and evaluating SOL&D advertising appeals. Practitioners will consider our findings relevant, while future researchers may view our study as a springboard into areas of SOL&D advertising and branding, advertising polysemy, consumer-based brand equity, and cultural differences in interpretation of SOL&D advertising attitudes and purchase intentions.

This paper aims to find out how marketing can play a more strategic role in helping firms improve performance in the Digital Age. Particularly, this paper investigates the drivers of e-Marketing capability and the impact of e-Marketing capability. This research studies how IT capability, marketing, and IT cross-functional collaboration and leadership emphasis can impact e-Marketing capability and thus improve customer relationship management and new product diffusion. In addition, the moderating effect of industry type is also investigated. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed at the end.

Marketing managers are hard pressed to defend their existing products and brands, as well as to launch new ones in efforts to maximize their shareholder value. Drawing upon the market-based assets framework (cf. Srivastava et al. 1998), a substantial body of research in marketing has investigated the effects of product and brand strategies on shareholder value in the last two decades. In marketing, we have an extensive body of knowledge pertaining to the performance implications of product portfolio strategy with a special emphasis on new product introductions (Boatwright and Nunes 2001; Rubera and Kirca 2012; Szymanski et al. 2007; van Herpen and Pieters 2002). Similarly, brands are widely accepted as the most important intangible assets owned by firms that affect shareholders’ assessment of firm value (Mizik and Jacobson 2003; Morgan and Rego 2009; Ndofor and Levitas 2004; Srivastava et al. 1998).

All, or virtually all, introductory level business textbooks are accompanied by banks of multiple-choice test questions, the questions invariably being classified into three levels of difficulty. For several question banks, recent research has shown the accuracy of those classifications to be in the range of 50–60 %. Those researches, though, have used just one operationalization of “difficulty,” albeit the most common 1 % of students answers the given question correctly. However, additional operationalizations of difficulty have been put forth. Possibly the accuracy of published difficulty levels is at least somewhat dependent on the specific measure of difficulty employed. To address this issue, the present research investigates the accuracy of several published question banks using four measures of difficulty: percent correct, extreme subgroups of students, and Guilford’s and Horst’s corrected (for guessing) measures.The accuracy of the difficulty classifications resulting from those measures vis-a-vis their published classifications was determined by a summary descriptive statistic, the Taxonomy Indicator (TaxI, Dickinson 2013), that equals the percent of questions that are correctly classified. Toward arriving at its final value, the TaxI procedure first rank orders questions, from easiest to hardest, on their observed or measured difficulty. The end value of TaxI is a function of the original rank ordering of questions. Possibly the four measures of item difficulty investigated here yield different rank orders of questions, in turn, resulting in different percents of questions classified correctly.Multiple-choice question banks accompanying six texts were examined. Among the six were two editions of a consumer behavior text plus a second consumer behavior text and three editions of a retailing text. Samples of questions were drawn from the banks using systematic sampling. Each of the four measures of item difficulty was calculated for each question.Using each of the four measures of item difficulty, TaxI, then, was calculated for sample questions from each of the six published banks. Addressing the purpose of this research is the range of TaxI across the four measures for the respective banks. The largest range was 2.632 percentage points (61.842–59.210 % correctly classified). The smallest range was 0.594 percentage points (49.555–48.961).Despite their different conceptualizations and empirical operationalizations of “difficulty,” for the purpose of assessing the accuracy of published difficulty classification, the four measures investigated here do not yield appreciably different percentages of questions correctly classified (i.e., TaxI values). Whether one published taxonomy is deemed more accurate than another is not materially affected by the measure of item difficulty employed.

Universities are complex service institutions where a number of factors and actors interact to cocreate value and to achieve innovative teaching. In most UK universities, the diversity of student backgrounds impacting on learning achievements and their variability of skills continue to present obstacles to achieving innovative teaching, leading to a fragmented process in institutional provision and student learning.The diversity and variability of student learning needs could be achieved by providing a standardised and consistent teaching model that uses simulators which are powerful tools that enhance the learning experience. Simulators in higher education (HE) promote conceptual learning, problem-solving skills, co-operation and real-world participation.In business studies (BS), simulators have been shown to offer many advantages. They help improve the students’ knowledge of the business theories and their confidence about their employability. For lecturers, simulators foster innovative teaching methods and improve team working abilities.However, although a plethora of simulators are being produced for BS, many academics are still reluctant to use this unique educational resource. It is expected that the number of universities using simulators will rise in the future as a result of the UK government’s push for good teaching. Therefore, it is important for universities to know why some academics are still reluctant to the use of simulators in their teaching. The purpose of this study is to explore the drivers and barriers for academics in using simulator games in the UK universities.

This study investigates and analyzes university/college slogans which play an important role regarding institution-specific positioning and digital marketing. By discussing the literature and morphological issues (word formation in sentences), the study investigates 1935 universities and 4-year colleges in the USA. Findings of this study reveal that nearly half of the institutions used slogans in 2007 on their Websites. At the same time, this number declined significantly after 7 years in 2014. These findings clearly support the notion that universities and colleges are showing limited interest regarding placing slogans on their Websites. Interest in slogans may be declining because of the appearance of new technology platforms and digital media. Findings of the study confirm that slogans help universities and colleges to seek identity and develop online marketing campaigns that aim at differentiating their academic programs and institutional image. The paper carries a meaningful value added in the areas of positioning and digital marketing which often change in higher education to deal with competition, digital technologies, and new delivery methods.

This paper extends the understanding of positive customer feedback. Technological advances suggest future trends in customer feedback management will encompass ever advanced methods of data capture and analysis. Thus, feedback is increasingly likely to contain both negative and positive sentiment, as opposed to the predominantly isolated negative content which researchers and practitioners have historically focused on. By comparing and contrasting frontline employees’ and customer’s perspectives, we develop a deeper understanding of the main elements and characteristics of positive customer feedback, its various impacts, and the perceived importance of this phenomenon for both actors. Exploratory research was conducted using a novel integrated methodological approach combining two well-established qualitative techniques: structured laddering interviews and two significant components of the Zaltman metaphor elicitation technique (ZMET) (Zaltman 1997) (unstructured in-depth questions and the visual projective technique). This dual approach enabled the identification and discernment of deeper meanings that customers and FLEs associate with their particular perceptions of positive customer feedback. Forty participants (20 customers, 20 employees) were interviewed using snowball sampling (Groth et al. 2009). Customer participants were customers of various service industries including retail, hospitality, and tourism, ensuring that we gathered FLE perceptions of a range of spontaneously received feedback, communicated in different scenarios and forms. Employee participant inclusion criterion was that they had a working experience as FLEs in a service industry. Understanding of positive customer feedback is extended beyond the current literature (i.e., gratitude, compliments) via the identification of nine characteristics and a number of associated impacts on both customers and frontline employees. Both actors share similar understanding of positive customer feedback; however, the importance of the various elements and subsequent impacts varies between the two. The study contributes to a holistic understanding of customer feedback by countering the dominant focus on the “dark side” and proposes a complimentary view of the positive, with implications for management of positive service encounters. The positive consequences identified suggest that managers should engineer processes and develop an exchange culture designed to increase opportunities for customers to give employees more, positive, feedback. We contend that with changes in technology and society, now is the time to rebalance this negative approach with an increased focus on positive customer feedback.

The hospitality industry is dynamic and highly competitive. Being a service industry, the role of service quality in the success of hotel businesses cannot be overemphasised. It is therefore vital for hotel managers to have a good understanding of what customers want. Identifying the specific expectations of customers and the dimensions of the service quality relevant for each specific segment of the hotel industry would help hotel management surmount the challenge of improving and delivering quality service (Akbaba 2006). This study develops a scale to determine which items and factors are relevant for small hotels’ service quality in developing country context.

Several studies have sought to investigate the potential of marketing efforts as a tool for quality signals (Kirmani and Rao 2000). Harris and Goode (2010) present a model of e-servicescape from dimensions of websites that influence the customer’s perceptions about products and services offered on the Internet. The development of an experiment is aimed to verify the relationship of cause and effect between variables. The procedure includes the development of platforms with different quality levels (high, medium, and low). The channels were accessed and analyzed by students and then assessed the credibility of the signal (quality signals). The theory of quality signals is based on the assumption that, in the negotiating process, the parties involved have access to different amounts of information (Akerlof 1970). This situation is recognized as scenarios of “information asymmetry” (Kirmani and Rao 2000). The greater the asymmetry of information and the difficulty in identifying the customer a quality product at the time of purchase, the greater the relevance of the company transmitting signals to consumers about the quality (Rao; Qu; Ruekert 1999). Harris and Goode (2010) e-servicescape model presents three dimensions that result in perception of quality digital environment organizations: aesthetic appeal, design/functionality, and financial security/environment. The guidelines of the platforms were signed from theoretical references of Harris and Goode (2010) model. The website with the highest quality with excellence should encompass all dimensions of the model. The website of average quality contemplates the dimensions with less force. The low quality neglected the majority of elements. The characterization of service and brand was created with the objective of having control of their effects on the prior knowledge by the consumer. Undergraduate students were chosen as the sample. According to Hair et al. (2005), 30 observations are sufficient to perform the analysis of variance (ANOVA); however, due to the intention of greater consistency in the database, it has reached the number of 40 observations per treatment. Regarding exposure to the websites, there was a total balance in the number of participants in each treatment. Forty individuals (33.3 %) were exposed to high-quality website, 40 individuals (33.3 %) to medium-quality website, and the other 40 subjects (33.3 %) were exposed to low-quality website (n = 120). The H1 hypothesis relates to the measurement of differences from the website with the factor dependent on the credibility of the signal that was observed from the ANOVA test of a factor variable. With F 370.1 and p < 0.05, reject the null hypothesis and confirm that there are significant differences between the means of the credibility of the signal groups in relation to treatments. Tukey’s test, in which the groups are compared pairwise, demonstrated that the differences between means were also significant among themselves. Thus, confirming the hypothesis that the perception of investment or credibility of the signal is perceived as a significant difference in websites of different qualities. The second hypothesis (H2) suggested that the e-servicescape is positively related to the credibility of the signal of the website. Pearson correlation was considered significant (level below 0.01). The correlation coefficient (r) shows that there is a strong association (r = 0.92) between the variable x (e-servicescape) and the variation in another variable y (website credibility of the signal); an increase in e-servicescape is accompanied by an increase in the perception of the sign of the investment website, thus, confirming the second hypothesis of the study (H2). The results are important theoretically because they meet other studies that verify the digital platforms of organizations as signaling elements of the quality on the Internet.

Individuals easily assign personality traits to brands and form relationships with brands (Fournier 1998). Brand characters provide the potential for an optimal brand relationship through increased positive emotion, more positive brand personality attributes, positive impact on brand attitude, and an overall greater liking for the brand (Delbaere et al. 2011). Anthropomorphism theory, personification, self-expansion theory, and imagination exploit brand character tactics even further, providing the perception of similarities and mutually beneficial brand relationships (Delbaere et al. 2011; Huang and Mitchell 2014). “There is nothing, in truth, that can’t be anthropomorphized … … the maxims of modern marketing are adopt an animal and feature a creature” (Brown 2010:215). But surprisingly, marketing literature on brand characters has yet to address future research recommendations from over a decade ago (e.g., Callcott and Lee 2004). This research contributes to our better understanding of branding with advertising icons, spokescharacters, and brand mascots, collectively referred to as brand characters throughout this research. Noteworthy contradiction and lacking distinction among these brand character types are highlighted. Current typologies exist, but their categories are overlapping and confusing. Contributory clarity is provided. A more thorough and theoretically sound classification is presented. The inclusion of a distinction between animated characters and real-animal brand characters is deemed necessary. An additional contribution to the brand character literature is provided with the addition of a fourth, real-animal type of brand character, coined, animal ambassadors (e.g., the Aflac Duck; Amos 2010). Brands that employ brand characters should be viewed as a distinct, different kind of brand, and brands that employ animal ambassadors are an even more distinct, different kind of brand. Based upon this proposed notion, recommendations for future research are provided.

Although previous context effect literature has confirmed the mood congruence effect, this study attempts to examine the emotional blunting phenomenon that could possibly occur between same valence emotions when the emotions have a different appraisal. Building on the appraisal tendency framework and emotional blunting hypothesis, this study aims to investigate how an existing discrete emotion (i.e., anger, disgust, or pride) elicited from a media context blunts or augments subsequent emotional experiences (i.e., sadness or empathy) elicited by a commercial that follows. The findings of the study will not only contribute to the theory of advertising context effect but also provide a useful guide to help practitioners implement a proper ad placement.

The current study posits that perceived length of the video ad might be incongruent with the actual length of the video ad, and thus, it might be more influential to viewer’s reaction. This study will examine the effect of the completeness of the narrative ad on viewer’s perception and attitudinal responses to the ad in the context of online video advertising. We expect that viewers would perceive that incomplete ads are always shorter than complete ads, regardless of their relative lengths. Further, we predict that this perception affects viewer’s attitude toward the ad contrarily depending on the context of ad presentation. Specifically, people would prefer a complete ad to an incomplete ad when the ad is presented independently, while people would prefer an incomplete ad to a complete ad when the ads are presented contextually in media content. However, the effect of completeness on people’s attitude toward the ad will be eliminated when the actual amount of ad time is explicitly provided.

For this special session, we propose to have an interactive panel session in which expert panelists explore the social, technological, and organizational issues related to emerging types of wearable technology or the wide range of devices that people can wear on almost any part of the anatomy; for example, some of the most well-known wearable devices include the Google Glass, the Pebble, and the Fitbit.

Consumer transgression is an emerging field of study within service marketing (Fullerton and Punj 2004; Harris and Reynolds 2004; Jones et al. 2011; Lovelock 1994; Tonglet 2002). Some of the topics that service scholars have examined include contagious effects of consumer transgressions in access-based services such as car sharing (Schaefers et al. forthcoming), territorial behaviors (Griffiths and Gilly 2012), customer rage (Surachartkumtonkun et al. 2014), spectator rage (Grove et al. 2013), employees dealing with dysfunctional customer behavior (Gong et al. 2014; Harris and Reynolds 2003), snubs and betrayals in relationship transgression (Jones et al. 2011), theft (Cox et al. 1993; Tonglet 2002), and consumer retaliation as a response to dissatisfaction (Huefner and Hunt 2000). However, there is scarce research on how consumers view their own misbehavior and how managers could influence consumers’ own view of their misbehavior. In addition, whereas past service literature focuses on identifying the antecedents, consequences, and typologies of consumer transgressions in specific service sectors (Harris and Daunt 2011), studies investigating the cognitive processes underlying customer transgressions remain lacking (Fisk et al. 2010; Schaefers et al. forthcoming). This study fills these gaps in the service literature.We seek to extend this literature and propose that consumers will make more stringent self-judgment if they adopt a third-person perspective when imagining a service scenario. Across a series of studies, we find evidence that relative to the first-person perspective, the third-person perspective motivates moral stringency by increasing principle-based reasoning or deontological reasoning and judgments of immorality. Our findings can be used in advertising and design of service layout to lower incidents of customer misbehaviors.

Customers often act in a service context by voluntarily helping other customers and the firm. This voluntary helping behavior is termed customer citizenship behavior in the service literature. Customer citizenship behavior (CCB) involves behavior that is outside of the customer’s required role for service delivery and consumption, but that is unsolicited, helpful, and constructive toward other customers and the firm (Bove et al. 2009). For example, customers may help other customers find a product and complete a survey for the firm (Groth 2005).

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become an umbrella concept for initiatives that aim at doing good. The concept of “triple-bottom-line thinking” indicates that sustainable business includes not only an economic dimension but also an environmental and a sustainable dimension (Elkinton 1997). Managers have come to consider CSR initiatives as appealing given the potential positive effects on relationship quality, brand, and firm performance (Homburg et al. 2013). However, research shows varying effects on financial performance and outcomes, and they vary from showing an impact on consumers that embrace the firm’s CSR initiative (i.e., where there is firm-consumer congruence) and where there is no effect (e.g., consumers without a CSR interest) (Leonidou et al. 2013; Sen and Bhattacharya 2001). The majority of these studies evaluated CSR initiatives based on consumer perceptions of a product or brand. Few studies have evaluated CSR in the context of business-to-business (B2B) services (cf. Ostrom et al. 2015). A major difference between consumer and business markets is that the later usually are made up of fewer actors; some business firms might even know all their customer firms by name which seldom is the case in consumer markets (Håkansson and Snehota 1995). This means that the cost for sustainable initiatives has to be divided into a smaller number of beneficiaries which makes the overhead cost per user viable.

Carsharing user numbers and the set of related service offerings are growing globally. Offerings can be categorized into business-to-consumer (B2C) and peer-to-peer (P2P) services. The latter allows consumers to rent and lend privately owned vehicles via online marketplaces. Consumer behavior research on carsharing is predominantly focused on users’ consumption in B2C contexts. However, such research may not be directly applicable to P2P carsharing. Transactions are made with strangers, involving asymmetric information and economic risks, raising the relevance of psychological factors such as trust. In P2P accommodation, trust is a barrier and central differentiator toward B2C services, from a participant’s perspective (Ert et al. 2016; Tussyadiah and Pesonen 2016). In B2C carsharing, renters benefit from a repeated interaction with a single service provider, which follows a predefined set of processes, and the rented cars are largely of the same quality and overall condition. In P2P carsharing, renters need to develop trust toward the vehicle owner (e.g., regarding the car maintenance, cleanliness, availability) and have to do so for every single transaction to a different owner. Research on P2P carsharing, mainly psychological and motivational drivers to use P2P carsharing, remain scarce but can provide valuable insights for managers confronted with P2P carsharing-related issues. Especially since studies indicate that globally 21 % vs. 30 % of potential consumers in Germany would consider renting a privately owned vehicle, but actual numbers remain significantly behind these projections (Nielsen 2014; ING DiBa 2015).

Although there is a wealth of psychological research on how people predict the probability of outcomes and the duration of tasks, there is little on how they predict spending (see Peetz and Buehler 2009). This is unfortunate because spending predictions underlie many decisions, from whether to have kids to where to go for lunch. Our objective is to understand spending predictions by extending theory and research from other domains of judgment. In particular, we focus on unpacking effects. We ask whether unpacking a complex or multifaceted spending category (e.g., “monthly spending on groceries”) by listing one of its elements and a residual category (e.g., “monthly spending on meat and other groceries”) influences predictions. On normative grounds it should not (the referent of judgment remains fixed), but psychological research on other judgment domains suggests that it will.

Almost 35 % of Americans are considered to be obese (Center for Disease Control 2015), and more than half of Americans will not have enough savings to maintain their accustomed standard of living upon retirement (Porter 2015). Though consumers may have the best of intentions, research indicates that they often miss the mark when making long-term decisions. In this research, we investigate a new method for improving consumers’ long-term decisions by encouraging them to think about their future more concretely.

The very foundation of relationship marketing practice hinges on the development and nurturing of meaningful exchanges between buyers, sellers, and the focal organization (Morgan and Hunt 1994). One critical element which manifests in various forms in a salesperson-customer-firm triad is the notion of organizational identification (Dutton et al. 1994). Previously studied in terms of both customer-company identification (Bhattacharya et al. 1995; Bhattacharya and Sen 2003; Ahearne et al. 2005) and employee-company identification (Dutton et al. 1994; Bergami and Bagozzi 2000), research in this realm focuses on how employees and customers forge bonds of identification with the companies they work for and patronize.Social identity theory provides the framework for understanding how the powerful effects of identification manifest. Tajfel and Turner (1985) outline the parallels between personal identity (self-concept) and social identity which rely upon salient group characteristics. Social identity is therefore the perception of belonging to a group that occurs when a person identifies strongly with that group (Bhattacharya et al. 1995).Stemming from the notion of social identity theory is organizational identification, a phenomenon which occurs when a person experiences a feeling of oneness or belonging to an organization (Bhattacharya et al. 1995). When identification occurs, the person may actually begin to incorporate the organization into his/her individual self-definition (Mael and Ashforth 1992). Dutton et al. (1994) similarly assert that organizational identification cognitively occurs when an individual’s self-concept mimics the same attributes of the organization.In following with the well-documented effects that identification has on employees and customers, it is believed that organizational identification will hold compelling influence over a salesperson. We hypothesize that job satisfaction, self-efficacy, and, ultimately, overall selling performance will be impacted.Theoretical implications of this research include an application of organizational identification and social identity theory in the specific context of sales. While customer identification and general member identification have been shown to bear strong relationships on various firm outcomes, the specific notion of salesperson identification with the organization is highly deserving of further exploration. Managerial implications of this research include outlining best practices for communicating the most beneficial projection of a firm’s identity. Given the relationship between identification and customer perceptions of a firm, a salesperson’s organizational identification is similarly believed to hold significant effects.

Although it has been generally reported that high-pressure sales tactics can have negative effects on both the customer and the salesperson/firm (e.g., Chu et al. 1995), the amount of attention devoted to the subject in the marketing literature is less than optimal. As such, our understanding of factors, such as salesperson credibility, that can contribute to consumer perceptions of sales pressure could also benefit from more research effort. Additionally, with the millennial generation playing an ever-increasing role in the consumer population, the need exists to examine the role of consumer entitlement in this relationship. Using a sample of 326 consumers, this research seeks to address these gaps in the literature.While the majority of the literature on source credibility has been relative to social influence, very few have examined credibility within the personal selling context (Sharma 1990). The basis of persuasion is the same for either, so the theories applied to social influence and advertising should reasonably be expected to be applicable to selling situations. Consumer perceptions of salesperson credibility have been found to be higher in less important purchases, than in extremely important ones (Belonax et al. 2007). Generally speaking, the more important a purchase is, the more potential pressure will be felt during its process. Extending this finding to the current study, one could argue that if salesperson credibility is perceived to be lower in more important, potentially more pressure-filled purchases, it should then be negatively related to a consumer’s perceptions of sales pressure. That is, more perceived sales pressure should be expected when salesperson credibility is low.In their effort to introduce the personality variable of entitlement in a retailing context, Boyd and Helms (2005: 273) have defined consumer entitlement as “the extent to which the buyer perceives himself or herself to be a special customer of the firm.” In concert with the conceptualization of Boyd and Helms (2005), Fisk and Neville (2011) found that “the behaviors of entitled customers seem to reinforce the notion that these individuals perceive themselves as superior to others” (p. 394). Empirical research has found that Americans are experiencing unprecedented levels of narcissism (Twenge 2006). The youngest members of the millennial generation (often referred to as the “entitlement” cohort) have been characterized as “possessing a greater sense of entitlement” than its older millennial cohort members (Debevec et al. 2013). Additionally, there has been a trend of declining resilience among younger Americans (Gray 2015) that will likely result in a heightened sensitivity to feel pressure from less than credible salespeople.Hypothesis 1, predicting that salesperson credibility is negatively related to consumer perception of sales pressure, was confirmed through a significant beta of −.528. Meanwhile, hypothesis 2, predicting that consumer entitlement would moderate the negative relationship of credibility and perceived sales pressure, was also confirmed. The interaction between salesperson credibility and consumer entitlement was graphed, and the simple slopes were tested per Aiken and West (1991). The results provided additional support for the interaction effect as the impact of low salesperson credibility on perceptions of sales pressure was at its strongest for those high in entitlement. When the salesperson was perceived as credible by the consumer, however, there was significantly less sales pressure perceived by the consumer regardless of his/her level of entitlement.These results serve to further underscore the importance of a salesperson’s credibility in the eyes of the customer. A salesperson’s credibility can effectively nullify the negative moderating impact of consumer entitlement, as well as the degree of perceived pressure felt by the customer. Sales training should focus on not only technical expertise in the form of product knowledge but also impression management (i.e., people skills) in an effort to ensure that their salespeople are perceived to be credible in the eyes of their customer.

Despite the ubiquity of competition in sales, little is known about how competition effects the ethical behaviors of salespeople. This study examines the relationship between competitive psychological climate, ethical psychological climate, and the ethical behavior of salespeople directed at their customers during sales interactions. Using a unique dyadic data set, this study is interested in salesperson ethical intentions from the salesperson’s perspective and salesperson ethical behavior as perceived by their customers. The results of the dyadic study provide insight into the perceptions of salespeople and their customers in regard to ethical behaviors. Looking at the differences and similarities from a dyadic perspective offers interesting implications for both researchers and managers into what salespeople plan to do and how their customers perceive what actually happened.

The brand-brand dyad is increasingly becoming a holistic interbrand relationship; we define these interbrand relationships as consisting not only of traditional, tangible value created through strategic brand alliances/co-branding/brand extensions (Park et al. 1996; Rao and Ruekert 1994; Simonin and Ruth 1998) but also of nontraditional, intangible value created through interbrand communications. Social media has deepened and broadened marketplace relationships beyond brand-consumer relationships (Fournier et al. 2012) into consumer-consumer relationships (Hennig-Thurau 2004, 2010). While brand-consumer and consumer-consumer communications seem more organic providing firms with value ranging from improved consumer brand attitudes to brand loyalty, it seems counterintuitive that consumers would care about interbrand communications.Should brands bother to continue with the interbrand communication strategy? Do interbrand communications have any meaningful effect on the interbrand relationship? Most importantly, do interbrand communications have any effect on consumer evaluations of interbrand (brand alliance/co-branded/brand extension) products? We suggest that interbrand communications have a positive impact on the interbrand relationship—not only on brand attitudes but also on interbrand product evaluations. Given, when the initiating brand is familiar, there is greater impact on post-interbrand communication attitudes toward the brands, and given product congruency positively impacts attitudes toward interbrand communication, we test the effects of interbrand communications and interbrand product announcements on consumer evaluations of interbrand products and determine how interbrand communications contribute to the interbrand relationship.

The phenomenon of electronic word of mouth (eWOM) has been the focus of a substantial amount of research, with negative eWOM receiving a great deal of that attention. Compared to positive ratings, negative reviews elicit stronger feelings toward both the brand and its performance (Mizerski 1982). Indeed, research indicates that four out of five online consumers have changed their decision to purchase based on a negative online product review (Cone 2011). While sales effects directly attributable to eWOM have been shown to be short-lived (Moe and Trusov 2011), little is known about the long-term impact of negative eWOM on a brand. A study of movie ticket sales, however, did find that the volume of reviews can have a significant impact on overall movie revenues (Duan et al. 2008), suggesting that there may be long-term effects of eWOM. While the power of eWOM is accepted, to date, extant literature has not specifically addressed the impact of responses to negative eWOM and how those responses may affect readers’ evaluations of the focal brand. Our research examines how a response (i.e., a negative review has been posted online and another person posts in reference to the original comment) can counter a negative online review and empirically examines the differing impact based on who responds.

Brand personality has become an increasingly important concept within brand theory, and factor-based methods constitute the standard measure in brand personality research. However, questions have been raised about the validity of current factor-based models. This research explores how brand personality characteristics that are salient in verbal and visual advertising content change over time as the brand is extended into multiple product categories. The empirical data are based on a case study of four sub-brands of the personal and skin care brand Nivea, including an advertising analysis and a document analysis. The results show that the meanings of words that represent brand personality characteristics in advertising content shift across different product categories. The study emphasises the problems related to the use of a generalised brand personality scale and develops an alternative methodological approach for brand personality research.

The ways consumers gather information and communicate about brands have been changing dramatically over the last decade (Hennig-Thurau et al. 2010). Content in the traditional media era was disseminated based on prearranged schedules via one-way communication channels. This model is gradually changing to allow consumers to select the content they want at the time of their choosing (Wildman 2008). This switch challenges brand managers’ understanding about the types of connections that consumers tend to seek in this new communication landscape (Leeflang et al. 2014).

Recently, with a fact that approximately 25 % of US advertisements are celebrity endorsement, the use of celebrities in advertising is no longer a recent phenomenon (Shimp 2000). Because of popularity and effectiveness of celebrity endorsement, it has enjoyed much resonance among academics and practitioners (Vaughn 1980). One of the most effective ways of celebrity endorsement is employing “matchup effect” that matches celebrities’ images/characteristics with the product they are endorsing (e.g., Till and Busier 2000). Considering importance of ad message in the context of donation (e.g., Entman 1993), current research applies construal level message framing that emphasizes how information is represented: abstract or concrete (e.g., Trope et al. 2007). Thus, the purpose of current research is to investigate the effects of celebrity endorsement on donation with the moderating role of construal level ad messages.

The theories commonly used to explain celebrity endorsement in advertising are mostly borrowed from such disciplines as communication (Austin et al. 2008; Hung 2014), social and cognitive psychology (Ross et al. 1984), and anthropology (McCracken 1989). This, of course, is not a problem per se as advertising phenomena are indeed related to these fields. Furthermore, advertising has considerably benefited from adopting and extending such theories. However, the explanatory and predictive power of the existing theories can vary as a function of context (Amos et al. 2008). Therefore, not all aspects of celebrity endorsement have been effectively researched so far. The current research seeks to examine one such aspect, the role of attractiveness, by applying an evolutionary psychology perspective. First, a brief review of the extant literature is provided. Second, it is argued that evolutionary psychology is an appropriate overarching framework under which celebrity endorsement can be understood and explained. Specifically, the article examines the role of mating cues (Griskevicius and Kenrick 2013) in the perception of attractiveness in celebrity endorsement.

In marketing in general and brand-related communication in particular, progress in neuroeconomics provided advanced tools to measure the impact of marketing activities and generated new findings and evidence for intuitive “gut knowledge” with reference to the performance of marketing activities. Consequently, high expectations in neuroeconomics generally and in neuroimaging technology particularly raised the hopes of marketers that their (daily business) problems could be solved, e.g., by improving marketing activities (pricing strategies, product packaging design, etc.) or uncovering insights about customer’s true preferences. Moreover, neuroeconomics findings such as the winner-take-all/first-choice-brand effect, meaning that only the favored brand of a customer positively emotionalizes the decision-making process and therefore increases the buying probability, challenge the suitability of established marketing and marketing research concepts such as the evoked set. However, in the contemporary science and business world, the label “neuro” is overused, and an increasing number of companies sell neuro as a business activity (e.g., consulting, market research, etc.). With this tendency in mind, the aim of this paper is to discuss justifiable hopes from blind hype as well as to provide guidance for serious marketing purposes.

Regular consumption of a well-balanced diet is an important factor for ensuring healthy nutrition, especially in children of primary school age. In particular, seafood products are key components of a healthy diet and are important culturally and ethically around the world (Affinita et al. 2013). The communication of a balanced and ethical diet and the achieved health benefits needs to be carefully balanced to take into account various family factors which influence eating habit formation in young children (Castaño et al. 2015). The family atmosphere is the first and most crucial place where children acquire the examples and principles of own eating habits. Indeed, this paper explores the effects of family eating habits on sustainable seafood consumption habit creation in children.

Word-of-mouth studies have been extended to the online environment with the increasing engagement of consumers in sharing and gathering information. Industry report suggests that two-thirds of consumers trust consumer opinions posted online—the third-most-trusted format, higher than traditional advertising channels (Nielsen 2015). Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) has been widely adopted by consumers in purchase decision-making. Elaboration likelihood model developed by Petty and Cacioppo (1986) has been widely used in persuasion studies. Prior research on eWOM has applied the ELM model in explaining the effect of eWOM on consumer behavior. However, there is no consensus on how consumers process eWOM in different conditions with different cues. This paper seeks to develop a framework of consumers’ eWOM processing based on the ELM model. The author links the factors studied in the eWOM literature, such as characteristics of review content and reviewer, involvement, and prior knowledge, with the major components in the ELM model, such as motivation and ability, together. The framework provides an overview of the current studies.

The increasing interconnection of automobiles among each other as well as with the environment promises the implementation of various new ideas and concepts (Narla 2013). Thereby the connected car seems to be “one of the most fascinating innovations in the long history of the automotive industry” (Telefónica Digital 2013). Enabled by permanent communication between vehicles and environment, experts expect a significant improvement in transport safety, efficiency, and daily travel comfort (Sichitiu und Kihl 2008). This research aims to contribute knowledge to the discussion on how connected car technologies will evolve and which concepts and business models will be enabled thereby. With the help of this study, we try to answer the following research questions: (1) How will the connected car technology develop in the future (5–15 years)? (2) Which technology concepts will be dominant and established in the future? (3) What are individual and economic consequences?To investigate these questions, we used a mixed-method approach consisting of a focus group (Hair et al. 2009) and Delphi analysis (Dalkey and Helmer 1963). The focus group consisted of seven interviewees with diverse backgrounds such as representatives of technology companies, automotive suppliers, or a university research institute for intelligent and technical systems. The interviews followed an interview guideline (McCracken 1988). During the analysis, we developed a category system, based on an inductive and deductive approach, as it is common in research practice (Miles and Huberman 1994).The research offers a first overview of the general significance of increasing interconnection of vehicles. The results show the interconnection as one of the most important topics in the industry, which implies huge potential for promising business models. One example for a promising concept realized by car interconnection is mobility on demand, which can target younger people or low-income earner. Nevertheless, barriers in relation to further drivers still exist. Future research should focus on one specific concept. There is a potential to investigate cars as a distribution mechanism for service provision (Vargo and Lusch 2004, 2008, 2016). Dieter Zetsche (CEO Daimler Benz) pronounced that automotive manufacturer will be less manufactured but more mobility service provider in the future. In this context, it will be interesting to investigate customer requirements on mobility solutions. Important questions are how to create and combine them and how to establish them on the market. With vehicle-to-grid concept and pay-as-you-drive insurances, this research already gave an overview of some promising mobility services.

Retailers are facing major changes, including intensified competition, increased internationalization, and technological advances, which are transforming the competitive landscape at a fast pace. Simultaneously we see an emerging paradigm shift in consumers’ buying behavior. Digital devices such as smartphones and tablets allow consumers to search and shop online, irrespective of time and place and without geographical boundaries. While these devices originally were used mainly for information search, mobile purchases are becoming a natural part of many consumers’ shopping habits.

Dhruv Grewal (Ph.D. Virginia Tech) is the Toyota chair in Commerce and Electronic Business and a professor of Marketing at Babson College. His research and teaching interests focus on direct marketing/e-business, retailing, global marketing, pricing, and value-based marketing strategies. He has published over 100 articles in journals such as Journal of Retailing, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, as well as other journals. He currently serves on numerous editorial review boards.

The digital and social media campaign of the NITB is evaluated using both qualitative and quantitative performance metrics. The overall success of the GoT Belfast campaign is weighed in terms of economic costs to attract the filming to Northern Ireland versus the economic impact on the region. The assessment addresses the process to evaluate the fit between film and location, the strategies used by the DMO to attract the film production, the impact of the DMO digital and social media campaign, and an overall assessment of the economic impact of the film production on the region.

The use of social media is ubiquitous in American culture. Seventy-four percent of American adults report using social networking sites; among consumers 18–29 years of age, the penetration rate is 90 % (http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fact-sheet/, 2014). As social media has increased in importance as a marketing medium, placement of links to social media in various outlets has become widespread. The expected advertising spend in this area is $14 billion by 2018 (http://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-advertising-spending-growth-2014-9, 2014). Moreover, the use of multiple media to reach a target audience is more prevalent than ever before. Conventional advertising on high-reach media such as television and magazines is supplanted with a mix of touch points, espousing a huge number of media alternatives (Journal of Advertising Research 53:221–230, 2013). Magazine advertisements frequently carry colorful social media icons. This qualitative study explores the attitudes of social media adopters toward these magazine links. Findings suggest that the most salient features of compelling social media links are promotional offers (such as coupons, discounts, free shipping, games, contests, or any other thing that is interesting about the company) and a clever link or hashtag keyword that facilitates easy information access about a particular product in an advertisement.

Native advertising, or paid content that is assimilated with the visual design and function of nonpaid content on a publisher’s site, is growing in popularity. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) asserts widespread advertiser and publisher agreement regarding clear and prominent disclosure that native ads are paid content. The disclosures are important because they help prevent scrutiny about whether native advertising is misleading or deceptive, which could trigger policy intervention. However, by definition, native ads, including their disclosures, are designed to match the experience provided by other content. So, it is not clear (a) if consumers know native ads are sponsored content or (b) whether consumers care about the source of the content. Thus, the initial research questions are How are advertisers using native advertising? How are they disclosing their sponsorship of the content? To begin to address this gap in our understanding of native advertising, the article begins with a report of current native advertising formats and practices. It then reviews 122 examples of native ads from identified native advertising leaders over a 31-day period on October 2014. The report summarizes ad format (video, content, picture), industries that used native ads, the amount of engagement with the content during the 31-day period, and, perhaps most importantly, how the sponsorship was disclosed in each case. Most native ads that were recognized were in-stream ads that used words (vs. video or pictures). However, videos had higher levels of engagement (as measured by social media). Videos also seemed more likely to use celebrities and emotional appeals. Technology companies were the dominant users of native ads during the time period. Substantial variation existed in words used, shading, colors, capitalization, contrast between text and background color, font size, and timing/placement of disclosures. The manuscript contributes to the conceptualization of native advertising, provides an overview of disclosures currently used, and provides directions for next steps and future inquiry by marketers, policy makers, and policy influencers.

In recent years, it has become increasingly accepted that brands possess the capacity to convey different sets of benefits to different consumers and that these benefits can be functional, experiential, and/or symbolic in nature. While our understanding of functional and experiential branding has grown considerably over the past quarter of a century, our knowledge of symbolic branding lags behind. Relatedly, although a considerable amount of research has been conducted regarding brand personality as an effective evaluation tool for predicting perceived brand benefits and acceptance, to date no studies have employed brand values for the same predictive capacity. As codeterminants of lifestyle, both brand personality and brand values are integral to the formation of consumer attitudes, behavior, and lifestyle. By examining the predictive capacities of Kahle’s List of Values (LOV) framework and Aaker’s Dimensions of Brand Personality framework, this study conceptualizes symbolic brand equity and then uses linear regression modeling to evaluate the List of Values (LOV) as a measurement framework for assessing symbolic brand equity, as well as its relative effectiveness in measuring symbolic brand equity as compared to the Dimensions of Brand Personality framework. While Aaker’s Dimensions of Brand Personality framework continues to be an effective framework for assessing brand equity in general, study findings reveal that Kahle’s List of Values framework outperforms the Dimensions of Brand Personality framework when measuring symbolic brand equity. Correlations are drawn between brand values and brand personality, as well as within the LOV instrument itself. Theoretical and managerial implications of consumers’ brand values and brand personality evaluations are also discussed.

In both marketing research and business practice, the study of corporate brand reputation has gained growing interest. Especially, the highly dynamic and intense contentions in the various markets worldwide initialized a paradigm shift from physical competition, including tangible problem solutions and overall product quality, to a psychological competition with reference to identity and reputation. However, better knowledge of drivers of corporate brand reputation, and the effects on the overall brand performance from a customer’s perspective, is still needed. That said, previous studies about corporate brand reputation fall back on traditional and basic explicit self-reporting scales. However, an increasing number of neuroeconomic studies indicate that customers are not fully aware of their thoughts and opinions. In fact, most mental processes are of so-called implicit nature, taking place hidden in the unconscious and automatic mind. Yet, established models of corporate brand reputation are missing implicit processes completely. Against this backdrop, the aim of the current paper is to fill this research gap. For that reason, a holistic framework of dual information processing is derived with reference to corporate brand reputation. Furthermore, related explicit (reflected/deliberate) and implicit (impulsive/automatic) measures are developed and applied to capture the dual facets of corporate brand reputation. The empirical results provide evidence that both dimensions, implicit and explicit corporate brand reputation, have a crucial impact on the degree of attachment toward the brand.

In an increasingly competitive higher education sector, universities face significant challenges when it comes to recruiting new students. Recruitment is only the beginning of a long-term relationship that higher education institutions (HEIs) need to cultivate, not only while students attend the programs but also beyond graduation. Previous studies highlight the need for research in relation to the power that comes from successful branding and the implications for HEIs (Dholakia and Acciardo 2014). This paper aims to contribute to an underdeveloped area in the literature related to brand attributes and their importance in the context of the higher education sector (Chapleo 2010). The paper has three aims which represent major research gaps identified in contemporary literature. Specifically, the first aim of this work is to investigate whether universities’ positioning strategies should continue focusing on building prestige or whether strategies aimed at improving student satisfaction could have more positive effects on brand equity. The second aim of this work is to examine whether the perceived by the students brand equity of an institution is different for students and graduates. The third aim of the paper is to examine the relationship between attachment strength and satisfaction.

Strong consumer–brand relationships are highly valuable assets for both interaction partners: While consumers benefit from satisfying their social needs by creating and maintaining bonds with a desired brand, the brand benefits from increased customer loyalty and advocacy (Algesheimer et al. 2005). With the advent of social media, marketers are confronted with new opportunities to foster meaningful relationships with their customers and to disseminate information for creating strong brands with a rich and clear brand knowledge structure in the consumer’s mind (Gensler et al. 2013). Facebook brand fan pages (BFP) are deemed as one of the most powerful instruments to strengthen consumer–brand relationships and to enhance interaction as well as dialogue with and among a brand’s consumers. A BFP is here defined as company-initiated online community representing a brand’s official channel on Facebook to communicate with its former, current and potential customers. By “liking” such a page, people become part of a consumer community of similar-minded individuals and which enables them to publicly share their brand experiences with others. In such an environment, marketers have lost their pivotal role as authors of their brands’ meaning (Kuksov et al. 2013): Consumer-generated content has a considerable impact on the audience’s opinions, feelings, and behaviors (e.g., Hennig-Thurau et al. 2010) that potentially undermine corporate brand communication. Hence, for companies BFP are a double-edged sword. This raises the question arises whether marketers’ considerable efforts to create corporate brand postings ultimately convert into strong consumer–brand relationships or, more precisely, consumer-based brand equity (CBBE), or not.

Digital technologies reshape customer behavior. Currently, many customers are shifting their searches about new products, their communication about it, and consequently their buying actions to online channels. Therefore, traditional brick-and-mortar retailers face a massive wave of new online competitors to whom they are continuously losing customers. Past research about this highly relevant issue is deficient as it lacks a comprehensive strategy on how brick-and-mortar retail stores can survive in this new digital world on a long-term and customer-oriented basis. The aim of this research project is to identify measures brick-and-mortar retailers can take to prevent the additional loss of customers to their competitors. To do so, the authors model the real-life decisions of customers between the online and offline retail channels. They investigate the reasons why customers choose brick-and-mortar retailers over online stores. Building on these reasons, the authors derive competitive advantages traditional retailers can profit from potentially. These insights offer important implications for the survival of brick-and-mortar retailers in a digital environment.

“Would you like to donate $1.00 today to support the local food bank?” Retailers across the nation are asking this question of consumers at the conclusion of their transactions, encouraging them to make quick, oftentimes spontaneous, charitable decisions. Recent statistics indicate that these miniscule donations add up 63 companies using a point of sale cause marketing (CM) tactic raised nearly $360 million in 1 year, and these companies alone have raised over $2 billion in the past 30 years (Cause Marketing Forum 2013). While such point of sale donations are clearly effective in raising money for charitable causes, the implications for consumers and retailers are understudied. One consumer poll revealed that such tactics may be perceived as an ambush that guilts consumers into making hasty and unwarranted charitable decisions (Taylor 2014). Roseman (2014) described how many shoppers are uncomfortable declining the offer to support the charity.The impact these point of sale requests may have on consumers is almost completely absent from both academic and practitioner perspectives. Thus, this study attempts (1) to identify the antecedents to consumer point of sale donation intentions and (2) to determine the emotions that will occur when consumers participate or decline to participate in such tactics. First, we identify the antecedents to point of sale donation intentions. We then show how consumers who choose to donate at the point of sale will experience increased positive feelings of happiness and joy and less negative feelings of guilt and anxiety as explained by signaling theory (Khan and Dhar 2006, 2010). Using data collected from consumers in a Southeastern US medium-size city, structural equation modeling is utilized, the results are analyzed, and practical implications for retailers are discussed.

Playing music in stores is very common. Music exerts an influence on how people behave (Milliman 1982, 1986), how they perceive the passage of time (Yalch and Spangenberg 1990, 2000), and how they exert an influence on what customers select from an assortment (North et al. 1999). Based on a meta-analysis of 32 research studies on the effects of music in retail settings, Garlin and Owen (2006) conclude that the mere presence of music has positive effects on people’s behavior and perceived pleasure, that liked music has a positive effect on behavior, and that volume and tempo influence the time perception. Despite these positive effects, a deeper investigation of the results reveals several ambiguities regarding the effects of music.Milliman (1982) found that sales increased with slow music, but Herrington and Capella (1996) could not replicate this. Similarly, Caldwell and Hibbert (2002) could not replicate Milliman’s 1986 study. Yalch and Spangenberg (1990) find that when foreground music is played at “purposeful times of the day,” customers self-report fewer unplanned purchases. Similarly, Bailey and Areni (2006) show that different types of music lead to different effects depending on the consumer’s cognitive task during the time that the music is played. When people are trying to solve a cognitive issue, that is, “nontemporal,” background music makes them loose track of the time, whereas foreground music makes it easier to keep track of time. These results, in combination, suggest that when the shopper’s motivation primarily is of a task-oriented character, foreground music could have a negative influence on the purchases. On the other hand, when it is more of a recreational shopping trip, foreground music may be preferable (Yalch and Spangenberg 1990). To better understand the effects of music in a retail setting, this study was run.Using a Latin square design field experiment in three grocery stores, we investigate the possible effects of (1) the presence of music, (2) the type of music, and (3) interaction effects of music and the time the music is played. The playlists were background, slow foreground music (≈70 bpm), and fast foreground music (≈120 bpm). The stores were of similar size and located in similar areas of the same city. Each cell lasted for 1 week. To create “purposeful times” and “leisurely times,” the data was split into weekdays (Mondays through Thursdays) and weekends (Fridays through Sundays). Results support an interactive effect of “music on/off” and “part of week.” Music had a positive effect on sales during weekdays, but a negative effect on sales during weekends. There was also an interactive effect of “type of playlist” and “part of week” on sales. Background music was the best to use during weekdays, while no music at all and the faster foreground music treatment resulted in the highest average sales during weekends. This research adds to knowledge about the effects of music in retail settings. It provides guidance on both if music should be played, and if so, guidance on what kind of music should be played and if there is a need to take on different tactics on different days.

Consistent with the idea of retailtainment (Howard 2007), retailers can implement additional services in their stores to make them places where people can engage in different activities, such as painting or scrapbooking. While these activities already constitute a clear component of the mix of malls, they represent a quite new component of the mix for retailers. To this regard, considerable research has examined the impact of many aspects of the store environment (e.g., Bitner 1992; Michon et al. 2005), but no research to date has examined the effects of in-store cultural activities (ISCA). Thus, the present research aims to determine—and to provide a clear explanation for—the effects of ISCA. To this end, and building on legitimacy theories (Maignan et al. 2005; Suchman 1995), this research proposes a framework whereby their implementation increases legitimacy and in turn consumer’s patronage behavior.

Technology influences consumers’ consumption habits (Verma et al. 2015) and construction of identities (Cluley and Brown 2015). This research focuses specifically on the wearable activity tracker, Fitbit, and explores how it not only drives change but also becomes an active participant in consumers’ everyday lives. Four themes are presented: health-related behavioral change, impact on self-satisfaction, technology-governed goal-driven behaviors, and technology dependency and embodiment. We conclude that when consumers actively track and monitor their quantified selves, the technology takes on an agentic role and demands consumers’ trust and reliance in exchange for gratification, access to performance data, and a happier, more satisfied, state of mind.

The costs related to increasingly sedentary lifestyles and rising obesity rates are an enormous financial strain for society in general and healthcare systems in particular. This situation favours the development of mobile technology related to health (mHealth) enabling proactive well-being management and encouraging positive lifestyle change (Martin 2015). Wearables such as bracelets, watches and clip-ons for tracking activity and vital signs interacting with mobile ‘apps’ or other internet-enabled devices (Duffy 2015) are among the most promising mobile tools due to their versatility and ease of use (Philips 2013). Application of these tools is perceived as a potential cure to healthcare systems due to foreseen benefits for different stakeholders: consumers (mHealth as information provider and an enabling agent), employers and healthcare insurers (mHealth as a channel of delivery and monitoring of healthcare services as well as a tool helping to reward healthy behaviours) and technology developers (mHealth as key to enter and expand markets) (PWC 2012; Olson 2015). Regardless of the potential of wearables, the actual benefits remain unexploited, as consumers are either slow or only short-term oriented in adopting such tools (Andajani-Sutjahjo et al. 2004; Chan and Ryan 2009). This implies that perceived value of these tools does not go beyond it being perceived as ‘trendy’ devices.To understand factors driving technology evaluation and adoption, technology acceptance models have been reviewed (Davis 1986; Venkantesh et al. 2012). The aspect of technology evaluation, an issue of interest to this research, has been reflected by the factor of perceived usefulness (PU) and its determinants (image, job relevance, output quality and result demonstrability) as presented in Technology Acceptance Model 2 (TAM-2) (Venkatesh and Davis 2000). While TAM-2 and similar models have been widely accepted by researchers, some criticise it for diverting researchers’ attention away from key issues, such as the lack of understanding of PU antecedents in different contexts (Barki and Benbasat 2007). This limitation is rather problematic in the context of wearables’ adoption as it can hinder development of wearables with PU-enhancing design characteristics.In order to understand evaluation and adoption drivers for wearables, we conducted in-depth interviews with 15 participants who used ‘Misift Flash’ activity trackers for a period of 7 days. Template analysis technique, as defined by King et al. (2004), was used to analyse the data. In line with TAM-2, the results identified PU as the main driver of technology adoption. Moreover, the study suggests enhancing PU by explaining one of its main antecedents: ‘output quality’ with three predictors, namely, ‘accuracy’, ‘design’ and ‘data delivery’. The enhancement increases the model’s ability to understand and predict users’ evaluation and consequently adoption of wearables. Hence, the study contributes to theory as it acknowledges the impact and the multiple facets of under-researched ‘output quality’. Further quantitative studies can further verify our findings. Finally, our research offers implications for technology developers and marketers who can enhance design of wearables so that consumers see value in using it.

In the not so distant future, if you wish to see a doctor, you’ll either “Uber” one and your nearest on-demand healthcare provider will be at your doorstep within 15 min or else you’ll book a videoconference with a virtual doctor who will carry out a remote consultation with the help of a full 24/7 record of your vital signs. These will be captured through one or several wearable sensors and a couple of handheld “Robodoc” consumer devices. Welcome to the brave new world of consumer-driven healthcare! Of course, we have seen this movie many times before. As set of technologies—nano, geno, driverless cars, the Internet of Things—comes out of its early developmental closet, technology pilots signal as-of-yet hard to measure future potential, investors glimpse a gold rush of opportunities, the media and industry analysts get involved, and a new hype curve is born (Brown and Michael 2003). Most likely, the technologies in question are first-phase evangelized and vilified in equal measures before being absorbed into our daily life and into existing markets in small, palatable steps that seem curiously less dramatic than the discourse that has surrounded these technologies at the beginning of their public lifecycle. However, as marketing researchers, we do not have much insight into the process through which a technology innovation hype is translated into a fully operational market. Most of the diffusion models that marketing researchers use are derivatives of Rogers’ (1962) diffusion of innovation curve. Yet, Rogers’ model and subsequent research in marketing has failed to accommodate how markets are actively and often painstakingly constructed, both in a socio-cognitive and material sense, by multiple, diverse, and often competing stakeholders.Research in the sociology of expectations has over the past decade considered the development and trajectory of expectations and hype surrounding technological innovations, and in the context of marketing, an emerging literature has started to marry its arguments with the vocabulary and frameworks of market studies. This recent research has made first inroads in investigating the role of hype, promise, or expectations on the development of markets and market spaces (Geiger and Finch 2016; Araujo et al. 2014; Beckert 2013). The current paper follows this early trajectory to trace how expectations around new technologies act to shape future markets and market practices. We do so by concentrating on one specific market that is currently in its “gold rush” phase, as measured by growth and venture capital investments: digital healthcare. Discourse analysis reveals how market actors shape the digital healthcare hype with shifting promises and expectations and how they lead to tangible market practices. We map the online interest in digital health on the one hand and relevant patents filed between from the period 2005–2015 on the other and cross-reference these data sources with a body of 462 publicly accessible texts around digital health technologies and markets across newspapers, internet sources, and public policy documents. Our aim is to trace the content of the discourse, the promises made and warnings sounded, who contributes to the hype, and its effects on the shaping of the digital healthcare landscape, measured as filed patents over time. Our paper contributes to technology marketers’ understanding of how technology markets and hypes are shaped and how they can position themselves in these markets to best effect.

Free-to-play online games, funded by the sale of virtual items, are renouncing the sale of those which provide a competitive advantage for those which are purely cosmetic, in order to keep competition pure. Recent quantitative research has discovered several motivations for the purchase of virtual items in general, but no study has directly explored the motivation to purchase cosmetic items (i.e. non-functional). This paper contributes here, by exploring the motivations of non-functional virtual item purchase through 16 interviews with western hardcore gamers of League of Legends. The results reveal three superordinate purchasing motivations: hedonistic, social and social payments. The first two support existing knowledge in the field; however the latter provides novel contribution. This is akin with other sites, such as Wikipedia, where users are motivated to invest money with the intention to reward and support the developers and to ensure its future existence. Future research and marketing implications are provided.

Today’s competitive marketplace increasingly pressures organizations to provide benefits beyond those desired by end consumers, to enhance some facet of the surrounding community (Lacey et al. 2015). In response, many companies express broadening their value delivery aim from the shareholder to a more inclusive arena including multiple stakeholders and social causes. This focus shift is reflected in a variety of corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts in practice—from discrete charitable donations to the development of entirely new service innovations—with the overarching goal of “doing well by doing good” (Rangan et al. 2015). Corporate social responsibility, broadly, refers to organizational activities that benefit society (Brown and Dacin 1997; McWilliams and Siegel 2001) to enhance brand image in the eyes of consumers while stimulating market performance (Bruch and Walter 2005; Luo and Bhattacharya 2009). Specifically, one emerging trend in CSR practices involves incorporating a minority community in need directly into their service offering. In fact, businesses are creating opportunities for minority groups to be frontline employees that provide services to the majority population. These organizations operate with the dual goals of bridging the gap between majority-minority populations while providing tools for subsistence—not targeted aid—for the need community, achieving both through profitable service operations.

With the recent dramatic increase in the smartphone ownership and usage, the spending on mobile advertising surpassed the spending on desktop digital advertising for the first time in 2015. The current research investigates the effectiveness of these mobile banner ads. Particularly, we examine which location on a screen (top vs. bottom) is more effective for mobile banner ads displayed on smartphones vs. phablets. Results from an experiment show that the mobile banner ads are more effective in terms of attitude and consideration of set formation when displayed on the top (vs. bottom) of the screen on smartphones, but such difference is not significant for phablets.

Existing research on digital marketing has mainly focused on social media. However, Internet evolution brings particular challenges that must be faced. In order to explore new business opportunities, it becomes increasingly important to develop new conceptual models on the availability and adoption of digital marketing strategies to a more sophisticated application.This paper views the adoption of digital marketing strategies as a holistic process which encompasses motivational, emotional, and cognitive factors underlying the implementation of digital marketing strategies. To achieve research purposes, it is presented a conceptual model to understand the attributes of digital marketing in building market competitiveness in Mexico. The technology acceptance model (TAM), the theory of reasoned action (TRA), and the diffusion of innovations (DOI) theory are used to develop the model and capture the unique business dynamics of the current digital environment. This paper concludes with a discussion on its conceptual contributions, conclusions, and interesting directions for future research.

Providing responses to peers’ posts can prove problematic for students participating in online discussion forums, just as assessing these responses can prove problematic for faculty. Typically seen are responses that provide emotional support (I like how you…) or some other forms of critique. These types of responses provide little opportunity for students to demonstrate their grasp of the material nor for faculty to easily assess whether students understand the material. This research details a method of managing online discussions such that peer responses can act as an easily assessed method for gauging student understanding of concepts.

With an increasing share of retail sales being conducted online, local retailers are being squeezed by customers switching toward online purchases and by the growing price pressure they face when trying to compete with online retail giants (e.g., Amazon.com). Our research addresses this issue by investigating community-based resources available to local retailers and their impact on retail performance. We find that developing resources based on community engagement, shared values, and the economic value proposition increase the retailer’s share of customer and the likelihood the consumer will engage in positive word of mouth. We also find that shared values enhance the positive impact of community engagement resources on commitment. Our findings contribute to the retailing and resource-based theory literature and provide managerial direction to help local retailers develop more effectively compete with online retailers.

This paper looks at the relationship between legitimate and expert social power types of preadolescent children over their perception of influence on their mothers’ purchasing behavior in Peruvian toy stores. The literature review takes into consideration the concepts of Social Power and the Influence in Family Behavior to then focus on Social Power within Family Behavior with the purpose of mainly developing four hypotheses regarding purchasing behavior. The methodology followed a nonexperimental transversal correlational design. A pilot sample size of 50 cases was used. The sample was based on an objective population of Peruvian mothers of families that live in northern Lima and that go to purchase toys with their children to major shopping centers. The results show that the expert social power as well as the legitimate social power has a strong relationship. In addition, both social powers have an impact on the perception of influence child–mother but not on the perception of influence mother–child. However, the test of moderation of the expenditure level on toy purchases did not have an effect on the context that was studied. The contribution shows that important changes are happening on the consumption behavior on the aspect of children influencing mothers and that for Latin American contexts, the level of expenditure still does not crucially affect the causality demonstrated.

Global tourists’ spending within the United States (USA) is expected to increase continuously during 2012–2017 (Euromonitor 2013). The US Travel Association (2014) reported that 69.8 million international visitors arrived in the USA in 2013, with each overseas traveler spending approximately $4500 for a visit staying 17 nights on average. This globalization of shopping has encouraged a growing trend of outshoppers that is no longer restricted to the rich and famous (Guo and Wang 2009). Apparel (e.g., clothes, shoes, and jewelry) is found to be the most important product category that consumers are willing to outshop (Oh et al. 2004); thus, this outshopping phenomenon generates an attractive additional consumer base for US retailers and fashion companies. Furthermore, informed shoppers who enjoy shopping are also more willing to travel further distances to seek satisfaction in their shopping (Guy 1990).

Considered an “irrational belief that an object, action, or circumstance that is not logically related to a course of events influences the outcome” (Damisch et al. 2010, p. 1014), people often hope their superstitions will induce propitious outcomes. Calls for cross-cultural attitude-based research on consumers’ superstitious beliefs continue. To heed these calls and help establish a general model for such beliefs, this research relies on survey data collected from two economically and culturally disparate countries: South Korea and the USA.

Research investigating business-to-business (B2B) exchange supports the position that cultivating strong interfirm relationships (i.e., buyer-seller relationships) is vital to the long-term success of both parties involved in an exchange (Morgan and Hunt 1994; Palmatier 2008). Healthy exchange relationships are characterized as being built on the foundation of high levels of interfirm trust and commitment (Garbarino and Johnson 1999; Gregoire et al. 2009; Priluck 2003), and evidence demonstrates their positive impact on critical downstream measures such as sales growth, financial performance, and cooperation for both parties (Morgan and Hunt 1994; Palmatier et al. 2006; Palmatier et al. 2007). Further, strong exchange relationships can create a competitive advantage for companies relative to rival firms engaged in weaker relationships (Dyer and Hatch 2006; Dyer and Singh 1998). In short, it is an accepted premise that strong relationships yield a number of positive outcomes for both parties involved in the exchange.

It is an acknowledged fact that any organizational buying decision is taken so as to eliminate the risk associated with the purchase. This paper investigates the moderating role of risk and the mediating role of brand love on organizational buying. We build upon the earlier works of Webster and Wind (1972) and Sheth (1973) by investigating one dimension of the environmental determinant on organizational buying through a set of propositions in this paper. Branding is known to influence the decision-making process. Prior studies have shown that technical specialists in a decision-making unit (DMU) are influenced by various dimensions of brand personality. The paper provides implications for managers and directions for future research.

This study investigates the question of when a customer firm’s participation is helpful or harmful for value cocreation in professional services. Codevelopment between customer and supplier firms is an overlooked research area in the supply chain literature. Further, when there exist no common language and clear rules between suppliers and their customers, the presence of ambiguity is unavoidable. Thus, the investigation of what role ambiguity plays out that affects customer participation and value cocreation is rather imperative. The objective of this research is to answer the following question: How does customer participation (depth and breadth) moderated by ambiguity (need based and knowledge based) affect strategic collaboration, which in turn affects service cocreation outcomes?

The nature of firm relationships continues to be evolutionary and dynamic. While most of the extant research focuses on the positive side of relationship marketing and the corresponding benefits to the firm, some research highlights the dark side of relationship marketing. The different phases of relationships require activities that are prone to different forms of relationship-destroying behaviors. This research, through a systematic review, (1) explores relationship-destroying behaviors in the context of the acquisition, development, and maintenance of relationships with customers and (2) identifies specific kinds of relationship-destroying behaviors and the corresponding antecedents and consequences. We hope that this systematic review acts as a catalyst for researchers’ attention to the dark side of relationship marketing.

Environmental sustainability has become a prominent issue in current business and public policy agendas. The untenable rate at which postconsumer waste is increasing has resulted in various efforts by governmental agencies, companies, and NGOs to promote sustainable practices among producers and consumers (Newman et al. 2012). Developing countries are of heightened importance to these organizations for two key reasons: (a) They are the most vulnerable to climate change, due to their high production dependence on the exploitation of natural resources and large population with low economic resources; and (b) they contribute only minor shares to global greenhouse gas (OECD 2012). Therefore, there is a challenge for these countries to spur development and reduce poverty without compromising their current natural resources.

Advertising is a creative and an informative source of marketing communications to reach particular target markets or audiences (American Marketing Association (AMA) 2012). While creativity helps to enhance persuasion of advertising, information provides trust to customers. With 106 participants, this exploratory research tests how creativity and information are able to improve trust of customers toward the advertising message.

Traditional cinema advertising lacks in effectiveness. In order to increase the effectiveness of cinema advertising, ideas have been raised to make cinema advertising interactive. However, existing research on interactivity is inconclusive on whether that would be an effective solution.

Across many industries, increasing levels of specialization lead to a growing demand for solutions to individual customer problems. Many of these solutions—such as special machinery, software, or knowledge-intensive business services—are sold and delivered within processes that are commonly referred to as complex projects (Jaakkola and Hakanen 2013; Davies 2004; Möller 2006; Stremersch et al. 2001). In order to be able to successfully sell and deliver complex projects, suppliers depend on input from their customers, especially an adequate articulation of demand and the competence to cocreate value during project delivery. However, existing studies reveal that business customers frequently lack the competence to sufficiently articulate their needs (Aarikka-Stenroos and Jaakkola 2012; Santos and Spring 2015; Tuli et al. 2007). Low customer competence and the resulting ill-defined needs present a challenge for sales managers in project business for three reasons. First, they increase the difficulty for salespersons to offer what the customer actually needs leading to higher effort necessary for making a proposal and at the same time reducing the likelihood of closing a sale. Second, low customer competence is likely to reduce the quality of the definition input a customer can provide, which increases the effort on the side of the salesperson and other functions involved in project execution for successfully delivering a project. Third, a project that is carried out based on ill-defined needs is likely to result in dissatisfaction of the customer, which may require reworking by the supplier, cause lower repurchase likelihood, or lead to costly conflicts. Overall, it is thus important for suppliers intending to successfully sell complex projects to assess and to deal with customer competence.

The objective of this article is to discuss the performance of B2B sales strategy in the context of social media. Four components of sales strategy, customer segmentation, customer prioritization and targeting, relationship objectives and selling models, and uses of multiple sales channels are examined to assess their impacts on sales performance. In addition, three dimensions of social media usage, competitive intelligence, engagement, and word of mouth are explored as moderating factors that impact the relationships between sales strategy components and sales performance outcomes.

Traditionally, cognitive scientists have conceived the human brain as the main organ capable of building internal representations of the external world (van Dijk et al. 2008). However, in a shift from this paradigm (i.e., information processing), embodied cognition theories support that cognition and behavior can also derive from bodily states and its interaction with the external world (Barsalou 1999; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Niedenthal et al. 2005). Following this stream of research, Cacioppo and colleagues (1993) found that flexor and extensor arm movements can activate approach and avoidance motivational states, respectively. In a similar way, Topolinski et al. (2014) recently shows that pronouncing a specific sort of letter arrangements that resembles the oral kinematics of deglutition (swallowing-like, inward movement) or expectoration (spitting-like, outward movement) can shape people’s attitudes toward a particular target (Topolinski et al. 2014). Extending these findings, we propose that food labels can drive human cognition and behaviors. That is, we suggest that food names might exert an unobtrusive effect on food perception, intentions, and actual food consumption through an embodied mechanism, so that names that induce inward movement lead to more favorable evaluations and higher consumption. In a series of three studies using both French- and English-speaking samples, we show evidence for the proposed embodied effect. First, we demonstrate that inward (vs. outward) oral movement activated through food name leads to lower healthiness perception of a food item. Second, we show that inducing an inward (vs. outward) oral movement can boost (vs. dampen) a dish desirability. Finally, we show that inward (vs. outward) oral movements lead to higher food consumption. This research contributes to marketing theory and practice in several ways. First, the research addresses the need for studies that explore the effects of verbal information on consumers’ perceptions (Krishna, 2012). Second, we show that the same pattern of effects stands for both English- and French-speaking samples, suggesting that the effect is not contingent on the language people speak. Finally, this research has both managerial and social implications. From a managerial standpoint, marketers should consider naming their products—food and nonfood—in order to trigger approach motivation. From a public and policy perspective, in turn, legislators could restrict the use of “approach food names” for unhealthy food, while stimulating it for healthy food as an endeavor to increase healthier consumption behavior.

Brand extensions push a brand beyond its typical coverage and keep the brand growing. In order to extend the brand beyond its original product categories, marketers may alter the original logo to free the product limitation and increase the perceived fit of new product category. This study is inspired by the case of Starbucks’ logo redesign and suggests that logo frames may set a boundary on the perceived scope of the brand categories and its extensions. Furthermore, consumers’ regulatory focus is proposed to be a moderator on the relationship of logo frame and perceived brand categories, based on the information processing natures and tendencies of promotion- and prevention-focused people. Prevention-focused consumers tend to carry self-boundaries so their association can hardly be released by unframed logos.

Research provides evidence for positive effects of products’ package aesthetic designs on responses in consumers (Bloch 1995; Creusen and Schoormans 2005; Reimann et al. 2010), notably on the important variable of willingness to pay (Bloch et al. 2003; Combris et al. 2009). What results suggest is that consumers evaluate bottle designs in a holistic manner (Orth and Malkewitz 2008) and rather than relying on specific attributes, most consumers process the label as a whole. Considering this holistic process, the investigation of the influence of package designs has often been conducted under the lens of fluency or the ease with which stimuli are processed (Reber et al. 1998). Fluency appears to play an important role in that fluently processed stimuli seem to be preferred (Alter and Oppenheimer 2008; Reber et al. 2004). Another recent stream of research highlights the role played by typicality or the degree of family resemblance of a product with the other products belonging to the same category (Loken and Ward 1990). The empirical results from research on typicality converge toward the notion that consumers prefer in general more typical (vs. atypical) designs (Celhay and Trinquecoste 2014; Veryzer and Hutchinson 1998), at least in the short run (Landwehr et al. 2013). Considering their important effects on consumer’s responses to package design, previous research has started to examine the relationship between fluency and typicality (Alter and Oppenheimer 2009; Oppenheimer and Frank 2007). However, a review of the existing research highlights some inconsistencies, and this research thus investigates the potential interaction between these two variables. In addition, this research extends the literature on fluency by focusing on its interaction with a specific individual variable that may help in getting a better understanding of the effect of fluent package designs: risk avoidance tendency. Since people perceive disfluently (vs. fluently) processed stimuli as riskier (Song and Schwartz 2009), the objective of this article is to present and provide empirical support for a theoretical framework that outlines not only the moderating role of typicality in the effects of fluency but also that of risk avoidance tendency.

The global rise of the Foodie movement has attracted some research attention as well as critique in the food industry trend followers, but little research attention in marketing research. The present study looks at the ‘Foodie’ phenomenon in the UK and aims to extend how the notion has been coined in literature through a qualitative investigation of a sample of self-professed Foodies. The objective is to provide an in-depth understanding of what it means to be a Foodie at the individual and group levels, probing attitudes, motivations and self-awareness. Results indicate that the term Foodie cannot be used as an implicit definition of someone ‘simply interested in food’; the capacity of the Foodie may be dependent on individual involvement and the level of importance along the five emerging themes: these being learning and discovery, pleasure and enjoyment, inspirational influences, quality and experiencing food as an individual and in connection with others. Findings imply that there might be different levels of Foodies, leading to a start on developing a Foodie typology. The study poses implications for food marketers and researchers that can assist in more effective segmentation, efficient targeting and tailored positioning, as well as opportunities for future research.

The exchange of comments online about branded offers is defined in the literature as electronic word of mouth (eWOM). Most of the existing academic research on consumer behaviour focuses on positive emotions and behaviour about branded offers (Veloutsou and McAlonan 2012; Zarantonello et al. 2016). However, next to sharing positive comments, consumers are increasingly using online media to distribute unfavourable experiences and opinions about products and brands (Ullrich and Brunner 2015), and more research on the effects of the expression of negative comments online is needed. The negative electronic word of mouth (NeWOM) is defined in this study as negative statements made or distributed by individuals about an object (in this case a brand), posted on a public online space such as online retailer sites, social networking sites or blogs. The understanding of the mechanisms that drive negative behaviour is of high importance for companies that want to increase their customer base, and there is a call for more research on how negative relationships actually work (Fournier and Alvarez 2013). With the exception of some qualitative studies that have addressed motivations for engaging in eWOM in brand-related conversation (Hennig-Thurau et al. 2004; Sundaram et al. 1998), no systematic research has investigated drivers of NeWOM beyond dissatisfaction. An important question which arises is if NeWOM is only motivated by consumer’s reaction against the company or if it is motivated by consumer’s desire of contributing to the community. The purpose of this study is to analyse the motivations for NeWoM going beyond dissatisfaction and paying special attention to the mediating role of social motivations. According to Hennig-Thurau et al. (1994), engaging in eWOM is not something people do only for themselves (vengeance); they also share their experiences to help other consumers.

It is nearly impossible for all consumers to like a brand. However, there is evidence suggesting that when a large portion of consumers hate a brand, that negative emotion can be hazardous to a brand’s success. Abercrombie and Fitch’s 17 % quarterly drop in earnings after announcing the brand would not be available in sizes larger than size 10 demonstrates the potential hazards of brand hate (see van Delzen 2014). Given the difficulties and limited options available to marketers in dealing with the challenges of brand hate emotions, many managers take the traditional approach of turning the other cheek. In contrast, some companies are experimenting with using nontraditional approaches to deal with the problem of hate by addressing the situation head-on and publically acknowledging the existence of brand haters. Some companies even go as far as attempting to capitalize on the cache of being hated, a tactic particularly popular among polarizing brands. Luo et al. (2013) introduce the concept of polarizing brands and define the term as those brands having a significant number of consumers professing to hate the brand, as well as a significant number of consumers claiming to love the brand.

The Internet has given rise to anti-brand communities which are forming around common aversions toward brands. We illuminate this phenomenon in the context of social networking sites and consider effects on sponsorships of the opposed brand. Therefore, we conduct a mixed method study of Facebook-organized anti-brand communities using the brand FC Bayern Muenchen and its main sponsor Deutsche Telekom. Our findings reveal that community membership negatively influences both attitude and purchase intention toward the sponsor of the anti-brand. Consequently, we establish the relevance of anti-brand communities for both the brand and their sponsors and derive marketing implications.

Brands tend to polarize consumers. As a result, consumers engage in behavior and communication in support of a focal brand or against that brand’s competitors (e.g., Gregoire et al. 2009; Lovett et al. 2013; Wolter et al. 2015). As brand-directed word-of-mouth (WOM) behavior by consumers represents an opportunity to indirectly influence consumer behavior in a cost-effective and rapid manner, marketers are attempting to create “talkable brands,” which have characteristics that promote WOM (e.g., Berger 2014; Hollebeek et al. 2014; King et al. 2014; Lovett et al. 2013). But such efforts come with the concomitant risk of brands stimulating unfavorable behaviors such as opposition and avoidance (e.g., Wolter et al. 2015).

In the past decade, the Internet has dramatically increased consumer access to price information for many consumer goods and services. Widespread adoption of smartphones also gives consumers current price information at their fingertips and often in real time. Most importantly, the rise of consumer-generated content is purportedly more influential than traditional company-generated content (Euromonitor International 2013), making it a potent and credible source of price information. Inarguably, customers have access to a vast amount of pricing information that might facilitate consumer decision-making.

Recent research has shown that effort can influence consumers’ judgments of fairness (Darke and Dahl 2003) and deservingness (Reczek et al. 2014). Popular press provides evidence that consumers are willing to expend effort to get better prices, such as through behaviors exhibited on Black Friday (Tabuchi 2014). Furthermore, academic researchers have called for more investigation on the effects of social cues, such as referent effort—or the effort of another consumer—on consumer judgments of deservingness and price fairness (Darke and Dahl 2003; Haws and Bearden 2006).

Companies empower customers more than ever, and reversely customers increasingly demand more control. Even pricing mechanisms show an increasing level of customer participation (Kim et al. 2009). While traditional fixed pricing models do not contain any interaction with the customers (buyers), in participative pricing models companies (sellers) offer customers the opportunity to participate directly in the price-setting process. Hence, companies delegate a certain level of control to the customers (Chandran and Morwitz 2005). These pricing strategies have become increasingly important over the last decade for three reasons: (1) Opposed to fixed prices, participative pricing mechanisms enable companies to address consumers’ individual willingness to pay (WTP), (2) to differentiate themselves from competitors due to their unconventional, innovative character, and (3) to create a rather balanced win-win relationship between companies and customers (Kim et al. 2009). Therefore, it is not surprising that auctions, reverse auctions, price negotiations, and other participative pricing mechanisms have gained increased attention, both in practice and in scientific research (Spann and Tellis 2006). The most progressive form of participative pricing is Pay What You Want (PWYW) as it gives the buyer full control over the transaction price (Kim et al. 2009). From a seller’s perspective, the obvious risk of PWYW is that customers might exploit their control in order to maximize their utility in line with rational choice theory. However, practical examples and scientific studies provide evidence that consumer behavior in PWYW pricing is not completely opportunistic (Kim et al. 2014; Kim et al. 2009).

Consumer loyalty has received significant managerial and academic attention for its importance of preventing consumer’s switching to competitor’s products and increasing consumers repurchase intention, ultimately benefiting companies’ profits. Most academic studies have looked at the determinants of consumer loyalty, examining the process by which factors influence consumer loyalty. The acknowledged conditions to measure consumer loyalty, consumer repurchase intentions, and behaviors have been explored by many previous researchers. Word-of-mouth communication and social influence, as social variables, are two major factors that can change consumers’ attitudes and/or affect their purchase intentions (Brown and Reingen 1987; Van den Bulte and Stremersch 2004). Consumers’ personalities and consciousness can also make a difference on consumer attitudes (Nuttin 1995).

Unfamiliar brands face the formidable challenge of effectively signaling the quality of their products to consumers. Yet, a current market search reveals that unfamiliar brands attempt to signal quality by offering product warranties. Furthermore, many of these unfamiliar brands offer warranties that are considerably longer than the warranty lengths for comparable products from recognized brands. We label these warranties as exaggerated since they clearly outlive the consumers’ expected period of use for such products (e.g., 10 years warranty on a hoodie).

For a variety of product categories, such as online news, music downloads, or video games, consumers can use previews or trial versions to examine the offer before making a purchase decision. Previous research shows that the characteristics of a preview (e.g., usefulness or quantity of the provided content) have a strong impact on consumers’ buying decisions (e.g., Cheng and Tang 2010; Haruvy and Prasad 2001).

Exclusivity is a long-lived concept in marketing. Luxury goods, for example, are often discussed in terms of their “exclusive” appeal. Franchise, technology, or patent licenses are often “exclusive” in nature. Exclusive distribution is also a common product dissemination strategy. A product or brand may see “timed exclusivity” at a retailer or in a distribution channel, or even be locked into an exclusive retailer or channel for the lifetime of the product’s existence. Firms may also use exclusivity as a part of a product or brand assortment strategy, leveraging unique inventory as a competitive tool (Dekimpe et al. 2011). Some retailers report adopting this strategy to fight online competition and new consumer behaviors such as “showrooming” (Zimmerman 2012). Thus, in recent years, advertising the exclusivity of a product, or even labeling product packaging with an “exclusive” label, has become common. This trend of “advertised exclusivity” or exclusivity labeling has yet to see any significant coverage in the literature. In fact, the idea of “exclusivity” and its various forms and uses, have rarely, if ever, been discussed and summarized in a single source. This work hopes to examine the idea of exclusivity in the literature and marketplace as well as shed light on the new trend of advertised exclusivity as a retail strategy.

The sharing economy continues to grow in the USA, developed countries, and emerging markets. The sharing economy connects sellers and buyers through unique digital platforms and P2P business models. The sharing economy can be a part of “futuristic marketing” related to the Internet and web-based interactions. It is definitely an extension of new marketing practices that encompass consumers, business, society, virtual networks, etc. The sharing economy can be defined as sharing of consumer and industrial products, services, and resources which are used by consumers and businesses. The sharing economy is inherently synonymous with collaborative consumption areas that help consumers and firms to lower cost, seek economies of scale, and remain competitive in the fast-changing business and digital world.

With the assistance of new information and communications technologies (ICTs) and data analytical tools, marketing organizations now are capable of generating better targeted and more effective advertising campaigns. Among many emerging advertising practices, data-driven real-time bidding advertising (or RTB advertising) has attracted a lot of attention among scholars and practitioners. The process of RTB advertising refers to a new approach to sell advertising inventory on the network by targeting right audience and assigning each impression to the viewer in real time. However, in order for this data-driven advertising practice to function properly, the collection and analysis of massive consumer behavioral data are indispensable. Nevertheless, these often applauded big data, and consumer analytics practices have severe ramifications for consumer privacy at both national and international levels.

As the number of augmented reality applications increases, it will be necessary to acknowledge how customers become prepared to use this technology. Since prior research barely emphasized the role of customer readiness in customers’ willingness to use augmented reality, this study develops a conceptual framework regarding how customers become ready to use augmented reality. Drawing on the intrinsic motivation theory and the diffusion of innovation theory, this study presents that customer readiness is a recipient of various antecedents, including personal innovativeness, previous experience, desire for control, need for interaction, need for touch, personal innovativeness, service complexity, perceived risk, relative advantage, perceived playfulness, perceived interactivity, and novelty, and influences customers’ willingness to use augmented reality.

The research outlines forces that threaten a firm’s ability to retain competences that lead to comparative advantage. We argue that resource specialization within competence creation can create resource lock-in which can make the firm vulnerable to interfirm casual ambiguity, intra-firm casual ambiguity, and reward system misalignment. Together, the three elements can result in a triangulated isomorphism which can decrease competence retention. Also, we posit that retention of competences in the presence of triangulated isomorphism results in a new product development focus on incremental (rather than radical) innovations. Discussion and conclusion ensue.

Historically, when issues of time and temporality were considered within marketing and other contexts, they were viewed in a defined and discriminant manner as reflected through clock and/or calendar time, i.e., objective time. While the use of objective measures has traditionally been appropriate when considering time, anecdotal evidence and recent work across multiple disciplines suggest the value of applying alternate, nonlinear temporal frameworks (Kaufman-Scarborough 2006; Lee and Liebenau 1999; Mosakowski and Earley 2000). These discussions suggest that while objective time remains situationally relevant, it is in itself an insufficient means by which to examine antecedent, focal, and outcome variables and that the use of alternate temporal conceptual frameworks should provide additional insights.Within this research, we answer complementary calls to (1) generate new and impactful theoretical contributions in marketing research (MacInnis 2011; Yadov 2010) and (2) develop a broadened conceptual framework of time (Kaufman-Scarborough 2003). This work proposes the first alternate, nonlinear, holistic temporal framework in marketing research. In this exposé, we conceptualize two new time constructs in the marketing domain (subjective time and holistic time), two new temporal orientations (idiosyncratic-temporal orientation and socio-temporal orientation), and three referent-based perspectives (individual, group, and societal) and incorporate these constructs within a temporal framework that captures the dynamic, socially constructed nature of time within the modern marketplace.Our powerful conceptual framework yields three critical benefits. First, it enables marketers to assess and leverage temporal factors across different contexts, products, processes, temporal orientations, referent perspectives, and strategic orientations. Second, it provides guidance on how to measure and manage these rapidly evolving, socially constructed constructs. Third, it serves as a roadmap to guide future research and application involving time, temporal orientation and key time-related factors.

The CMO and CIO often struggle for influence on strategic decision making within the top management team, if they are included at all. Technological improvements have increased the ability of firms to gather customer data which elevates the role of the CMO and CIO and requires them to work together more closely. There has been limited research on the relationship between senior executives outside of that with the CEO, and this study fills that gap by exploring CMO/CIO cooperation. To analyze the dynamics of the CMO/CIO relationship, this research introduces a conceptual framework that captures three antecedents of cooperation: interdependence, CMO/CIO structure, and CMO/CIO diversity. Additionally, the study identifies four cooperation mechanisms that can mediate the relationship between these antecedents and CMO/CIO cooperation. A positive relationship between the CMO and CIO can lead to a greater impact on strategic decision making, improved strategy implementation, and a superior competitive position.

The strategic decisions of chief executive officers (CEOs) significantly impact firms’ key stakeholders and society at large. As a result, a plethora of research focuses on highlighting the economic, social, and environmental consequences of CEOs’ decisions (e.g., Mizik 2010; Swaminathan and Moorman 2009; Steenkamp and Fang 2011). Surprisingly, this research has mainly focused on the impact of CEOs’ demographic backgrounds such as age, functional background, education, and tenure (e.g., Palmer and Barber 2001; Jensen and Zajac 2004; Bertrand and Schoar 2003; Baker and Mueller 2002). However, research that investigates the impact of CEOs’ personality traits on their strategic choices remains scant, and the impact of personality on strategic marketing outcomes has not yet been investigated. This omission is surprising given that CEOs are directly involved in a number of strategic marketing decisions and are also likely to influence the decisions of marketing executives such as chief marketing officers (CMOs) through a top-down approach (Bower 1970). In response to this gap in existing research, the authors examine a segment of personality which has recently received attention in both the academic literature and public press: narcissism. In this research the authors investigate the relationship between narcissistic personality characteristics found in CEOs and firms’ strategic marketing behavior. The authors find that firms led by narcissistic CEOs exhibit higher degrees of competitive aggressiveness. Higher competitive aggressiveness in turn not only mediates these firms’ new product introductions but also increases the likelihood of these firms engaging in marketing controversies (deceptive advertising, pricing controversy, or product safety issues). A sample of 395 publicly listed US firms was observed between the years 2006 and 2010 to test the authors’ hypotheses. This article highlights the role of CEOs’ personal values in shaping marketing strategy and the risks and rewards to firms associated with high degrees of competitive aggressiveness.

Dhruv Grewal (PhD, Virginia Tech) is the Toyota Chair in Commerce and Electronic Business and a Professor of Marketing at Babson College. His research and teaching interests focus on direct marketing/e-business, retailing, global marketing, pricing, and value-based marketing strategies. He has published over 100 articles in journals such as Journal of Retailing, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, as well as other journals. He currently serves on numerous editorial review boards.

This special session includes assistant professors with varying levels of experience, discussing several topics outlining what to expect from the final year in the doctoral program, the first semester as an assistant professor, and the first few years on the job. Discussants will speak on topics such as:The Job Market Conference: focusing on how to go about applying for jobs, what resources are most useful, tips to improve your success, navigating the conference interviews, following up after the conference, etc.Balancing the Job Search and Finishing the Dissertation: focus here is on how to manage one’s final year in the program between potentially flying out for job interviews, teaching classes, and also finishing the dissertation, which is of paramount importance.The First Semester Expectations vs. Reality: The focus here is on effectively balancing the transition from doctoral school to assistant professorship. Considering how overwhelming it may be to discover a new town and understand the workings of the new job, while also working that job, this topic is important to pass along helpful tips.The First Year, Expectations, and Reality, Where Has the Time Gone: This continues the theme from the previous discussion, but extends it to include understanding the realities of the first year on the job.Effectively Managing Your Time: The focus here is intertwined with the advice been put forth in the previous two topics. Managing one’s time is essential in order to successfully navigate the first semester and year.Tenure Clock: The focus here lies in understanding the necessary steps to take, in order to avoid the panic as the dreaded tenure clock ticks away.

Advertisements for beauty-enhancement products commonly feature unrealistically thin models as the ideal point for which female consumers should strive. Unfortunately, many of these campaigns negatively impact the self-perceptions of the consumers that they are purportedly able to aid in achieving their goals. Some brands (e.g., Dove) have responded to this issue by using heavier models in their ads. However, the brands and advertisements are generally better received with thin models, making this a difficult path to follow for many marketers. This paper further develops our understanding of consumer response to such advertisements by integrating goal-striving and social comparison theories to explain how goal attainability may diminish the negative impacts of the thin ideal on female consumers. The paper further explores the mechanism through which the advertisements affect consumers by proposing shame as an emotional mediator and promotional focus as moderator of the effects. The results of two experimental studies provide evidence that support these propositions.

Recently, a phenomenon known as the pink tax has come to the forefront of the fight for women’s equity. Women often pay more than men for equivalent products particularly when products are targeted toward women (Duesterhaus et al. 2011). In fact, gender-based pricing is estimated to cost female consumers in the USA upward of $1400 a year (Forbes 2012).

Social norms are an influential driver of consumers’ preferences in different domains of everyday life (Cialdini et al. 2006; Melnyk et al. 2009) and are extensively used in marketing campaigns, as well as in political and social campaigns. Consumers are exposed to social norm information when they are in a good and when they are in a bad mood. The impact of mood on the effectiveness of persuasive messages is considerable (Bless et al. 1990). It plays an important role in the way consumers learn, interpret, and remember information (Forgas 1989) and can interfere with people’s ability to process persuasive messages (Mackie and Worth 1989). The effect of social norms on consumers’ decision-making depends not only on mood but also on the formulation of the social norm. Social norms can be formulated as descriptive norms, which describe what most others do in a given situation, or as injunctive norms, which prescribe certain behavior in a given situation (Cialdini et al. 1990). Different reasons drive conformity to injunctive versus descriptive norms, and consumers process the information that each norm conveys differently (Prislin and Wood 2005). Despite a large body of research on social norms (see Goldstein and Cialdini 2009) and on the role of mood in consumer behavior (see Gardner 1985), little is known about the effect of mood on social norms’ influence.This study contributes to our understanding of the influence of social norms on decision-making by showing how mood affects the influence of descriptive compared to injunctive norm formulations on consumers’ attitudes, purchase intentions, as well as on real behavior. The results of the two experiments show that the effect of norm formulation on attitudes, intentions, and behavior depends on the mood of consumers. Facing a descriptive norm under negative mood (vs. positive mood) makes attitudes and intentions (but not behavior) more congruent with the normative message. In contrast, injunctive norms have a greater influence on attitudes, intentions, and behavior under positive than under negative mood. Furthermore, we show that this effect translates to actual (donations) behavior. Experiment 2 shows that the effect is due to cognitive deliberation, as the effects disappear when cognitive deliberation is hindered.Our results indicate that social norms should be carefully chosen and used depending on the context in which the information supported by the norm is processed by the consumer. The study has theoretical implications as well. Previously, negative mood was shown to decrease consumer’s evaluations of received information and persuasive messages (Miniard et al. 1992). Our study shows that mood not only changes the responsiveness of consumers to social norms for attitudes and intentions, but it does so differently for the two norm formulations. In particular, the negative effect of bad mood on responsiveness to persuasive information can be reversed by using descriptive norm formulations rather than injunctive norms.

As the Internet is becoming an ever more pervasive part of consumers’ lives, businesses constantly find innovative ways of incorporating it into their marketing strategies. Recently, companies introduced “shoppable videos” as a channel to promote and distribute their products. Shoppable videos are short clips that feature a company’s products, which allow consumers to click and buy them. The links to products are usually available over the video or on the side of the screen. They also display the available sizes, prices, colors, and other attributes related to the items on the videos. Our exploratory approach indicated that shoppable videos offered significant benefits for consumers. Shoppable videos save time and effort for consumers, give them ideas and information on how to use products, and provide entertainment at the same time. Overall, shoppable videos are ubiquitously accessible and are more effective than still pictures or text alone in the online shopping context.

Over the last 30 years, an increasingly significant amount of research has emerged concerning the state of marketing’s influence within the firm. However, the results have been surprisingly inconsistent. For example, Homburg et al. (2015), benchmarking Homburg et al. (2009), show that marketing’s influence has in fact decreased over the last two decades. This result appears to contradict research showing that the marketing function contributes to shareholder value (e.g., Gupta et al. 2004; Kumar and Shah 2009). Again, another recent work by Feng et al. (2015) suggests that marketing’s influence has increased in the last 15 years and that it is also a driver of firm performance. To complicate the picture even more, Nath and Mahajan (2008) make the case that the presence of a CMO has no effect on firm performance. Given the amount of rigorous, yet contrary research findings, it is surprising (read: unsettling) that the results may in fact be dependent on methodology and/or sample. How does this impact strategic marketing theory? How does this information impact practitioners, marketing spend, hiring practices, Ph.D. programs, etc.?

The rise of social media has boosted marketers’ interest in using these platforms to build relationships with customers and as potential tools for spreading word of mouth. While research has examined topics related to consumer-brand relationships on social media (de Vries et al. 2012; Labrecque 2014), the sustained use of social media platforms and their evolving nature merit additional inquiry (Kumar 2015). We extend the literature by investigating how the linguistic style of brands’ social media messages impacts consumer engagement. We look beyond the message content and investigate how the linguistic style of the message affects a consumer’s decision to interact with the brand, taking into account not only what is being said but also how it is communicated.This research examines how the semantic content of a brand’s social media communications affects consumer engagement activities at the message level (likes, comments, and shares). Our research builds upon previous studies that examine brand post popularity (de Vries et al. 2012; Berger and Milkman 2012) in two important ways. First, we look beyond the message content and investigate how the linguistic style of the message affects a consumer’s choice to interact with the brand. In essence, we take into account not only what is being said but also how it is communicated. Second, we take into account that consumer social media interactions at various levels are interrelated. That is, each action increases the reach of the message and therefore affects additional actions. Our Multivariate Poisson Regression Analysis allows us to simultaneously compare message characteristics across our three levels of consumer engagement (likes, comments, and shares).We utilize data from Fortune 500 companies’ Facebook positing and create a linguistic style profile for each post using the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) software (Tausczik and Pennebaker 2010). The results of our research offer both managerial and theoretical implications. While previous research has examined how message elements affect likes and comments on Facebook, our research provides additional insights by examining how the linguistic style characteristics of the message, not just the message content, influences consumer engagement. Furthermore, our analysis allows us to simultaneously compare message characteristics across three levels of consumer engagement (likes, comments, and shares). This multivariate analysis is important as these consumer engagement activities are interrelated. Managerially, our research provides important and direct ways in which firms can strategically design their social media messages in order to facilitate consumer engagement activities. Consumer engagement on social media sites is important to managers since the success of brand pages on these sites hinges on consumers engaging with brand communications that help the brand (Berger and Milkman 2012).

With 74 % of online adults using social networking sites (SNSs) (Duggan et al. 2015) and the average American spending over 22 h per week on these platforms (Ipsos 2013), marketers have become acutely aware of the opportunity that social media offers as a promotional tool. Social media allow organizations to engage in timely and direct end-consumer contact at a relatively low cost, making the new promotional tool not only relevant for large multinational companies, but for virtually all organizations, including small- and medium-sized companies (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010). Indeed, an estimated 97 % of marketers are using social media marketing, and 92 % indicate social media is important to their business (Stelzner 2014).

As social media continues to grow, the challenge for companies remains measurement. Few companies are able to concretely show the impact of social media on their business. Literature suggests this challenge is partly due to the lack of strategy and objectives, as well as a lack of understanding of the value of social media.The purpose of this research is to develop a social media value chain that will provide companies with a conceptual framework to measure and evaluate social media.The social media value chain framework, developed from interviews with social media experts, highlights the importance of three key areas: firm investments, community management, and return. The framework incorporates the integration of traditional and social media communications and the drivers of success of social media campaigns.The findings also highlight the shifting focus of social media programs from marketing communication efforts to relationship management and social business initiatives. The importance of formulating strategies and objectives is clear in order to measure word of mouth, trust, loyalty, and authentic business.This research is of value to both academics who are seeking measurement theory methodologies to understand the intricacies of measuring the impact of social media, and to practitioners, who are striving to develop ROI measures of their investment in social media programs.

Mobile devices provide retailers the opportunity to communicate and interact with their customers via a new channel, regardless of the customer’s current whereabouts. Generally, mobile devices are used for a variety of reasons at the point of sale (Cliquet et al. 2014). Especially with regard to reduced search costs, customers can search the mobile web or use smartphone applications to quickly gather external information about various products before making a purchase decision (Daurer et al. 2015).The intention of this research is to improve the knowledge of the impact of mobile devices as a communication channel in contrast to personal communication in a brick-and-mortar environment. Specifically, we investigate the impact of the two most frequent information sources, namely, salesperson and previous customers.Contrary to a large number of studies which investigate the influence of recommendations on customers’ behavior in isolation, this study provides an approach to examine the effects of communication channels and information source simultaneously. More precisely, this research offers an initial attempt to understand the effects of mobile devices as a new communication channel on customers’ perceptions of recommendation persuasiveness and the importance of customers’ perceived control of the communication process at the point of sale.Despite retailers’ quest to increase their understanding about the impact of new communication channels on customers’ purchase decisions, this stream of research has been previously neglected. Across two experiments we show contradictory effects of digital communication and reveal that mobile devices (when compared to personal communication) enhance perceived control of the communication process. In this context, the study contributes new aspects to existing research on in-store communication while taking contemporary communication structures into account.

Crowdfunding, a process of generating monetary resources for a certain need through the power of the crowds’ collaboration, is becoming a popular practice among entrepreneurs (Mollick 2012). The popularity of crowdfunding has exponentially grown in the last few years, generating around $5.1B worldwide each year (Massolution 2012) to support entrepreneurial and social ventures in the areas such as, arts, fashion, technology, and so on. In parallel with the growing popularity in the marketplace, crowdfunding is also considered an important research topic among researchers. Past studies have examined the role of important factors such as project characteristics (Mollick 2014), social information (Kuppuswamy and Bayus 2014), and consumer motivation (Gerber et al. 2012) on the funding success. While these studies advance our understanding of what leads to the ultimate funding success, we have limited understanding on how marketing factors such as branding and emotions of the rhetoric used to promote the projects affect the final outcome.

We investigated how brand attributes, familiarity and consideration, and residuals of prior marketing mix exposures on individuals influence the intention to purchase. We employed a Bayesian view point to make probability statements about the parameters and express uncertainty in a probability or distribution statement. We used a behavioral data set of US auto industry. Nine thousand six hundred seventy-five observations were used in the analysis. Prior literature neglected to take into account the customer-brand relationship variables which may explain unobserved customer heterogeneity. Our brand choice model builds on a set of behavioral variables and focuses on the brand dimensions. Within a Bayesian framework, we proposed a new brand choice model which accounts for the customer-brand relationship. Our mixed model showed familiarity and brand loyalty vary by segment; brand loyalty is the most important predictor of purchase intention for each segment. Besides, our mixed model indicated fixed effect of the interaction between familiarity and attachment to be a significant predictor of purchase intention. We showed that consideration positively and brand attachment negatively are associated with purchase intention. Our results regarding negative effect of brand attachment on purchase intention suggest further investigation of possible moderating factors of the relationship between brand attachment and purchase intention.

Ad spending worldwide was expected to reach $569 billion in 2015. Despite this level of spending, declining brand revenue trends and brand deaths occur (e.g., Oldsmobile, Plymouth, and Woolworth stores). What causes a brand to start losing market share, which could eventually lead to it being phased out of the market? Do they lose touch with the consumers’ wants and needs? Are management teams unable to influence the consumer’s reason to buy innovative products? Yet, some brands (e.g., John Deere) remain relevant to generations of consumers over time. What is the secret formula to sustainable brand growth? Research has shown that when brands are able to be consumer oriented, they have a higher likelihood to produce innovative product offerings that drive the value proposition with consumers. But what role do the behaviors of brand leaders play on driving the brand engagement with consumers? Do the behaviors of brand leaders impact the company’s culture to drive the brand engagement with consumers? These are the key questions that we sought to answer to reveal learnings on how brand leaders start building a road map to drive long-term brand sustainable growth.We conducted a qualitative research study by interviewing 34 executives who are leading or who have led brands from the consumer goods and consumer-packaged-goods industries. In order to gather a real perspective of the market, we talked to brand leaders that led brands with growing and declining revenue trends. We found evidence that growing-brand leaders exhibited behaviors and activities supported by emotional intelligence, hope, and social identity; whereas the declining brand leaders did not.Overall, the growing-brand leaders created a consumer-oriented environment through emotional intelligence, hope, and social identity to drive brand engagement with consumers (e.g., new innovative products), which positions their brands for sustainable growth.Emotional Intelligence—Leaders which expressed high levels of emotional intelligence established a team culture of trust, respect, passion, enthusiasm, and healthy risk-taking to drive innovation. Conversely, leaders that lacked in emotional intelligence represented a team culture of fear, anxiety, unhappiness, no trust, no respect, and no risk-taking that hindered their innovation.Hope—Leaders with high levels of hope managed teams which had vision and freedom to be consumer oriented, which created a team bond and alignment to drive new product innovation. In teams with low-hope leaders, the team did not have the freedom to operate and prohibited brand growth.Social Identity—Leaders which participated in their brand communities greatly increased the likelihood that the firm would be consumer oriented.By exhibiting the above behaviors, these leaders and their teams became more consumer oriented with their brands, which also allowed them to continue increasing their brand’s consumer engagement over time by (1) generating market intelligence pertaining to current and future consumer needs, (2) communicating the market intelligence across the internal teams, and (3) ensuring the organization is executing against the market intelligence.

Based on the main idea to put ones first name on a coke bottle, Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign has since spread to currently more than 80 countries across the globe. And many other brands followed by also printing first names on their product packages (like Nutella or Langnese), although it is still unclear what drives the success of Coca Cola’s campaign in particular. In order to examine Coca-Cola’s campaign from a holistic consumer behavior perspective, the focus of the present study is on the assessment of (positive and negative) explicit and implicit consumer reactions. In this context, the following research questions are investigated: What is the impact of a personalized product packaging with regard to customer’s explicit and implicit brand-related associations? Are the explicit and implicit effects of different brand assessments influenced by different degrees of brand consciousness? An experimental study was conducted to measure the product-related explicit and implicit brand assessments. In the study a self-report questionnaire and a reaction time measurement (SC-IAT) was used. In January 2015 over 228 consumers participated. In order to test the main hypotheses, mean and group comparisons were applied. Our results reveal that for customers with a high brand consciousness, Coca-Cola’s product personalization positively affects attitudinal brand assessment on an explicit and implicit level. The opposite effect was shown for customers with low levels of brand consciousness toward Coca-Cola: Here the personalized product design evoked negative attitudinal associations on an automatic and impulsive information processing level.

The concept of shopper marketing is getting increasing attention from both academics and practitioners (Silveira and Marreiros 2014). Shankar (2011) defines shopper marketing as “the planning and execution of all marketing activities that influence a shopper along, and beyond, the entire path to purchase, from the point at which the motivation to shop first emerges through to purchase, consumption, repurchase, and recommendation.” Coupons play a unique role as a shopper marketing tool because coupons can even act on prospects who are currently not in a shopping mode.Researchers in the past have hypothesized and tested the relationship between coupon redemption intentions and attitude/subjective norms (Shimp and Kavas 1984), past behavior (Bagozzi et al. 1991), and coupon characteristics (Krishna and Shoemaker 1992). These researchers tested the relationship between coupon redemption intentions and psychological, economic, and past behavioral variables using traditional frequentist approach. Their hypotheses testing approaches, however, do not capture the heterogeneity of the impact of these variables on coupon redemption intentions. We augment the existing research, by allowing the parameter estimates to vary across customers.We developed an instrument to capture consumers’ redemption intentions of coupons on two different product categories (coffee and detergent). For each of these two categories, we collected data on redemption intentions for three different face values (low face value, medium face value, and high face value), two brands (a brand they normally purchase and a brand they occasionally purchase), and three methods of distribution (mail-in coupons, on-pack coupons, and freestanding inserts). We used the scales developed by Shimp and Kavas (1984) to measure attitude toward the act of redeeming coupons and subjective norms. We pretested the instrument and refined it before collecting the data.For both product categories, attitude, subjective norms, and past coupon redemptions have a positive impact on coupon redemptions for most of the customers. Also, people are more likely to redeem coupons of higher face value and for the brand they normally buy. Unlike the frequentist approach, here we allow the impact of independent variables to vary across customers by employing Bayes estimates. The parameter estimates for both the categories are similar, thus making our findings more robust.The contributions of this research are twofold: (1) we develop a comprehensive model of coupon redemptions taking into account individual level, brand level, and promotion characteristics, and (2) we capture the varying impact of these variables on different customers. In this research we focus on one type of shopper marketing program. Future research needs to extend this by investigating the effectiveness of different types of shopper marketing programs.

This research sheds light on the theoretical mechanism behind consumer discounting of discounts and extends it to the online daily deal context. Based on advertising and behavioral pricing research, we develop and empirically test a conceptual model of the effects of discount level and daily deal promotion presence on consumer perceptions of discount credibility, the extent of discounting of discounts, and change in purchase intentions for brands with average reputations (study 1) and high reputations (study 2).

Cross-selling of extended warranties has become the norm in many durable consumer goods categories. These warranties typically cover parts and labor repair costs for durables for a pre-specified period beyond the standard product warranty. The cross-selling of extended warranties is now so prevalent that in certain product categories such as consumer electronics they account for the majority of retail profits. Margins are extremely high—in some cases in the 50–80 % range—compared to roughly 10 % for the typical product (Berner 2004). This has prompted the interest of public policy makers in some countries. In the UK, for instance, sellers of extended warranties are required to upload all offers to a central website, ensuring transparency to consumers.

Participative pricing mirrors the idea that consumers directly contribute to determining the price paid (Chandran and Morwitz 2005). Pay what you want (PWYW) is such a participative pricing strategy, which becomes increasingly popular in many industries (Johnson and Cui 2013). In a PWYW situation, consumers have complete control over the price determination (Kim et al. 2009) by choosing the price they want to pay. This price can be above or equal to zero (Chao et al. 2014). Recent studies on the effectiveness of PWYW pricing examine determinants of willingness to pay such as satisfaction (Kim et al. 2009; Kunter 2015), consumers’ reference prices, or external reference prices (Johnson and Cui 2013; Soule and Madrigal 2014). The objective of this study is to analyze the proportion of their reference price (RP) consumers are willing to pay in a PWYW situation in specific conditions (involvement, moderate vs. high; salience of the external reference price, yes vs. no; satisfaction, low vs. high; consumers’ mood, neutral vs. positive). This study adds to existing research by considering effects other than just direct ones because no previous studies have simultaneously analyzed direct and interaction effects of such conditions. In addition, effects of involvement and mood have not been studied in a PWYW context yet.

Branded online communities have become an integral part of doing business, as customer membership can have a direct impact on the bottom line. A recent study found that customers who join online communities increase their online purchases online by 37 % and offline by 9 % (Manchanda et al. 2012). A key component of these communities is the way in which users’ reputation in the community is signaled (Lampel and Bhalla 2007). While one community might construct a hierarchy of labels to display user status such as Newbie, Citizen, and Super Citizen in the T-Mobile Support Community, another may use numerical scores such as points. For example, users in the National Multiple Sclerosis Society community gain points based on the number of comments that they post to the community. Most communities employ one reputation signal type or highlight one type over another if multiple types are used simultaneously. Even when points and labels are used to signal reputation concurrently, a pilot study (N = 80) shows that consumers tend to rely on one reputation signal type (points or labels) as the major signal (i.e., 70 % of participants in a multiple-signal condition could recall only one signal type), and directional evidence suggests that the presence of multiple signals may be confusing (M_Multiple = 3.47 vs. M_One = 3.14). As such, the focus of our research is to systematically explore the differences in consumer perceptions of each reputation signal type individually.

Charities sometimes use information about others’ participation to influence potential donors. Two streams of research on social norms and the bystander effect appear to predict opposite effects of others’ participation on charitable behavior. We reconcile these conflicting perspectives by identifying a broader theoretical framework based on agency-communion motives that accounts for both positive and negative effects of others’ participation on charitable behavior. Based on our theoretical framework, we show that others’ participation has a positive effect on charitable behavior when recipient resources are low but a negative effect on charitable behavior when recipient resources are high. Consistent with our theoretical framework, we show that these positive and negative effects of others’ participation are mediated, respectively, by perceived informativeness of social norm and perceived responsibility for achieving the campaign’s goals. Further consistent with our framework, we show that manipulating agentic-communion motives modifies the effects of others’ participation and recipient resources on charitable behavior. This research makes a contribution by identifying recipient resources as a new moderator and agency-communion motives as a new mechanism underlying the effect of others’ participation on charitable behavior.

One important challenge that managers of online communities face is to do with ensuring that members do not only benefit from contributions of others but that they also actively participate in providing support to those in need. This paper adopts the resource exchange theory to examine factors that influence reciprocity in online health communities. Data was gathered from 361 members of online health communities from Gauteng, South Africa, using a structured questionnaire. The findings show that willingness of online health community members to reciprocate favours depends on perceived level of social capital that individual members associate the online community with as well as their gratefulness towards the community and satisfaction with the community. Of the two emotional factors, satisfaction with online community was found to have stronger direct influence on willingness to reciprocate than gratefulness. The study helps isolate factors that managers of online health communities need to focus on in their efforts in stimulating reciprocity on their platforms.

Today, we are more aware of the several alternative activities happening around us than ever before. We have access to real-time information about what is going on—events to see, places to visit, conversations to follow, gatherings to attend, etc. Especially through digital tools and social media, we are frequently reminded of the existing experiences. Yet, we often lack the resources to participate in all. As a result, we are likely to experience an aversive affective state, a feeling of missing out on the unattended experiences. Despite the extensive managerial press on FOMO (e.g., Herman 2012; JWT 2012), scarce empirical work exists (Alt 2015; Przybylski et al. 2013). In this paper, we elaborate on the meaning of FOMO in a nomological web of constructs, explore its antecedents (i.e., when and how it occurs), and link FOMO to consumer behavior.

Expanding waistlines continue to be a burden on both consumers and public health (Ye et al. 2015). Many see food manufacturers and retailers as contributing to this weight epidemic, as more than half of consumed calories in the developed countries come from packaged foods and soft drinks typically available in various retail outlets (Euromonitor 2015). Considering expanding waistlines worldwide and the centrality of retailers and suppliers in food distribution, many hold these organizations at least part responsible for helping consumers to eat more healthily. We propose that marketers should undertake health promotion activities as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices, thus benefitting consumers, public health, corporate reputations, shareholder value, and alignment with public policy priorities. However, an important question arises what exactly should such organizations do in order both to satisfy consumers and to meet social obligations to support healthier eating?

The nexus between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and firm financial performance has been researched extensively, but the findings have been inconclusive or even conflicting. However, the link between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and marketing performance is unexplored. This study examines the relationship between CSR and marketing performance and uncovers a positive relationship. It also shows that the degree of commitment toward the customer relationship further enhances the positive relationship.

Organizational crisis can potentially result in negative publicity (Dean 2004), which could be damaging for organizational reputation and image (Claeys et al. 2011; Dean 2004). Additionally, organizations in crisis are bound to encounter negative external stakeholder emotions (e.g., anger), prompting external stakeholders to talk negatively about or to abandon the organization (Coombs 2007). Organizations, therefore, are pressed to adequately respond to a crisis situation by communicating with their stakeholders and influencing their views about the organization (Coombs 2007). During an organizational crisis, stakeholders and the media demand immediate, thorough, and unqualified response from an organization (Seeger et al. 2001, 2003).

In an organizational context, scholars suggest that successful management of an organization in crisis also largely depends on how an organization acts after the crisis hits (Benoit 1997; Brown and White 2011; Coombs 2007). When something goes wrong, the organization has the option of being the first to fully admit that something with potentially harmful consequences exists (proactive communication) or that organization might wait until an external party (e.g. the media) exposes the problem and then reacts to that exposé (reactive communication).

It has been widely accepted that market-oriented behaviors are positive drivers of business performance (Narver and Slater 1990; Jaworski and Kohli 1993; Morgan et al. 2009). Rather than examining such behaviors, this study bases its assertions on Kor and Mesko’s (2013) investigation outlining the role of the drivers and consequences to the firm’s dominant logic. This doctoral study infers that the firm’s dominant logic (defined below) has similarities with a market-oriented dominant logic (Cadogan 2003) and is driven by dynamic managerial capabilities (Kor and Mesko 2013). The firm’s dominant logic is “the way in which managers conceptualize the business and make critical resource allocation decisions - be it in technologies, product development, distribution, advertising, or in human resource management” (Kor and Mesko 2013, p. 235). Dynamic managerial capabilities (managerial human capital, managerial cognition, and managerial social capital) are “the capabilities with which managers create, extend, and modify the ways in which firms make a living — to help explain the relationship between managerial decisions and actions, strategic change, and corporate performance under conditions of change” (Helfat and Martin 2015, p. 1282). No studies have examined the drivers and consequences of a market-oriented dominant logic which needs to be done so that managers can appreciate how firms can manage their market-oriented activities and shape their performance accordingly through the correct level of investments across its various departmental functions. This is critical to measure so that scholars and managers can appreciate the situations in which marketing may not always be a positive activity as an overinvestment in marketing may cause negative consequences (e.g., effects on tensions and performance) (Buono and Bowditch 2003). The study conceptualizes the dark side of a market-oriented dominant logic through causal relationships (where the primary contribution is made), whereby a market-oriented dominant logic indirectly leads to negative consequences (such as tensions between departments through overinvestments in marketing) as well as through environmental contingencies. The paper argues that while the “marketing department” is an integral component of a firm’s operations (Verhoef and Leeflang 2009; Morgan 2012), other departments are likely to require a level of investment in tandem with marketing (Homburg et al. 2015). Tensions may encapsulate a broad range of outcomes associated with such relative investments across an organization’s departments such as trust and relationship quality (Menon et al. 1997). This study intends to make recommendations on how managers can avoid such outcomes based upon the proposed negative link between an overinvestment in marketing (due to a market-oriented dominant logic) and financial performance. As such, the above conceptualizations yield the research objective of examining (under the dynamic managerial capabilities perspective) the antecedents and consequences to a market-oriented dominant logic with a specific focus on the dark side to such market-oriented dominant logic. The presentation ends by discussing further stages of this doctoral study’s life cycle specific to the empirical testing of the conceptual findings.

Celebrity endorsement advertising has long been recognized as an effective method in modern marketing (Stafford et al. 2003). However, using a celebrity is risky, as celebrity scandals can create negative attitudes toward the brand, thus effecting sales and resulting in the stock price falling. For instance, when Tiger Woods and Armstrong were found cheating on their wives, consumers felt offended. They advocated boycotting Nike as a response to the cheating. US celebrities show up in more than 15 % of advertisements, and the number is far higher in markets, such as India (24 %) and Taiwan (45 %) (Crutchfield 2010). Since many more celebrities were used in Asia, are scandals more harmful in Asia than in the Western culture? If so, what factors determine the differences? Are consumers from one culture more forgivable than consumers from the other culture? More specifically, are Chinese consumers more forgivable toward Chinese celebrities than American celebrities? In turn, are American consumers more forgivable toward American celebrities than Chinese celebrities?

The objective is to propose and test a framework based on the psychological continuum model (PCM) that explains fans’ positive word of mouth for a sponsored event, taking the fans’ distance traveled to the event into consideration. For fans, the identification process is thought to be a mechanism driving fans to discuss a sponsored event.

Product reviews are an essential prepurchase proxy for customers to evaluate anticipated consumption experiences (Chatterjee 2001; Herr et al. 1991). Academic research has investigated the influence of product reviews on perceived quality and purchase intentions (Liu 2006); however, this research offers little guidance as to the effects of product reviews on purchase intentions in the context of bundles. Bundling has developed into a common practice for firms (Brough and Chernev 2012; Harris and Blair 2006), and customers of Amazon.com encounter bundled products nearly every time they shop. Thus, providing a better understanding of how product reviews affect purchase intentions offers potentially valuable theoretical and managerial implications. This research offers an exploratory investigation into whether consumers’ bundle purchase intentions always improve as individual product reviews increase in favorability.

Word-of-mouth (WOM) communication is considered the most important, informal means of communication between consumers (Derbaix and Vanhamme 2003). An increasingly important extension of the traditional face-to-face WOM used by consumers is the electronic word of mouth (eWOM), especially with regard to how eWOM is used within today’s online social media outlets (Weisfeld-Spolter et al. 2014). Within the travel and tourism industry, eWOM has become vitally important, as consumers tend to trust information from consumer-generated (social) media more than information from service providers (Ip et al. 2012). This is particularly true for the younger generation of Internet users—the “e-generation,” who are “digital natives” and who have used digital technologies since they were kids. The aim of this study is to provide a better understanding on how today’s e-generation is using eWOM as tourists/travelers, from a multicultural perspective. In order to reach this aim, the following research questions are stated: (RQ1) How are e-generation consumers using eWOM when planning a trip?; (RQ2) How are e-generation consumers using eWOM during and after a trip?

Although many scholars studied different aspects of online shopping versus in-store shopping, there are still questions about the effects of common shopping motivations on customers’ shopping channel preferences and purchase intentions. Theoretically, the literature about the motivations of shoppers’ channel preferences is almost a one-sided focus on online shopping or a sole concentration on in-store purchasing. Furthermore, the effects of shopping channel preferences on purchase intentions are not well established. Practically, while managers need to know which values consumers take into account when they choose shopping channels, our current knowledge is limited. Moreover, since the ultimate goal of marketing managers is to increase the purchase intentions, they should consider the effects of different motivations for shopping channel preferences on customer purchasing intentions. The surprising recent shutdown of well-known retailers in Canada, Future Shop and Target, again highlighted the necessity of comprehensive studies about customers’ shopping channel preferences and purchase intentions. Filling the existing gap in the literature, this research conceptually tries to shed more light not only on the effects of shopping motivations on channel preferences, but also on consumers’ purchase intentions in the preferred shopping channels.

A variety of factors have been found to influence eating behavior, which in turn aid in the understanding of how to address the obesity problem being experienced on a global level. In this research, we examine how different types of ambient scents can influence perceived temperature, which in turn can influence consumption volume and choice.

This research aims to examine smiley faces as visual primes that induce healthier food choices in children. As children are exposed to thousands of food advertisements and respond to environmental cues, food labeling and packaging are expected to have a strong impact on children’s food choices. Emolabeling is an image-based labeling strategy using happy and sad faces to visually communicate the level of healthfulness of a food item (Privitera et al. 2015). Prior research in emolabeling found evidence that children opt for healthier choices that are labeled with happy faces vs. sad faces (Privitera et al. 2015). Therefore, visual cues such as images and icons are simple measures to influence children’s food choices.

Obesity has become an ever-present concern in the modern world, and researchers are concerned with mechanisms that cause obesity. This research seeks to identify one possible cognitive style that affects how consumers process the consumption environment—context dependence—and how it relates to certain consumer’s propensity to overconsume. Context dependence (Witkin 1950) is the psychological tendency to over-rely on the environment to process information. In food environments, context dependence may make some consumers more susceptible to peripheral cues that their behavior is desirable or correct which in turn may lead to overconsumption. This research reaffirms the need for adjustments to the shopping and consumption environment if we are to improve national health. These adjustments, such as pathways to produce departments and shopping cart divisions, have already been shown to increase fruit and vegetable selection in the shopping environment (Payne et al. 2014).

Literature suggests that using olfactory cues in marketing communication activities could have potentially powerful effects (Morrin et al. 2011; Krishna et al. 2014). In this paper, we argue that scented advertising influences product-related judgements, especially when it comes to advertising products that hold expectations for scent (e.g. soap). More specifically, we propose that scent cues in advertising are automatically linked to the scent of the product, thus shifting attention to its concrete attribute. Evidence on psychological distance (Trope and Liberman 2010) suggests that certain aspects of the object we pay attention to change the way we feel about it. An attribute-focused mindset signals psychological proximity, manifesting in any of the following dimensions: one’s perception about hypotheticality of the object, its spatial, temporal or social proximity (Trope and Liberman 2010). Taken together, we predict that scent cues in marketing communications make the promoted product being perceived as closer and more realistic. Psychologically close objects feel familiar (Förster et al. 2009) and certain (Bar-Anan et al. 2007). Thus, we also propose that scent-induced psychological proximity increases perceived attractiveness of the product and purchase intentions (c.f. familiarity-liking effect, Rindfleisch and Inman 1998).

About 60 years ago, Walt Disney recognized that “entertainment spaces such as amusement parks could be used not only to sell popcorn and candy floss, but toys, collectibles, and motion pictures, as well as—and, we would argue, most importantly—a corporate brand image” (Kozinets et al., J Retail, 78: 17–29, 2002).Walt Disney is said to be one of the pioneers of brandscaping, the act of transforming a brand itself into a physical location (Riewoldt, Brandscaping: Worlds of Experience in Retail Design. Erlebnisdesign für Einkaufswelten. Basel, Boston, MA: Birkhauser-Publishers for Architecture, 2002). These brand worlds, like flagship stores or brand museums, are evident in B2C on many occasions nowadays and provide visitors with a unique brand experience. Academic research has been carried out, even if on a small level. In industrial marketing in contrast, these brand worlds have not been subject to academic research so far.This paper lays the foundation for future research on the topic of brand worlds in industrial marketing. It is based on a systematic literature review and qualitative content analysis of the B2C literature, as well as practical examples. The authors suggest a set of variables and categories to give a first overview on which forms of brand worlds already exist in industrial marketing and how they could be distinguished.

In 1931, Roy Disney Sr. noted that “The sale of a doll to any member of a household is a daily advertisement in that household for our cartoons and keeps them all ‘Mickey Mouse-Minded’”. That the Disney Company was aware of the significance of merchandising at such an early point in its history demonstrates just how crucial its branding was in the creation of a strong, inimitable corporate culture—one that stretches outside the company itself to embrace its fans. The methods by which the company very successfully achieved this through merchandizing and people management will be addressed throughout this paper.

A large number of studies on counterfeiting explore consumer’s behavior in the consumption of counterfeit articles. But few of them consider luxury brand consumers and counterfeiting. Our study attempts to contribute to this field by studying the reaction of luxury brand consumers in a Moroccan setting.Concerning the methodological facet, we first suggest the measure of consumer’s reaction toward counterfeiting, namely, “resistance to counterfeiting.” Then, we perform a PLS model that includes some antecedents of counterfeiting resistance (need for uniqueness, integrity, and price-quality linkage), attitude toward counterfeiting, word-of-mouth, and purchase intention.More precisely, this research demonstrates that counterfeiting resistance has a positive impact on purchase intention of legitimate product. There are also mediating effects of attitude toward counterfeiting and word-of-mouth.In a managerial perspective, we suggest to counter counterfeiting by focusing on the luxury brand itself. A favorable word-of-mouth seems to be an effective tool to stimulate consumer’s purchase intention, despite the presence of counterfeiting.

For retailers who are concerned about an unfavorable price image, a reasonable strategy would be to lower actual prices. However, previous research shows that consumers do not necessarily base store-level price perceptions, or a store price image, on a careful analysis of available price information. This study adds to the limited research on how consumers update store price perceptions by investigating asymmetric effects of price increases compared to price decreases on overall store price perceptions. It also assesses to what extent such an effect might be influenced by whether the store has a discount or premium positioning, and whether consumers’ price search behavior will lead to an increased accuracy in estimating the magnitude of a price change. The experimental study showed that price changes have an asymmetric effect on store price perceptions but these are not moderated by store type. Contrary to expectations, consumers who engage in price search behaviors are less likely to accurately estimate a change in price levels.

The current research introduces the concept of perceived point of sale experience (the experience gained at the location in a retail store where the transaction takes place between a customer and the business). It also investigates its role on shopper’s attitude towards a retail store along its hedonic/utilitarian dimensions and its subsequent influence on the shopper’s re-patronage intentions (intentions of a repeat visit to the store). Furthermore, the role of perceived retail crowding (consumer sensitivity to space scarcity in a retail store) and interactional justice as antecedents to perceived point of sale experience is assessed.

This study investigates the interaction effects of product return policy and perceived product price and quality on purchase risk, store image, and store patronage. Using Warranty theory, this study argues that a consumer’s perception of product price and quality interacts with return policy in driving down the risk of purchase, thereby increasing image of the store and patronage intention. Using an experiment design, this study finds significant support for the prediction that lenient return policy and quality perception interact with each other to influence store image and patronage intention. In addition, results show support for the prediction that the interacting effect of return policy and product quality on patronage intention is mediated by risk perception. Theoretical and managerial implications of the findings are also provided.

Although companies make use of organizational precautions, the relationship between a company and its customer can become problematic. Companies may then face the challenge of handling complaining customers. They have several options to deal with these complaints, such as offering an apology or monetary compensation. Generally speaking, handling complaints is quite important for companies because the way they handle complaints influences customers’ overall satisfaction (Mattila & Ro, 2008; McCollough, Berry, & Yadav, 2000). Furthermore, depending on a company’s complaint handling, customers may decide whether they want to stay loyal or terminate their relationship with the company (Homburg & Fürst, 2005). As acquiring new customers is much more expensive than maintaining relationships with present ones (Kotler & Keller, 2012), investigations about customer complaint management are highly relevant.Complaint studies so far incorporated two different points of view: customer’s perspective by focusing on customer (complaint) behavior including customer complaint satisfaction (e.g., Smith & Bolton, 1998; Tax, Brown, & Chandrashekaran, 1998), and company’s perspective by focusing on requirements or organization of complaint handling (for an overview, see Davidow, 2003). Combining both perspectives, the model of complaint handling introduced by Homburg and Fürst (2005) is of core interest for this paper. Their model focused on explaining complaint satisfaction and the relationship of complaint satisfaction toward customer loyalty after the complaint. This paper seeks to contribute to the research field on customer complaint management by partially adapting Homburg and Fürst’s model and testing in what sense monetary and nonmonetary failure compensations serve to explain complaint satisfaction and loyalty after the complaint within the scope of an experimental approach. Furthermore, the authors extend the research model and investigate boundary conditions of failure compensation types by adding different magnitudes of failure.The authors conducted an online experiment, based on a 2 × 2 between-subjects design with two manipulated factors: type of failure compensation (monetary vs. nonmonetary) and magnitude of failure (high vs. low). A total of 133 undergraduate students completed the study, resulting in four scenarios. The results show that in case of a low magnitude of failure caused by the company and a resulting customer complaint, the better option is to offer monetary compensation to ensure or increase both: complaint satisfaction and customer loyalty. In case of a high magnitude of failure, means pointed in the reverse direction, however, the differences were nonsignificant. Companies should instead focus on being polite, showing empathy and most importantly offering an apology toward the customer. Furthermore, the authors can explain the effect of type of compensation on customer loyalty in the low magnitude of failure condition after the complaint via customer complaint satisfaction. Therewith, the relationship of customer complaint satisfaction toward customer loyalty after the complaint can also be traced (Homburg & Fürst, 2005).

In order to achieve expected financial performance, buyers and suppliers need to invest in their relationship. Prior research has corroborated the importance of relationship investments in relationship marketing. However, previous studies investigate the impact of relationship investments on financial performance in a static fashion without taking the RLC into consideration. Recent literature suggests that researchers study relationship marketing from a dynamic perspective. To meet the suggestion, the present search attempts to examine how general and specific relationship investments affect supplier’s profits during the RLC and investigate conditions under which the two relationship investments are able to produce optimal profits. After applying conceptual models, the current research reveals an interesting finding that when general and specific relationship investments have equal effects on profits, supplier’s profits will reach two extreme points: minimum and maximum. Based on the practical perspective, this study argues that the maximum point follows the minimum one. The following effort for this research is to find out at which stages of the RLC the minimum and maximum levels occur.

The global fashion industry has been growing steadily. Among the categories in the fashion business, fast fashion brands such as Zara and H&M have been growing more rapidly than other categories (Schlossberg 2016) due to: (1) the short lead time, (2) the trendy and fashionable clothing design, and (3) the low prices (Cachon and Swinney 2011; Christopher et al. 2004; Fernie and Azuma 2004). However, fast fashion brands face possible threats from their competitors. Since various in-store attributes contribute to sales in the fast fashion industry (Anguelov 2015) and since the offline store format for fast fashion has been identified as key for consumers in distinguishing fast fashion brands from other fashion brands (Gabrielli et al. 2013), we examined antecedents of consumer satisfaction at the point of purchase as well as determinants of actual purchase. In particular, we compared determinants of planned vs. unplanned purchase because fast fashion brand sales rely heavily on unplanned purchase (Anguelov 2015).

As every individual is part of a social system, the decisions we make may influence not only ourselves but also others. The focus of this paper is to examine how consumers with different categorization mindsets make social decision, which refers to a choice between self-oriented options (maximization of self-interests) and other-oriented options (seeking benefits of others at some expense to self-interests). Categorization mindsets can be unidimensional, where consumers process only the salient dimensions when making decisions, or multidimensional, where consumers process both salient and non-salient dimensions when making decisions (Ulkumen et al. 2010). While past research has focused on relational factors that determine one’s social motive and subsequently one’s social decisions (Loewenstein et al. 1989; Van Lange and Kuhlman 1994; Messick and McClintock 1968), this paper identifies a non-relational factor of categorization mindset that may impact one’s social decision.

In reviewing the literature some theoretical gaps were detected. The first one was the lack of empirical evidence about conspicuous consumption when it is perceived positively. The second gap, regarding the influence of reference groups, is that the social identity theory does not explain the observer’s perspective when he is in front of certain reference group members involved in conspicuous behavior. The third theoretical gap is related to the study of pro-environmental behavior determinants that does not consider the specificities of social influences, like reference groups in particular situations (e.g., conspicuous consumption). Then, the objective of this research was to analyze: (1) if conspicuous consumption could be perceived in a positive way and; (2) the influence of reference groups, engaging in conspicuous consumption of an environmental cause, on the observer’s attitude. In a first experiment two variables were manipulated: “conspicuous consumption perception” (positive/negative) and “reference groups” (association/dissociation/neutral). It was found that conspicuous consumption could be perceived positively. There is evidence showing that the environmental cause evaluation of the observer is more positive if the observed individual belongs to a dissociation group.

The increase in the amount of environmental studies being undertaken today suggests the popularity of such studies among academic researchers, businesses and policy makers. Existing studies have mostly concentrated on studying the determinants of environmental behaviors and/or profiling green consumers (Roberts 1995, 1996; Straughan and Roberts 1999; Chan 2001; Kim and Choi 2005; Glig et al. 2005; Akehurst et al. 2012; Khare 2014). Unfortunately, such studies have mostly confined to studying only limited ERC behaviors. Also, much of the literature is concentrated in developed economies (Diamantopoulos et al. 2003), with few notable exceptions in emerging economies (e.g., Chan 2001; Khare 2015). With the increasing concern for the environment and growing consumer class in emerging economies, marketers in the green domain, are looking to tap such markets. Thus, this study concentrates on understanding the environmental behaviors of Indian consumers. Specifically, we investigate how different levels of green consumption value and frugality impact an individual’s participation in various environmental behaviors.

2016 is the 80th anniversary of the academic field of International Marketing which, on its introduction was typical of the major paradigm shifts which tend to occur in marketing every quarter of a century. Practical evidence of major marketing blunders (such as the 2015 VW emission measure fiasco) suggests that we are due for another major shift, as exemplified by the discontent with globalization and the global crisis of trust; (Sanchez Bengoa et al. 2015; Sanchez Bengoa and Kaufmann 2015; Spais and Kaufmann 2015). In order to keep the field viable and vibrant, marketing peers are urgently advised to reflect on shortcomings, develop innovative multidisciplinary theories by taking a new perspective on holism and complexity, and set not just quantitative but also qualitative goals. The paper is structured in the following way: based on a synopsis of three case studies (beef crisis; employee identification in Poland and migration), a multidisciplinary conceptualization to remedy the respective gaps and a research methodology to validate the latter is provided.

A meta-analysis is a strategic tool to be used in developing new models based on existing ones found in the literature. The implementation of the meta-analysis on the current models of subsidiary exit among 51 academic papers, revealed that there are six important constructs, i.e., parent firm factors, environmental factors at target country, type of experience, organizational characteristics, experience, investment strategy, and subsidiary exit. At least 21 independent variables should be considered in future attempts of measuring or assessing subsidiary exit. US firms compared to Japanese and Korean firms have stronger relationships of the antecedent factors with subsidiary exit indicating their higher sensitivity to changes to factors influencing divestments. Finally, the study reveals 11 significant relationships which are formulated to a relational model which can be exploited in future studies on subsidiary exit/divestitures.

Retailers are the last and, thus, a crucial link in the marketing channel because they make goods available to millions of consumers where and when they want them on a daily basis. As consumer tastes and preferences are ever evolving, retailers devise new store formats and expand their operations in order to respond to changing consumer behavior trends. As a result, in many countries around the world, the retail industry has become saturated and retailers have sought to explore untapped market potential in foreign markets in a desire to grow. This has led to a heightened level of retail internationalization (RI), which refers to a retailer’s store presence in foreign markets (Reinartz et al. 2011; Vida et al. 2000). And despite the recent growth of online shopping, which enables international retailers to use e-commerce as a foreign entry mode, these retailers still face similar foreign market expansion impediments as retailers expanding internationally through brick-and-mortar stores.Because retailers directly interact with final consumers as well as suppliers, the RI process is a complex and particularly challenging task (Dawson 2007; Jackson and Sparks 2005; Jonsson and Foss 2011; Samiee 1993; Wrigley and Currah 2003). In order to be successful on the international scene, retailers need to gain an understanding of local culture and business practices, the regulatory environment and its impact on retail operations as well as the nature of retail competition in the host market because retail institutions are embedded in the environment within which retailing activities take place (Douglas and Craig 2011; Griffith 1998; Griffith et al. 2005; Samiee 1993, 1995). In fact, there are numerous examples of international retailer powers such as Wal-Mart and Dutch retailer Royal Ahold that have underestimated some of the aforementioned environmental factors when expanding abroad and have, as a result, suffered significant losses (Bianchi 2011; Christopherson 2007; Samiee 1995).Not surprisingly, in an effort to better understand the intricacies of RI and the road to a retailer’s successful internationalization efforts, marketing scholars have sought to tackle various RI issues. Specifically, we identify three key RI areas that have attracted scholarly interest: (1) RI process, (2) Small to Medium-sized retail internationalization (SME RI), and (3) RI and retail structure. However, RI research to date has left many unanswered questions and, thus, multiple research gaps to be filled. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, no attempts have been made to synthesize RI research in an effort to further advance the field. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to, by providing a comprehensive review of RI research, identify the existing gaps in RI research as well as make suggestions for potential research venues going forward.

There is an increasing number of reports on termination of customer relationships initiated by major banks in the media. While there are some [short-term] benefits associated with termination of customer relationships such as improving profitability and increasing employees’ productivity, our understanding of its negative consequences (negative WoM, compliant, retaliatory behaviors, etc.) and ways to address them is still very limited. Using a three dimensional perceived justice lens, this study looks at two distinct firm-initiated termination strategies (firm-oriented vs. customer-oriented) to compare their impact on customers’ evaluations and behavioral reactions. A scenario-based experiment with a 2 (termination strategy: firm-oriented vs. customer-oriented) × 2 (apology: present vs. absent) × 2 (explanation: present vs. absent) × 3 (monetary compensation: none vs. moderate vs. high) between-groups design is used. Based on the experiment conducted among 1248 US consumers in February 2016, we show that the two termination strategies significantly vary in terms of their perceived severity as well as their subsequent impacts on customers’ attitudinal and behavioral reactions. In addition, we show that offering different types of compensation (both tangible and psychological) can be an effective strategy in reducing the negative consequences of firm-initiated service termination.

The objective of this paper is to propose hypotheses that explore the impact of three patient-centered attributes of patient satisfaction on word-of-mouth communication by patients. With the underpinnings of advertising communications theory, we examine how empathy, responsiveness, and physical environment of a hospital affect word-of-mouth communication and intensity. This conceptual paper lays the foundation for future empirical research that has a potential to yield important and insightful findings. Results from an examination of hypotheses developed in this paper may advance knowledge in this area and assist administrators in improving patient-centered attributes of patient satisfaction that can stimulate positive word-of-mouth communication.

Previous research has looked at several gurus of wine ratings and the relationship between their rating and price in French, New Zealand, and other geographic markets (Horowitz 2002; Ali 2008). Yet, to the author’s knowledge, Robert Parker remains conspicuously absent in some areas of statistical inquiry, given his high level of prominence in the wine ratings industry. This paper examines the empirical support for Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate’s wine ratings relationship with price percentage change in domestic wines produced in 2011. Utilizing the hedonic price function and signal theory, Robert Parker’s wine rating, in addition to several control variables, is empirically analyzed in a study utilizing over 800 observations.

With the prevalence of Internet and social media, there are a lot more opportunities for consumers to offer their opinions to firms, other consumers with similar interests, and the general public. Generally such opinions are reviews of products, services and firms, and could be positive or negative. However, some consumers publicly post their negative reviews with an intention to hurt the firm that they perceive has treated them badly (Tripp and Grégoire 2011). Thus, while negative reviews are often posted in good faith and with the intentions to aid users and consumers or offer feedback to the firm, revenge behaviors are motivated by the intention to cause harm to the firm’s reputation and/or business. Thus revenge behaviors are spurred by different consumer perceptions, intentions, attributions of blame and the type of publicity sought for the review (Grégoire et al. 2009, 2010; Haj-Salem and Chebat 2014; Joireman et al. 2013; Zourrig et al. 2009). Such behaviors are often exhibited through public posting on various social media sites (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube), third-party complaint sites (e.g., consumeraffairs.org), or specific anti-corporation websites.

“Double-Eleven” Day (aka 11.11 [November 11th], Singles Day, and Bachelors Day) is an e-commerce shopping spree celebrated by millions of Chinese e-shoppers. Since 2013, Chinese e-tailers have experienced record 1-day sales on that date. Qualitative secondary data about ‘Double-Eleven’ Day e-shoppers suggests they are short-term oriented and individualistic, anti-hierarchical in buyer–seller relationships, focused on immediate consumption and hedonic pleasure, and prone to spontaneous trust and superficial interactions when online. In contrast, traditional Chinese shoppers conform to long-established Chinese personal selling strategies by being long-term oriented, collectivistic, and seekers of long-term mutual trust in hierarchical buyer–seller relationships. Hence, Chinese e-tailers should adapt their selling practices to Chinese e-shoppers’ attitudes and behaviors.

Online shopping has become a common phenomenon in today’s fast paced life with customers resorting to the internet to make even the most trivial purchases. With advancement in technology, e-commerce has transcended all barriers that could hinder its growth and expansion.

Based on the results of literature review and a qualitative study, a measurement scale for Confucian ethics was developed, and further purified and validated with survey data collected in China. The measurement scale emerged from the data consists of four dimensions: benevolence, work ethic, business ethics, and righteousness. This multidimensional scale demonstrated acceptable reliability as well as convergent, discriminant, and nomological validity. The predictive validity was assessed by looking into the relationship between Confucian ethics and social traditionalism or a narrow view of corporate social responsibility. The results show that all but one dimension of Confucian ethics negatively impacted social traditionalism. The interactions of benevolence, righteousness, and business ethics with psychological foundations of morality (either individualizing or binding foundations) suggest that Confucian ethics negatively affects social traditionalism by either reducing the positive effect of individualizing foundations or by enhancing the negative effect of binding moral foundations on social traditionalism. Nevertheless, work ethics positively affected social traditionalism, which confirms the common view that Confucian ethics does not condemn profit-seeking per se. Implications of the findings and limitations of this research are discussed.

Approximately one in every nine jobs in the United States involves selling. As a result, significant research has focused on identifying determinants of salesperson performance ranging from adaptive selling, customer orientation, emotional intelligence, motivation, to job fit. Our research introduces and tests a new determinant of salesperson performance, skilled intuition. Drawing from naturalistic decision-making research, we define skilled intuition as a heightened ability to make accurate, intuitive judgments based on the pattern-recognition-matching process of environmental cues (i.e., customer cues) to schemas.We investigate three intuitive judgments made by salespeople of their customers: intuition of needs, budget, and purchase likelihood. This paper reviews prior research on NDM research to suggest that top performing salespeople possess skilled intuition. In doing so, we highlight the importance of skilled intuition to both theory and practice, integrate prior research on determinants of salesperson performance, and provide managers with guidance on how to cultivate skilled intuition in their sales force.

This paper contributes to the emergent literature on sales managers’ ethical leadership (e.g., DeConinck 2015; Ng and Feldman 2015) by developing a framework of the mechanism by which sales managers’ ethical leadership influences salespeople’s ethical behavior and performance. Ethical leadership is defined as “the demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships, and the promotion of such conduct to followers through two-way communication, reinforcement, and decision-making” (Brown et al. 2005, p. 120). This definition embodies two broad aspects of an ethical leader: (a) a moral person dimension, demonstrated through honesty, caring, and fair and balanced decision-making and (b) a moral leader dimension, demonstrated through frequent communication about ethics, setting clear ethical standards and using rewards and punishment to motivate adherence to those standards, and proactively serving as role models for ethical conduct (Brown and Trevino 2006).The framework proposes that sales managers’ ethical leadership nurtures salespeople’s work engagement, which serves as an intrinsic motivational state that leads to productive behaviors (Den Hartog and Belschak 2012). Work engagement is defined as a “positive, fulfilling work related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication and absorption” (Schaufeli et al. 2002, p. 74). Through their ethical standards, communication, conduct, and modeling, ethical leaders are likely to make work more meaningful and significant, create a sense of ownership and pride, and enhance commitment and resilience (Den Hartog and Belschak 2012; Menguc et al. 2013). Work engagement, a positive emotional state, becomes a bridge that connects ethical leadership with behavior and performance (Menguc et al. 2013; Rich et al. 2010).The framework examines three moderators—ethical climate, leader charisma, and performance attributions—of the ethical leadership–work engagement relationship. In organizations where ethical conduct is supported and encouraged, the relationship between sales manager’s ethical leadership and salespeople’s work engagement is expected to be strengthened. Further, charismatic ethical leaders are expected to more effective than others in fostering work engagement as they are demonstrably adept in expressing an attractive vision, energizing followers, engendering commitment, infusing self-belief and a sense of purpose, and facilitating subordinates’ positive emotions (De Hoogh and Den Hartog 2009). Finally, following attribution theory, when salespeople attribute improved personal and organizational performance to their managers’ ethical leadership, they are more likely to become engaged at work. In summary, the framework contends that salespeople are more likely to “mirror the boss” in terms of ethical behavior and performance when sales managers are ethical, charismatic, and competent; this emulation is supported by the organization’s ethical climate and channeled through work engagement.

The boom of internet and network technology has fostered the emergence of a new type of advertising model: affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing spend has reached to four billion dollar in the USA in 2015. Surprisingly, however, affiliate marketing is still considered as one of the least understood components of the online marketing mix. Also in academic research, affiliate marketing has received little attention. Affiliate marketing has been described as performance-based marketing, and the primary compensation models employed in affiliate marketing industry are performance-based and outcome-driven (e.g., pay-per-sale, pay-per-click, and pay-per-action). Those performance-based compensation methods compensate only on results rather than input, focus solely on direct performance (e.g., revenue) and ignore indirect performance (e.g., quality of customers), and fail to take affiliate’s risk attitude into account, and thus they have been proved to be insufficient and ineffective under certain circumstances. It calls for a better compensation system, which will go beyond the purely performance-based mechanism.In salesforce literature, control system is a broader concept than compensation method, which will also consider other control activities such as monitoring and evaluation, besides compensation. The design of salesforce control system could be either outcome-based or behavior-based. In this paper, we define Affiliate Control System (ACS) as: merchant’s set of procedures of monitoring, motivating, directing, and evaluating its affiliate partners. The outcome-based affiliate control system means merchant’s control procedures mainly focus on the outcomes and performance of affiliate (e.g., sales and traffic generated); the behavior-based affiliate control system emphasizes the importance of affiliate’s behaviors (e.g., tactics applied and resources devoted). Based on agency theory and transaction cost analysis, we studied the antecedents for choosing between outcome-based and behavior-based affiliate control system from three levels: environment, merchant characteristics and affiliate characteristics. Specifically, we propose that high environment uncertainty will encourage merchant to choose behavior-based over outcome-based affiliate control system; larger affiliate team size will increase merchant’s willingness to adopt behavioral-based control system due to improved efficiency, but this willingness is moderated by merchant’s risk attitude and its ability to measure affiliate’s behaviors; different types of affiliates will also have their own preferences: content provider prefers behavior-based control system, shopping incentivizer prefers outcome-based control system, while there is no preference for shopping assistant. The effect of affiliate’s own preferences on merchant’s decision of control system is moderated by affiliate power.

The way that food is presented on a plate (i.e., plate presentation) can influence consumers’ judgments and decisions. Not surprisingly, some restaurants have started to use plate presentation strategically. This research investigates unintended consequences of plate presentation in terms of influencing consumers’ portion size perceptions and consumption. We ask: would presenting a portion of food vertically (i.e., stacked up on a plate) versus horizontally (i.e., spread out on the plate) influence consumers’ portion size perceptions? And how might vertical (vs. horizontal) plate presentation influence consumers’ consumption volume?We draw on prior research related to size perceptions and characteristics of the eating environment and link it with work in the domain of the psychophysics of salience. We propose that in typical dining situations the length and width of the food portion (i.e., the surface area) will be relatively more salient than the height dimension leading foods with larger surface areas to be perceived as larger. Furthermore, for equal volumes of food, portions presented horizontally would have a greater surface area and should therefore be perceived as larger than portions of food that are presented vertically. We also propose that because consumers’ perceive portions of food presented vertically as smaller they will eat a greater volume of food when the portion is presented vertically (vs. horizontally).The results of four studies support our predictions and show that plate presentation can systematically influence consumers’ portion size perceptions and consumption volume. This effect appears to be driven by consumers’ tendency to base portion size evaluations on the length and width dimensions of the plated food since these dimensions would be relatively more salient than the height dimension in typical dining situations.

Commercial companies have to be innovative to remain competitive and to grow economically (Aaker 2007). However most of them still have to deal with high rates of innovation failures (Moore 2002). An important aspect when introducing an innovative product is the intermediary—the retailing industry. Before trying to persuade consumers into buying new products, the communication focus has to be on retail as partner and convincing the management of integrating the products into their portfolio. The threat of rejection by the customers and the considerable risk of financial losses can lead to a negative attitude which is called resistance in scientific discourse (e.g. Garcia et al. 2007; Bagozzi and Lee 1999; Ram 1987). In retailing, innovations can be distinguished by the following four characteristics, which are fulfilled by frozen baby food in the German market: Changes in the relationship between providers and consumers, changes in economic surroundings in the market, development of new product categories, and replacement of established products (Leifer et al. 2000). Our main goal is to identify barriers towards innovative products in the industry and to develop strategies to overcome those barriers. As our study object (frozen baby food) is new to the German market and questions all of the dominant paradigms of the regular baby food buyer, reactions of resistance grant a deeper insight into the mechanisms of innovation adoption in the market chain.We conducted an empirical qualitative study to broaden the understanding of resistance in retailing with 14 semi-standardized in-depth expert interviews (Kvale 2007). We spoke with two purchasing agents of drugstore companies, one purchasing agent and one branch manager in the organic food retailing industry, seven purchasing agents, and one branch manager in regular food retailing as well as one purchasing agent and one branch manager of German discounters. The participants are qualified as experts as they possess inside knowledge from their working experience in retailing and can serve as a proxy for a multitude of deciders in the retailing industry (Bogner et al. 2005). The interviews were mainly centered on the topics retailing and marketing, innovations and frozen baby food. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. The data was evaluated using qualitative content analysis and inductive coding to structure the high complexity and specificity of individual statements and generalize the findings (Miles and Hubermann 1994).Our results reveal that sources for resistance and thus barriers to innovations can occur: (1) individual-related and (2) company-related. Individual-related barriers arise from a psychological level as well as from a functional level whereas company-related barriers seem to have a major impact on the evolution from an idea to an innovation. Our findings help managers foresee potential sources of resistance and deploy preventive measures.

The most important dimensions of an ambient scent when selecting this scent to be diffused in the store environment are its pleasantness and its congruity with the object (e.g., product or store) under investigation (Doucé et al. 2013). In this study we examine the importance of the congruency of the ambient scent with the crossmodal correspondences elicited by the store environment. A crossmodal correspondence refers to the tendency of one sensory modality to be matched with another sensory modality (Spence 2012). The presence of a sensory cue in the store environment (e.g., the colors used) might trigger an expectation with respect to, for instance, the tactile sense (e.g., expected temperature). We propose that if the ambient scent triggers the same expectations as the store environment then the ambient scent and the store environment are crossmodally congruent. Furthermore, we state that diffusing a crossmodally congruent ambient scent in the store environment will lead to more positive effects compared to the use of a crossmodally incongruent ambient scent.In order to measure the crossmodal correspondences elicited by the store and the ambient scent, a crossmodal correspondences index was developed (i.e., 11 bipolar items based upon Crisinel et al. 2012). The absolute difference between the scores the store would receive and the scores the scent would receive on these 11 items (e.g., loud versus quiet) can then be averaged and result in a crossmodal congruency score between scent and store.Three pretests were conducted: (1) to determine the crossmodal correspondences elicited by the store (i.e., a store selling cooking materials) by use of the crossmodal correspondence index, (2) to find two pleasant ambient scents of which one has the lowest possible crossmodal congruency score and one which has the highest possible score, and (3) to determine if the chosen scents are congruent with the products.In the main study there were three conditions: (a) no ambient scent, (b) a crossmodally congruent ambient scent (i.e., Apple Pie), and (c) a crossmodally incongruent ambient scent (i.e., Coffee). Results showed that the presence of a pleasant and product congruent ambient scent, whether or not crossmodally congruent with the store environment, has a positive influence on pleasure experienced in the store, store environment evaluation, and store evaluation compared to the absence of an ambient scent. This result indicates that crossmodal congruency does not necessarily lead to more positive effects. However, only an ambient scent that is crossmodally congruent has a positive effect on word of mouth and approach behaviour compared to the no scent condition. Moreover, a crossmodally congruent ambient scent also has a positive influence on approach behaviour compared to a crossmodally incongruent ambient scent. Thus, our results reveal that the use of a pleasant, product congruent and crossmodally congruent ambient scent holds some benefits.The crossmodal correspondence index and crossmodal congruency score presented in this paper are fairly new concepts and are—in this study—based upon 11 items. Due to the effects that were found in this study, the further development of the crossmodal correspondence index and crossmodal congruency score is advised and recommended.

Would the lateral display patterns of food items influence choice? More specifically, would having healthy item(s) displayed on the left and unhealthy item(s) displayed on the right lead to different choice outcomes than having the items displayed in the opposite pattern? This research examines how the lateral (left vs. right) positions of healthy and unhealthy items influence choice and consumption. The results of multiple studies demonstrate that displaying healthy items to the left and unhealthy items to the right enhances preference for the healthy options. In addition, consumption volume of a healthy item (vis-à-vis an unhealthy item) is higher when it is placed to the left (vs. right) of the unhealthy item. We also demonstrate process evidence through tests of mediation.We propose that consumers’ natural tendency is to mentally organize healthy items to the left of unhealthy items. We base this proposition on research related to spatial representation of magnitude. Research shows that individuals hold a generalized system of magnitude representation in which dimensions such as time duration, number magnitude, and spatial extent are mentally organized as left-to-right (Walsh 2003). In the context of foods, healthy items are considered less heavy (Deng and Kahn 2009), deemed lower in calories (Chandon and Wansink 2007), believed to be less filling (Oakes 2006), and even perceived as less tasty (Raghunathan et al. 2006) than unhealthy items. Since stimuli of lower magnitude tend to be mentally organized on the left and those of higher magnitude tend to be mentally represented on the right, we propose that consumers arrange healthy items to the left of unhealthy items. Furthermore, a “healthy-left, unhealthy-right” lateral display pattern is congruent with consumers’ mental organization of food items varying in healthfulness, which enhances ease of processing and self-control, thereby leading to a relatively higher likelihood of choosing healthy options.Our research has important conceptual and practical implications. While prior studies have examined the role of several different factors in influencing choices between healthy and unhealthy options, the present research is the first to demonstrate the effects of lateral display positions of healthy/unhealthy options on choice and consumption. Furthermore, given recent concerns related to obesity and factors influencing choices for healthy (vs. unhealthy) options, understanding how visual cues influence choice has important implications for designing menus, website, and even retail display patterns.

To encourage participation of underrepresented groups in stereotyped domains (e.g., women in STEM), marketing managers frequently utilize ads that include members of the underrepresented group (e.g., a female engineering student as the spokesperson).

Sharing services have become and seem to remain popular with both investors and consumers.

Most developed economies are characterized by a strong orientation towards consumerism and individuals often draw on possessions to construct their self-identities. However, this orientation is largely unsustainable and a change is imperative to relieve global resource pressure. The nascent economy of sharing might provide a resort, as it is commonly associated with a more efficient resource usage. To explore possible major developments in the context of the sharing economy, and to better understand its implications for a sustainable development, the current research presents first findings of a Policy Delphi study among a global sample of experts in academia, business, and policy. Findings show that besides its inherent environmental sustainability, sharing is considered to be a promising avenue to social sustainability as it can fulfill important integration functions and open the marketplace to previously excluded individuals. While expectations vary, business leaders are most optimistic and foresee a disruption of current market systems. The business sector’s strong focus on sharing ventures is viewed critically by some experts, who believe the capitalist orientation contrasts and undermines the collectivist spirit of sharing systems. Public policy makers are called upon to more actively engage with the sharing economy and to develop a stable legislative framework.

In 2011, retailers spent $6.7 billion on television advertising and over the last ten decades have maintained the number one or two spot for television advertising spending. Yet, the academic literature has focused on brands/product categories when conducting television advertising research and retailers have received little attention. The current study is an extension of Resnik and Sterns (1977) content analysis of TV advertising of brands to retailers. Their work has been replicated and extended but not with a sample which investigated retailers. Ailawadi et al. (2009) identified major differences in the goals, tools, and outcome measures used by retailers and manufacturers (brands). Thus, advertising strategies used by manufacturers should not be generalized to retailers and this research is needed to fill the gap. For this research, the sample contained ads from all goods-based retailers on the Leading 100 Advertisers’ List from 2011. This study analyzed the framing of the advertisement and the advertisement was the unit of measurement. Videos of commercials found on YouTube were viewed for the content analysis. All ads downloaded from YouTube were the same version, no extended versions, as the ad shown on TV. YouTube was chosen as the source of the ads since many companies are now uploading their TV commercials immediately to YouTube. Whereas Resnik and Stern (1977) found just less than half (49.2 %) of ads to contain at least one informational cue, in the current sample of 179 ads, only one ad would be considered non-informative since it was the only one without any informational cues. Additional analysis included determining which criteria were used and if specific retailer types were likely to use certain criteria more than others.

The notion that retail salespeople play a crucial role in customers’ reactions and other important consequences for business success (Mittal and Lassar 1996) is widely accepted.

The way people buy things has fundamentally changed. While purchase behavior in traditional bricks-and-mortar stores is constricted by, for instance, limited retail spaces and finite opening hours, the Internet enables customers to buy whatever, whenever, from wherever they want to. In addition, while in the past, customers—when seeking for additional information beyond product descriptions and attributes such as brand, functional aspects, or price—were reliant on sales people’s advice or recommendations from friends, nowadays, most online retailers provide access to hundreds of product evaluations written by previous customers with only a few clicks. As a consequence, when making purchase decisions people increasingly rely on these customer product ratings as a credible information source for decision making. Previous research suggests that these product ratings may even serve as a substitute for traditional information sources rather than as a complement by, for example, curtailing the relevance of brands in purchase decision making (Chen et al. 2008; Luca 2011; Zhu and Zhang 2009); traditionally one of the key criteria when assessing the quality of a specific product or service (e.g., Jacoby et al. 1971). Although a large body of literature has focused on the impact of online product reviews and ratings on consumer decision making (see Cheung and Thadani 2012 for an extensive review), insights into the effects of the mere presence of online customer ratings on the formation of purchase decisions are still rare.Thus, the purpose of this research is to improve our knowledge regarding how the relative decision weights of different types of product characteristics (i.e., brand, functional aspects, and price) can change due to the presence of customer ratings as an additional information source for purchase decisions. Furthermore, previous research (e.g., Hu et al. 2008) suggests that the incorporation of customer reviews as an information source into decision making may serve as a means to reduce the risk associated with purchase decisions. Therefore, we incorporated the three most salient types of risk perceptions; namely, financial, performance, and social risk (e.g., DelVecchio and Smith 2005; Dowling and Staelin 1994; Taylor 1974; Dunn et al. 1986) into our model (study 2).We conducted three single-factor between-subjects experiments with two groups (customer ratings absent vs. customer ratings present) including choice-based conjoint designs with student samples (N_1a = 182, N_1b = 156, N₂ = 335). Additionally, we conducted several regression analyses. In sum, our findings reveal that the presence of customer ratings curtails the relevance of product characteristics (i.e., brand, functional aspects, and price) significantly. In addition, the fact that online ratings are incorporated into decision making to reduce purchase risks (i.e., social, performance, and financial risk) can be held responsible for the changes in decision weights of a product’s core characteristics which serve to alleviate risk perceptions when online ratings are absent.

Imagine you are looking for a second-hand armchair on the Internet. You soon come across an armchair you like, but you notice the seller is a senior person. Would the age of the seller—whether he/she is old or young—affect the chances of buying this armchair? The global population is aging (United Nations 2013). Due to a combination of increased life expectancy and reduction in fertility rates (Lutz et al. 2008), the percentage of people over 60 years old is expected to double by 2050 (United Nations 2013). The online presence of seniors is rapidly expanding as well. In Europe alone, Internet usage has doubled among people over 65 years old (Edwards et al. 2015). The so-called silver surfers are turning to online technology to increase interpersonal interaction (Fosman and Nordmyr 2015; Jyoti 2014), but also to earn additional income (Telegraph 2014). Online second-hand markets are one of the fastest growing markets (Walia 2013; Walia and Zahedi 2013). It is worth noting, however, that these markets are peculiar to the extent that available products are pre-owned by someone that buyers often do not know. Research suggests that certain invisible properties of former owners can transfer to goods (Kapitan and Bhargave 2013). It seems thus that consumers draw inferences about used goods based on available information of previous owners (e.g. age), which can shape product perceptions and intentions. Drawing on age stereotyping literature (Fiske et al. 2002; Cuddy et al. 2008; Couto and Koller 2012), and consumer contamination theory (Argo et al. 2006, 2008), we investigate how a senior (vs. young) seller contaminates second-hand products. Specifically, we examine whether being a senior (vs. young) seller in a second-hand goods market can increase or decrease consumers’ purchase intentions toward the product. Two experimental studies suggest that consumers prefer to buy used goods that were previously owned by senior people. Findings show that interpersonal warmth fully mediates this effect. Our results suggest that the growing senior population might have competitive advantages when it comes to the online second-hand marketplace. Future studies will investigate if these effects hold with different product categories.

The market for secondhand goods has increased dramatically in importance. This study seeks to understand how consumers react to marketer-provided information about secondhand products from a perspective of the Accessibility and Diagnosticity of information.

When consumers experience post-purchase dissonance (PPD), most consumers keep their product (keepers), whereas some take their product back to the seller (returners).

In the situation of salary reduction but still want to buy something as the popularity of, with the rise of global Internet usage, it created a sharp increase of online shoppers worldwide.

Recent research is beginning to place particular emphasis on investigating how receivers of WOM make use of it in their decision making. Receivers have been found to be selective in determining how much value they place on information gathered from WOM incidents and whether they will make use of it (Martin and Lueg 2013; Sen and Lerman 2007; Sweeney et al. 2008, 2012).

Many people espouse superstition, whether individually (e.g., wearing a lucky charm) or collectively (e.g., applying feng shui to the workplace) as a mechanism for garnering preferred life outcomes. Psychologists acknowledge the value of studying superstition at the personal level; yet our understanding of how superstitious beliefs influence risk-seeking tendencies is incomplete (e.g., Kramer and Block 2008). Drawing from prior research on superstition, astrometry, suspension of disbelief, and risk-seeking, this study applies the experiential consumption theory and ‘magical thinking’ literatures to test a model of risk-seeking tendencies. Because superstition is a joy-filled experiential consumptive practice for many consumers, it influences their behaviors meaningfully (Holbrook et al. 1986).Superstitious beliefs (S_UPER), self-assessed zodiac sign expertise (Zod_EXP), intention to read horoscopes (Int_HORO), attitude toward zodiac signs (A_ZOD), and suspension of disbelief for fictional works (Sod_FIC) and virtual reality (Sod_VR) are modeled as determinants of risk-seeking tendencies (Risk_SEEK). Students enrolled in marketing courses at a southwestern US university completed the questionnaire during regularly scheduled classes. The mean age of respondents (N = 218) is 22.32 (SD = 2.53), with gender split evenly. Whites (71 %), Hispanics (18 %), and Blacks (8 %) are most represented, with seniors (59 %) and juniors (27 %) dominating the sample.Estimation of the measurement model (30 items, 7 scales) confirms convergent and discriminant validity. The relationships were tested using SEM (LISREL). A COV matrix and MLE were used to estimate model parameters. Model estimation produced the following GOF statistics: χ2(393_df) = 1207.11 (P = 0.00), (CFI) = 0.94, (GFI) = 0.73, and (RMSEA) = 0.098. The t-statistic associated with 10 of 11 path coefficients is significant at the P < 0.05 level or better. Specifically, S_UPER relates positively to each Zod_EXP (H₁; t = 8.50), Int_HORO (H₂; t = 9.51), and A_ZOD (H₃; t = 9.99). Zod_EXP relates positively to both Sod_FIC (H₄; t = 2.56) and Sod_VR (H₅; t = 3.35), Int_HORO relates positively to Sod_FIC (H₆; t = 3.64) and inversely to Sod_VR (H₇; t = −3.52), and A_ZOD relates inversely to Sod_FIC (H₈; t = −4.39), but is unrelated to Sod_VR (H₉; t = 0.35). In turn, Sod_FIC relates inversely (H₁₀; t = −2.15) and Sod_VR relates positively (H₁₁; t = 2.09) to Risk_SEEK.The model constructs relate to consumers’ everyday fun (whether individually or through social connectedness) by making life more stimulating; thus, the value of applying experiential consumption and magical thinking to the superstition context. For example, losing oneself in a fictional character may boost life’s experiential value, influencing risk-seeking tendencies.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a fundamental element of managing professional sport properties (Irwin et al. 2003). CSR refers to a company’s commitment to reduce, minimize, or eliminate harmful effects of operating, while maximizing the long-term positive impact on society (Petkus and Woodruff 1992). Besides impacting society, there is ample support for the positive impact CSR activities can have on firm reputation. One common issue with CSR and CRM activities is a lack of strategic planning on the part of the firm (Porter and Kramer 2006).This case study demonstrates the managerial conflicts and decision-making scenarios that can be associated with corporate social responsibility and cause-related marketing. Using the Cincinnati Bengals and their affiliation with NFL player Devon Still, we describe a series of events that led to an unplanned nation-wide cause campaign that resulted in the sales of more than 10,000 Devon Still jerseys benefitting pediatric cancer. We discuss the benefits and consequences of the fundraising program in the context of sport administration, CSR strategy, and corporate image. This case should be used to teach concepts and decision-making in business including those in sports marketing, public relations, business ethics, and strategic management.

Managers face increasing pressure to engage their firms in socially responsible behaviors such as cause marketing. As they seek to become more socially responsible for both philanthropic and economic reasons, their efforts are affecting not only consumers and society, but the employees who work for them and the potential employees they may attract. The majority of research on cause marketing, a type of marketing involving the cooperative efforts of a for-profit business and a nonprofit organization for mutual benefit, has focused on the impact on consumers; therefore, little is known about the effects of social initiatives on employees.

Individuals often think about and make decisions regarding social events that are geographically near or distant. Due to the ongoing globalization in the era of social media, effects of spatial distance (e.g., donation proximity; local vs. global) of companies’ cause marketing (CM) campaigns have been explored as a meaningful message cue that can influence consumers’ evaluations toward a CM campaign (Grau and Folse 2007; Inoue et al. 2013; Ross et al. 1992; Ross et al. 1991).

CM has been shown to be successful as it resonates with consumers, providing benefits for both companies and non-profit organisations (NPOs). CM is viewed as a promotional activity where an organisation will contribute a specified amount to a designated cause when customers purchase a specific product (Beise-Zee 2013; Vanhamme et al. 2012).

Social and economic disparities prompt the need for services provided by many non-profits as well as most corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Many firms donate resources to non-profit organizations as part of broader goals related to CSR. Non-profit organizations designed to serve individuals, and their communities must therefore use marketing efficiently to foster awareness of what they offer both to the firms looking to engage in CSR and to individuals in need of the non-profit’s services. This marketing message is often designed to communicate how the non-profit makes lives better. It is here where social marketing and public policy intersect, connecting the goals of a non-profit with those who seek to give (i.e., contributors) and its services to those who seek to receive (i.e., clients). Yet few studies exist which examine the services marketed by non-profits to potential contributors from the client’s perspective, that is, those who use these services. Thus, the purpose of this study is to understand how clients view the services they receive from a non-profit and to explore the implications of these views for developing effective social marketing and public policy.

Three papers are briefly presented (outlines below) that use descriptive statistics and bibliometric analysis. The presentations focus on the techniques and tools utilized, as well as the findings of the studies. The presentations include an opportunity for questions.

This article examines how power influences tip amounts. We propose that people tip differently depending on the level of power that they feel at any specific moment. The first experiment shows that when tipping is visible to the receiver, low-power individuals tip more than do those high in power. The second experiment shows that the quality of service does not significantly affect the tip amount for low-power individuals but it does for high-power individuals. This research provides insight as to why there is a lack of consensus in the literature regarding the relationship between service quality and tip size.

The smartphone is a permanent companion for shopping trips and also crucial for product research at POS or at home. Necessarily, either online or traditional store retailers have to reconsider their mobile appearance and adjust it to their consumers’ new shopping behavior. The use of game-like elements is called gamification and has the aim to raise emotions such as fun and happiness, which lead to a positive app experience and therefore consumers are more willing to accept and use the app. Normative beliefs encourage social value of an app and consumers want to compete in the games with friends. Through positive app experience, the attitude towards the retailer improves, recommendations are forwarded to social networks like Twitter or Facebook, and loyalty towards the retailer is built. Our aim is to analyze emotional and social values in retailing apps which use gamified elements to show the effect of emotional and social values on app loyalty and brand loyalty. Our contribution is to give retailers and marketers more insights about the possible brand loyalty enhancement or decline to which gamification in mobile apps can lead.

An increasing number of businesses are encouraging their salespeople to negotiate with customers while making a deal. The deal is where product specifications and the logistical aspects of the exchange are discussed and negotiated. This research examines the “crafting of a deal” from the perspective of value co-creation, where important negotiation outcomes are theorized to be determined by the interactions between salespeople’s negotiation strategies (SNSs) and customers’ persuasion knowledge (CPK). Using a unique dyadic dataset that combines multisource (salesperson and customer) survey data with objective purchase price information, we find that neither SNS nor CPK directly impact either outcome. Instead, all outcomes depend on the interaction of SNS and CPK. The compelling results provide evidence for varying levels of value co-creation on both the selling firm and the customer sides of the sales interaction based on the negotiation strategy employed by the salesperson.

The participants (athletes, spectators, organizers, etc.) of a sport event co-create the overall experience for each other and for themselves. Personal characteristics and motivational factors to attend the event often differ amongst participants, and the event marketing strategy should address the difference is those who co-create the event experience. The knowledge of different motivators as well as personal values of event participants should give new insight to sport event marketers and managers. According to the Human Values Theory, values are the most important guiding principles for people when making decisions. Sport events attract firstly the competing athletes and secondly the spectating audience. This paper studies the personal value structures of the spectators and competing team members in World Rally Championship (WRC) Neste Rally Finland event. The overall summary of findings reveals in part the factors behind the popularity of WRC Neste Rally Finland. For some, the rally is a “family reunion,” where experienced spectators come to enjoy the rally driven by same minded, experienced teams and drivers.

Many large and small scale sport events worldwide are successful thanks in large part to volunteers. These unsung, unpaid heroes are essential to the survival of such events. However, event organizers are challenged with recruiting and retaining volunteers in an increasingly competitive environment. Research suggests individuals’ perceptions of their work while volunteering (i.e., task attributes) has a significant effect on their satisfaction (Galindo-Kuhn and Guzely 2001). Additionally, volunteers who are able to utilize their skills fully and contribute to the ultimate success of the organization are more satisfied and committed to the organization (Jamison 2003). Other research indicates organizational-level evaluations (e.g., organizational reputation) play an important role attracting human capital (Cable and Turban 2003; O’Reilly and Chatman 1986). In the current study these research streams are linked to examine the effect volunteers’ task and organizational attributes have on their commitment to the volunteer organization. Importantly, pride—a volunteer’s assessment of others’ perceptions of the image of the volunteer organization (Lievens et al. 2007)—is predicted to play a mediating role in this relationship.

Brand experience has been noted as a key attribute affecting buying behavior. Although research into the determinants of brand loyalty in sport context has grown in recent years, the focus has predominantly been on brand experience, brand personality and satisfaction, not on social media variables. In addition, we lack empirically verified evidence of the brand experience and brand loyalty relationship mediated through brand identification. In this research the authors address the role of four different social media platforms and how they drive brand loyalty through different types of brand experiences, brand identification and satisfaction to the brand experience. Structural equation modelling is used to test the model based on data from a survey of 815 ice hockey fans of a particular ice hockey team. The results show that brand experience is positively affected by brand engagement in social media and the relationship is strengthened when more different social media platforms are used for following the brand. Brand experience affects brand loyalty mainly indirectly through brand identification and satisfaction constructs.

Social involvement research in the sport industry is still evolving, leaving much to be understood regarding the social activities of sport organizations (Walker and Parent 2010). While research suggests that CRM can positively affect purchase intentions and behavioral responses (e.g., Bhattacharya and Sen 2003), the rise in CRM activities in professional sports and the breadth of philanthropic partners among individual leagues warrants a deeper understanding of how and when sports fans respond favorably, and perhaps more importantly, unfavorably, to such initiatives.This paper examines the role of league–cause fit, perceived sincerity, and intentions to support league-wide cause-related sports marketing efforts (CRSM). Applying the tenets of attribution theory and social identity theory, we demonstrate the potential backlash effect of using “hometown” team imagery in league-wide CRSM advertising campaigns. The results of two experiments suggest that fans exposed to a CRSM advertising campaign that portrays their hometown team perceive such efforts as less sincere, which results in lower support of league-wide efforts when compared to fans exposed to the same campaign but featuring a rival team or no specific team.Although sports fans are often strongly attached to their favorite teams, and favor sponsor messages that are connected to their team in some way, this study provides some initial support for resisting the use of team allegiances to promote league-wide cause efforts. Importantly, when league–cause fit is low in CRSM, marketers cannot rely on favorite team imagery in ads to influence fans’ intentions to support the cause. However, when league–cause fit is high, team imagery has a pronounced effect. We speculate that images of the hometown team increased attention to the ad, and increased cognitive processing of the cause message.

Consistent with the Academy of Marketing Science call for papers theme on the magic of marketing, this research looks at the magic of price discounts and supply chain logistics on cash conversion cycle and working capital. Cash flow is vital for firms. The important of cash flow has been discussed in many studies. Research has shown that the cash conversion cycle (a.k.a. cycle days)—i.e., the time period between purchasing and selling, measured using estimated conversion periods for inventory and receivables, less payables—is correlated with firm profitability and stock returns (e.g., Jose et al. 1996; Shin and Soenen 1998). Thus, it is no surprise that some C-suite executives are emphasizing that their buying and selling teams need to improve cash flow through more focus on credit terms of payments and discounts in negotiations and “open-to-buy” or “merchandise planning” that includes retail pricing and discount management strategy (e.g., Hansen 2012; Hoffman et al. 2011; Johnson 2011).

Faced with pressures to achieve sales growth while enduring hypercompetitive and slow-growing landscapes in established markets, multinational companies are increasingly developing strategies to sell products to consumers in low-income markets around the world. These “base of the pyramid” (BoP) markets (Prahalad 2010) account for over half the world’s population. In South Africa, the context for our research, BoP consumers constitute more than one-third of the population (Chipp et al. 2013). These markets have tended to grow at significantly faster rates than established global markets recently, both in terms of population growth and growth in disposable income. Looking ahead to future decades, certain markets that occupy the base of the pyramid today will become important emerging markets that can fuel future sales growth, just as happened with countries such as South Korea that emerged before the concept of base of the pyramid markets had been recognized. Multinational companies that succeed in figuring out how to reach these unique markets may reap concomitant benefits. Successful companies may also contribute to poverty alleviation by providing base of the pyramid consumers with access to new products and services that can enhance their quality of life.

Retailing industry has undergone constant evolution and transformation in the past two decades, with the Internet being one of the main catalysts. Retailers capitalize on their owned online channel; whereas new form of online intermediaries are emerging. This macro-level study investigates how consumers use the online platform to interact with retailers, analyzing data from an Internet panel data provider. Actual behaviour of consumers on retailers’ online channel and online intermediaries is examined, across multiple websites. Behaviour within one channel, in terms of adoption and usage intensity, as well as the cross-channel behaviour is measured. Results indicate that cross-channel behaviour of consumers influences their activities on retailers’ website. Retailers that have a higher cross-visiting rate with intermediaries benefit from a more intense evaluation of their offerings. This suggests that online intermediaries direct consumer evaluation effort rather than simplifying it. This study builds a foundation for future research in the realm of multichannel behaviour by analyzing channel usage across retailers’ and online intermediaries’ websites.

Public policy in the USA strives to provide greater opportunity for women and minorities to participate in the economic mainstream. In the present paper, we examine the role that franchising plays in meeting these inclusive policy goals. Franchising serves as a natural private sector means for providing self-employment opportunities to individuals unable to acquire the skills or resources to operate an independent business independently (Hunt 1972: Williams 1999). Moreover, because franchisees gain access to established brands and publicly recognized service concepts, franchising may help overcome consumer reluctance to patronize women and minority-run businesses and become an attractive vehicle for incentivizing this segment to start their own businesses. The data in the present study reveal that (1) women and minorities are indeed represented in franchising in disproportionately higher numbers than men and non-minorities, and (2) that this representation is sector specific.

The purpose of this study is to establish a conceptual framework of xenocentrism in the context of consumer behavior and subsequently to develop a scale assessing its dimensionality, reliability, and validity. A mixed methodology approached was used in this study during an 18-month period. The data was collected in Mexico using a multistage research process. The final stage included a total sample of 356 consumers. For validation purposes, the ethnocentrism and cosmopolitanism scales were compared and tested against xenocentrism. The findings demonstrated that xenocentrism has to do with individuals’ positive attitudes towards foreign cultures and negative attitudes towards one’s own culture in terms of social behaviors and consumer preferences. The proposed scale to measure xenocentrism (XSCALE) which includes two factors, social xenocentrism and consumer xenocentrism, shows high levels of reliability and validity. The development of XSCALE is groundbreaking research in consumer behavior and international business, and should be used to segment consumers and identify potential markets for business expansion at a global level.

Across sundry sectors, consumers demonstrate proclivity to become part of brand tribes, which are exemplified by shared beliefs, brand admiration, unique rituals, and responsibility to fellow members and the community (Muniz and O’Guinn 2001). The understanding of consumers’ behaviors in brand communities and tribes is a valuable domain of investigation for marketing researchers (e.g., Gruner et al. 2014). The importance of smartphones in society is also well understood. As Android and iPhone users make up diverse social networks with a common ardor for their espoused brands, they are aptly classified as tribes (Taute and Sierra 2014).We conjecture a model of brand tribalism (i.e., L_INEAGE, S_OCIAL, D_EFENSE, and C_OMMUN) on brand love (L_OVE), which leads to brand attitude (A_B) and in turn purchase intention (PI_B). In contrast with prior research where purchase intent is the dependent variable, we posit subsequent effects on the individual’s motivational need for variety (N_VARIETY) and need for achievement (N_ACHIEVE). Students enrolled in marketing courses at a southwestern U.S. university completed the questionnaire during regularly scheduled classes. The mean age of respondents (N = 190) is 21.63 years (SD = 1.60). Whites (60 %), Hispanics (28 %), and Blacks (7 %) are most represented. In terms of favorite smartphone, iPhone (74 %) and Droid (23 %) are noted most.Estimation of the measurement model (42 items, 9 scales), confirms convergent and discriminant validity. With data pooling justified, the relationships were tested using SEM (LISREL). A COV matrix and MLE were used to estimate model parameters. Model estimation produced the following GOF statistics: χ2(804_df) = 1423.02 (P = 0.00), (CFI) = 0.97, (GFI) = 0.74, and (RMSEA) = 0.064. The t-statistic associated with six of nine path coefficients is significant at the P < 0.05 level or better. Specifically, D_EFENSE (H₃; t = 2.06) relates positively, while L_INEAGE (H₁; t = 0.54), S_OCIAL (H₂; t = 1.21), and C_OMMUN (H₄; t = 0.24) each are unrelated to L_OVE. L_OVE then relates positively to A_B (H₅; t = 6.97), A_B relates positively to PI_B (H₆; t = 8.42), and PI_B relates positively to each N_VARIETY (H₇; t = 4.58) and N_ACHIEVE (H₈; t = 2.22). Lastly, N_VARIETY has a positive effect on N_ACHIEVE (H₉; t = 4.69).Our model demonstrates that the tribal dimension of defense of the tribe relates positively to brand love; in turn, this emotional bond yields a positive attitude toward the brand and subsequent purchase intention. However, this research suggests that the purchased item is but a tool to be used in the development and furtherance of the motivational need for variety and need for achievement. Further, it also appears that the access to a variety of informational resources afforded by smartphones has a positive impact on the individual’s need for achievement.

The global luxury market has recently been valued at US $317.2 billion (Euromonitor International 2014). Part of this continuing growth came from an increase in assets of the elite class which grew by 17 %. This growth resulted in the emergence of 210 billionaires. Conversely, the luxury market growth seemingly reached capacity based on the saturation of western markets and their declining growth rates. Thus, it comes as no surprise that India’s luxury market growth rate is the highest among emerging countries. This growth is concomitant with the growing middle class and the increases in numbers of the young Indian population. One of that segment’s focuses is on apparels and accessories. Along with the creative oeuvre of fashion designers, this apparel enhances the symbolic elements found in luxury fashion products. Preeminent and distinguished luxury designers such as Satya Paul, Manish Malhotra, and Ritu Kumar are the flag bearers of this growth. The elegant and sophisticated luxuryproducts they develop are the perfect blend of Indian ethnicity and global aesthetics. Based on the aesthetic development, this market is estimated to further grow at the rate of 75 % until 2019. However, there are no published papers in this area as the literature has not kept pace. There are few studies on India associated with country of origin (COO) for Indian consumers. There are equally limited studies on luxury products, cross-cultural and COO pertinent to developed nations (Oldenkotte 2012). This study addresses this research gap to provide insight into and understanding of the purchase behavior of Indian consumers vis-a-vis Indian luxury brands. To accomplish this objective, the literature has been divided into consumers of and COO.

The proposed special session is a workshop to present and discuss the development of a 3-year Bachelor’s program in Marketing at a small New England university. The foundation of this curriculum model is the delivery, reinforcement, and application of knowledge to address and solve global business challenges. This is a model for innovating business higher education, and this session is designed to share the model and the development of a 3-year program for a marketing bachelor’s degree.The session will include presentations and discussion on the curriculum development process, the process of collaboration across departments and programs, the assessment of student learning imbedded in the program and business accreditation requirements. Presenters will share examples of curriculum, class pedagogy and design, assessment, assignments, and examples of student work. Additionally, examples of successes and failures across the process will be discussed and both the faculty and administrative perspectives will be shared.The two presentations/workshops within this session will be designed to examine two elements of the 3-year bachelor’s program in marketing; the Integrated Business Core (IBC) program model and the marketing major and the design of a 3-year integrated marketing program. This model is the tip of the spear for innovating business higher education and this session is designed to share the model and the development of a 3-year program for a marketing bachelor’s degree.

Corporate unethical behavior is nothing new. We are constantly bombarded with stories of managers engaging in illegal or unethical behavior. What is unknown are the reasons behind such behavior. Building upon Tenbrunsel and Messick’s (1999) work on ethical framing we investigate the boundary conditions on how we look at ethical decisions. Through a qualitative and quantitative study, we propose that when managers are put into a business frame, they are more likely to solve problems without an ethical view and thus engage in unethical behavior. More importantly, when we extend the business frame from a short-term to a long-term focus, we expect that business decisions would be more ethical. Further, how ethical the corporate culture is would moderate our decisions. Results indicate that ethical framing of problems do result in ethical outcomes, and that a corporate culture helps. However, the role of a strategic short-term and long-term frame is less understood, with managers using short-term business frames exhibiting more unethical behaviors, while long-term business frames are inconsistent in relation to short-term or ethical frames.

With the existing insights on writing and publishing marketing journal articles and the discipline’s rapid expansion of publishing opportunities in new US and international marketing journals, one intuitive prediction is marketing scholars’ publishing success of important scientific articles is rapidly becoming a more common occurrence. Yet this trend prediction is perplexing and contradictive because the prestigious and top 25 ranked marketing-oriented journals consistently report annual acceptance rates ranging between 7 % and 18 %. The low acceptance suggest a disconnect gap between conducting important, relevant quality research and ultimately publishing that research in quality journals.

As seekers of reactive and/or proactive innovations in search of competitive advantage, firms often, prematurely, adopt technological and/or administrative innovations. The adoption of such innovations can be premature in two ways: the innovation itself is in its infancy or the firm is not ready for adoption. While the adoption of technological as well as administrative innovations is important, in this research, the focus is on the adoption of administrative innovations. We systematically explore and synthesize research on adoption of administrative innovations to develop a framework to explicate premature adoption of administrative innovations. Next, we review specific administrative innovations such as market orientation strategy, and customer lifetime value framework to explore premature adoption of administrative innovations in marketing. Finally, we discuss the implications of this research for theory and practice. Given the paucity of research on this issue in the marketing discipline, we hope that our work sparks productive inquiry into premature adoption of administrative innovations in marketing.

The firm’s ability to develop innovative products has been shown to be an important factor in developing strategic advantage (Webster 1969; Hult and Ketchen 2001); however, not all firms have the resources or capabilities to innovate new products. Thus, to remain competitive, firms must adopt innovations from sources external to the firm—often in the form of technological innovations. To gain competitive advantage, a firm may adopt “transformational” technology—technology that enables a fundamental change to the firm’s business model, a new value proposition or a new way to manufacture, distribute, and/or market an offering (Aaker 2011). However, not all technology adoption decisions are successful, which places firm performance and customer relationships at risk. Abrahamson (1991) argues that innovation research focuses too much on what drives adoption decisions and too little on what drives firms to adopt inferior innovations and reject superior ones. The tendency of researchers to “ignore the study of ignorance about innovations” (Rogers 1995; p. 100) has resulted in a significant gap in the adoption of innovation research. Using diffusion of innovation theory as a lens, this research examines how an adopting entity’s perceptions of an innovation’s relative advantage, complexity, and compatibility influence the decision to adopt the new technology (Rogers 1962; O’Neal et al. 1973; Davis 1989). Because unrealistic expectations for the performance of a technology can negatively influence attitudes and perceptions of adoption success (Oliver 1980), it is important to understand how the firm’s perceptions of a technology are informed.Therefore, to examine how performance expectations of a transformational technology develop, this research explores from a resource perspective how a firm’s dynamic capabilities regarding organizational learning, knowledge-based resources and internal micro-politics influence perceptions of new technology. To gain this insight, we conducted ten semi-structured depth interviews with key informants from a variety of industries, including: higher education, healthcare services, financial services and manufacturing. Participants were asked to recall a recent technology adoption decision and to describe in detail the adoption decision process. Questions covered areas related to knowledge acquisition and utilization, internal communications and evaluation processes related to the technology adoption decisions. Analysis of the textual data resulted in four major themes emerging as important to firm-level technology adoption decision processes: knowledge-seeking capabilities, knowledge-utilization capabilities, organization characteristics, and technology characteristics. The textual data suggests that the absorptive capacity of a firm to acquire and deploy knowledge resources plays a key role in informing perceptions of a new technology, especially with regard to the technology’s relative advantages, perceived compatibility and perceived complexity. The textual data also provided strong support for the role of micro-political strategies, including coalition building and framing, as influencers of the perceptions of a technology. The study offers a theoretic framework and research propositions resulting from the textual data analyses and the supporting literature review.

Mobile technology penetrated all aspects of social and business existence. Studies around mobile technology mostly address the use and adoption process of mobile marketing or mobile commerce from a consumer perspective rather than from a business perspective. Another concern of majority of studies on the use of mobile technology is a focus on technical nature of mobile devices despite the fact that true magic of technology resides in its mobilisation and usage—the deployment of mobile technology. This paper aims to conceptually define and map mobile technology capabilities. Grounded theory approach was applied to collect and analyse in-depth interviews with 28 small and medium-sized enterprises from the UK, which deploy mobile technology for operational and strategic purposes. Results illustrate that mobile technology capabilities represent a set of five substantive capabilities: (1) leveraging mobile technology resources, (2) transforming capability, (3) learning capability, (4) solving problems capability and (5) leading capability—a set of five practices which can be employed to orchestrate successfully mobile technology resources. Through transformation of existing processes and mobile technology resources, mobile technology capabilities not only contribute to operational efficiency and effectiveness but drive strategic change within business by enabling vigilant market learning and adaptive market experimentation.

Marketing capabilities are important to make contribution to the theory and practice of strategy and to get commercial success of the products and services marketed by the firm. More recent attention has focused on the adaptability for a different business functions such as management (Akgun et al. 2014; Baard et al. 2013; Shoss et al. 2012), supply chain (Fu and Fu 2015; Mei et al. 2015), and manufacturing (Jin et al. 2013; Liu et al. 2015) etc. However, few attempts have been made to examine adaptability in the context of marketing (Clark 2000; Day 2011; Lu et al. 2009; Oktemgil and Greenley 1997) and much of the research up to now has been theoretical, and they have not investigated and operationalized marketing capabilities from an adaptive perspective.Adaptive marketing capability (AMC) is a firm’s ability to identify and capitalize on emerging market opportunities, and the development of adaptive capability is often accompanied by the evolution of organizational forms (Wang and Ahmed 2007). AMC lets to organizations to reconfigure them quickly in changing environments rather than merely identify existing demands and then exploit the available resources (Staber and Sydow 2002). AMC is based on response to product-market opportunities, marketing activities for responding to these opportunities, and speed of response (Oktemgil and Greenley 1997). In this context, we attempt to operationalize these AMC constructs, which are adaptive brand management, social customer relationship management, adaptive pricing management, and multichannel management.This paper attempts to offer a contribution to the marketing strategy literature by presenting a model for researchers and managers to understand potential interrelationships among strategic orientations (market and innovation orientation), adaptive marketing capabilities (adaptive brand management, sCRM, adaptive price management, and multichannel management), speed-to-market, and innovativeness. This study has explored the importance of AMC for speed-to-market and innovativeness. Although marketing capabilities in organizations have been investigated for many years, a study from an adaptive perspective in the field of marketing strategy broadens our understanding of this subject. The findings of this study confirm our hypotheses drawn from this theoretical framework about conceptualization of AMC, except adaptive price management for innovativeness and speed-to-market, and sCRM for innovativeness. A possible explanation for these results may be the lack of adequate variable which mediates relation between sCRM and innovativeness. Because, raw data obtained from sCRM need to be interpreted and made functional to be used for innovation processes. Besides, the concept of adaptive price management might be reconsidered with mediator or moderator variables which is related to the use of technology and information technologies.

Although researchers have recently advocated that brand communities should be customer centered rather than brand centered, literature on community identification focuses heavily on customer–brand relationships. Adopting the neglected customer–customer relationship perspective, this study instead reclaims the importance of (impersonal) peer identities and (personal) peer relationships in shaping brand–community identification. Adopting a structural equation modeling approach, this study empirically examines, in an online setting, how a brand community’s identity attractiveness and peer relational identification jointly influence brand community identification, which subsequently leads to members’ value co-creation behavior (manifested by co-consumption and co-production). The findings have important theoretical and managerial implications; communal leader enthusiasm might negatively influence peer relational identification.

A growing number of people are interacting on the web to express and share their views and knowledge of products and brands through social networks (Valck et al. 2009). For consumers, some social networks’ profiles serve as a reference in their purchasing decision process, since these profiles are perceived as giving their personal unbiased opinion (Efimova and Hendrick 2005). The fitness industry has been heavily influenced by the growth of social media, generating billions of dollars in revenues worldwide, including sales of clothes, equipment, and services. Within this context, this research aims to investigate interactions at Instagram, identifying how followers consume content from the fitness profiles on this social network—focused on body cult and physical beauty—and how this content may influence them. This study is based on the view of consumption as a social activity, capable of producing meanings and identities (Arnould and Thompson 2005), and uses the contributions of sociologist Bourdieu (1989, 1991) as a theoretical framework for the interpretation of the results.

This empirical study attempts to understand how augmented reality (AR) empowers the users to express themselves by using it. This study developed and tested a conceptual model that explained how augmented reality influences user satisfaction through identification. To test the hypotheses, a lab experiment of 99 college students was used. The results demonstrated that augmented reality significantly influenced identification, which in turn impacted on user satisfaction and purchase intention.

Questions of morality arise with many business decisions and practices, specifically when consumers are involved. Businesses as well as consumers have moral standards they cling to when interacting with other actors. These moral standards can be seen as individuals’ knowledge about implicit moral rules, norms, and laws of social life (Tangney et al. 2007). Moral emotions are the connecting link between moral standards and moral behavior and can be defined as individuals’ considerations about what is “good and bad, right and wrong and ought and should” (Weiner 2006, p. 87). In business practices, moral standards could be openness and honesty in communication. On the other side, lying, cheating, deceiving, and other incidents can be classified as morally inacceptable behavior. In the field of consumer behavior, deception has been investigated as one of these moral transgressions (Gardner 1975; Darke and Ritchie 2007; Darke et al. 2010; Boush et al. 2009). This chapter investigates a sales strategy by retailers and companies which is potentially misleading for consumers. Specifically, we are interested in the role of moral emotions when consumers perceive deception.

This study contributes to an understanding of how corporate efforts in connection with business sustainability appear to evolve along evolutionary paths over a timeline.This research is based on a grounded methodology with information gathered from a series of different Norwegian companies, all of which are highly regarded in both the marketplace and broader society for their business sustainability efforts.The objective of this study is to identify and describe the evolutionary paths involved in corporate efforts at business sustainability.A qualitative approach was applied to a sample of companies, all well known for their significant and long-term efforts at business sustainability. Their efforts within the respective organisations, marketplace and society all go beyond the level of mere compliance with regulations. Six companies across different industries were selected.The different evolutionary paths involved in corporate business sustainability efforts constitute a valuable contribution to the field. Business sustainability efforts are not static, but dynamic and based upon continuous flexibility to changes and adaptations over time.We observe that all identified evolutionary paths of corporate efforts in relation to business sustainability are interconnected—some paths originate from the initial efforts, while other efforts and paths are a consequence of others.The main contribution of this study is the set of evolutionary paths. Another complementary contribution exists in relation to Høgevold et al. (2014), although the current study extends and refines their framework of evolutionary paths.We believe that the evolutionary paths displayed are relevant and useful to both scholars and practitioners.A specific suggestion for further research is to further explore the existence of other evolutionary paths.

Founded in 2010, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) aims to protect vulnerable consumers from businesses such as payday lenders, car title lenders, subprime mortgage lenders, and other consumer financial services (CFS), whose core target market shows demographic characteristics of lower incomes and lower levels of education. While supporters of this bureau believe that these consumers are more vulnerable than other groups (c.f., Chatterjee et al. 2009), other researchers argue that these consumers are wise about their financial situation and do not need such government regulation (c.f., Cole 2007, 2015). Demographic characteristics of CFS users are well established, but psychological characteristics and attitudes of this group are not. Thus, this research seeks to examine the impact of gullibility, self-control, interpersonal influence, cognition, and the ability to judge value on attitudes and behaviors of CFS users. A combination of existing Likert-type scales and newly created items was used to measure the constructs in the model. A survey was administered through Survey Sampling International, and online consumer panel/surveying company. A total of 510 usable surveys were collected. Respondents matched the US population with respect to gender and ethnicity, and we requested that respondents earn less than $100,000 per year. Cronbach’s alpha values ranged from 0.79 to 0.95, indicating evidence of measure reliability. Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were performed and provided evidence of convergent and discriminant validity. Structural equation modeling was used to measure the impact of the independent variables listed above on attitudes towards CFS. Gullibility and susceptibility to interpersonal influence appear to be strong, significant predictors of attitudes towards CFS. It was found that the more gullible the respondent, attitudes towards CFS were more positive. Similarly, those who were more susceptible to interpersonal influence also displayed more positive attitudes towards CFS. There was also a link between cognition and attitude; however, this path was only marginally significant. Self-control and the ability to judge value were not significant predictors of attitude.The findings of this study have implications for policy makers striving to ensure informed decisions made by all consumer groups. This study’s discovery of a link between consumer gullibility and attitudes gives weight to the arguments made by proponents of the CFPB—that this bureau is needed to protect a certain group of consumers. Furthermore, the strong link between susceptibility to interpersonal influence and attitudes provides some direction to the CFPB to include consumer education about how to not be so influenced by the people around them. In addition, the relationship between cognition and attitudes indicates that the CFPB should continue to stress financial education as part of its mission. Future research should specifically address what format and content would be most effective in educating this vulnerable consumer group relative to these psychological characteristics.

In this paper, a novel 18-item scale for the customer’s perception of brand greenness is validated across two cultures—Germany and India—using measurement invariance tests that utilize multigroup confirmatory analysis (MCFA). On subjecting the scale’s measurement model to strong invariance constraints, it was found that the model supports full configural, full metric and partial scalar invariance. The findings suggest that the perceived brand greenness (PBG) scale is a cross-culturally valid measurement tool, and the same four PBG dimensions can be meaningfully compared across both Indian and German customer groups. Visualization using Boxplots and probability density functions provide further insights (similarities and differences) into the distribution of each item in the 18-item scale between Germany and India, eventually guiding in elucidating the reasons for the support of partial scalar invariance. This work establishes the cross-cultural validity of the new 18-item perceived brand greenness scale, which is an important step forward in the scale development and validation process.

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is one of the most common sexually transmitted infections (Giuseppe et al. 2008; Dunne et al. 2007). Affecting nearly all people at least once in their life, most of the 150 types of HPV are self-limited, asymptomatic, or unrecognized. Some types of HPV, however, are well recognized for their role in the etiology of cervical cancer (Munoz et al. 2003). Cervical cancer is one of the four most common types of cancer among women worldwide, affecting 528,000 women in 2012 (CDC 2012). Evidence suggests that although HPV testing is clinically effective in monitoring for cervical cancer, women are still reluctant to do it (CDC 2012; Ogilvie et al. 2013). Two important causes of resistance to test for HPV are shame and embarrassment. Considering that, this research aims to extend previous literature and understand which judgments and stereotypes can be acting as barriers to women to do the HPV test.

Recent estimates are that half of all deaths in the USA are due to mostly preventable diseases. Thus disease prevention is necessarily an increasingly important focus of modern public policy. Diabetes rates are rising globally, but in the USA over the last 30 years type II diabetes has risen 132 %. The Centers for Disease Control reports that type II diabetes costs the US economy $245 billion per year in direct medical costs and that of 29 million diagnosed diabetics in the USA, 95 % are type II diabetics. An additional 8.1 million Americans remain undiagnosed type II diabetics. Of particular concern is that diabetes does much of its damage before the patient experiences symptoms. By 2050, if left unchecked fully 1/3 of all Americans will be diabetic (CDC 2012). Clearly, current efforts in health messaging toward potential type II diabetics are not working.

In the current inquiry we add to evolving research on how consumers respond to nostalgic advertising by examining the cultural differences in the evocation of nostalgia. We contend that nostalgic reverie can engage the consumer, but there are cultural differences in the types of nostalgia that are evoked among consumers. We discuss work-in-progress findings from three studies in India that reveal that ad-evoked nostalgia has five dimensions: personal memories, positive emotions, negative emotions, physiological reactions, and collective nostalgia. These findings are unique and distinct from previous research. In this present research involving India, there is concurrent evocation of individual and collective dimensions of nostalgia. These findings are novel and useful from a theoretical and managerial perspective and should be viewed in the backdrop of a large emerging middle class in India and the predominant collective nature of the country.

We explore females’ reactions to a non-explicit, but still sexually themed, advertisement. Specifically, we consider the role of female sexual self-schema (SSS) in the identification of the level of sex present in such an advertisement, and then resultant effects on attitudes and purchase intent. We find that while SSS has no effect on the perceived level of sex present, it does influence resultant dependent variables, particularly for low-SSS females. Informed by our study and extant literature, we also offer areas for further SSS-based advertising research, particularly regarding issues of females’ perceptions of advertisement and brand fit with sexual themes.

Advertising research suggests that the use of white space increases readability, engages attention, reduces clutter, adds depth, and enhances the focal message delivery (Ambler and Hollier 2004; Pracejus et al. 2006; Olsen et al. 2012). Research on logo design also places a great emphasis on design simplicity, as a minimal design elucidates a more clear or vivid brand meaning, and facilitates easier recognition and recall (Janiszewski and Meyvis 2001; Pimentel and Heckler 2003). The current research attempts to bring these two research streams together in exploring the effects of adding white space to nonverbal logo designs on brand perceptions.

Stimulated by the increasing flood of information in today’s modern societies as well as the recent popularity of minimalistic designs, the present research investigates the influence of different levels of cognitive depletion on consumers’ preferences for varying levels of design complexity. It is proposed that high levels of cognitive depletion increase the preference for minimalistic designs due to their heightened degree of processing fluency which makes them less taxing on people’s cognitive resources. The conceptual framework underlying this reasoning is based on an amalgamation of the fluency theory and the arousal theory as well as research on cognitive depletion. As predicted, the results demonstrate that an impairment of people’s cognitive capacities has a positive impact on their preferences for less complex product designs. The implications as well as limitations of this finding are discussed.

The use of erotic stimuli in advertising is a common technique in marketing communication (Dahl et al. 2009) and can be found for a wide range of products. Soda, cars, beer, or photo cameras are—among others—products which are advertised by erotic female models. However, not just men but also women buy, use, and consume these products, and heterosexual female consumers might react differently to different types of erotic advertising than heterosexual male consumers. Thus, the question arises whether such advertising is also appropriate for a female target group or whether other types of erotic advertising such as showing an erotic couple would better address both female and male consumers if erotic advertising seems to be a promising strategy.

In order to increase the awareness of the negative effects of smoking, warning messages were applied to cigarette packages all around the globe. As such warning messages receive high level and frequency of exposure at the point of sale, they are supposed to be highly effective in influencing both health beliefs (attitudes) and smoking-related behavior. However, previous studies on the effectiveness of warning messages rely on respondents’ self-reported reactions. Reasoning the potential bias of social desirability as well as the respondents’ ability, motivation, and willingness to answer such questions in a reliable manner “these answers may not reflect actual behavior and hence may not provide an objective assessment of the effect of graphic warnings” (Azagba and Sharaf 2013, p. 709). The present study takes a different approach by assessing the explicit and implicit (automatic) effects of different warning messages on cigarette packages. The objective is to answer two main research questions: Do smokers react differently regarding self- and other-oriented warning messages and pictures on cigarette packages? Which combination of messages and pictures offers the biggest impact on attitude regarding smoking on an implicit and explicit level? Our results show that the impact on the attitude regarding the product (cigarette package) greatly differs regarding the used combination of picture and message content on the conscious and unconscious level.

Anthropomorphism creates favorable consumer reactions, such as increased product likability, enhanced positive emotions, and more favorable attributions of brand personality (Delbaere et al. 2011). Furthermore, cute products might include anthropomorphized features (Epley et al. 2007), since some humanlike characteristics can potentially enhance perceived cuteness (Lorenz 1943). We extend Sherman et al. (2009) that being exposed to cute product designs could evoke caregiving feelings and lead to altruism. Griskevicius et al. (2010) suggested that conservation behavior can be conspicuous altruism: going green is to be seen. Since cuteness is viewed as attractive in an adorable way (Hellen and Saaksjarvi 2011), cute product usage could assist to demonstrate their usage visibility. In this research, we propose that babyish-appearing product designs will lead to altruism and are advantageous to promote green products.Sherman and Haidt (2011) suggested that perceiving cuteness motivates social engagement and primes affiliative, friendly tendencies. This attitudinal change is assumed to be linked with cognitive processes related to mentalizing (i.e., attributing mental states to agents) and sometimes indirectly leads to increased cares. Thus, we propose that babyish-appearing design leads to more other-focused (altruistic) tendency. Since green product purchase and babyish-appearing product design can be related to the trait of altruism, we assumed that consumers prefer baby-faced design over mature-faced design on products with green appeal. We also assumed that consumers prefer mature-faced design over baby-faced design on products with functional appeal. Finally, we assumed that the influence of interaction between design and appeal on consumer preference is mediated by baby-face schema.We conducted three studies (two lab experiments and one empirical modeling) to examine baby-face effects on product design. The results uncovered several important insights into how consumers respond to babyish-appearing products. First, we establish the essential importance of babyish-appearing product designs in green product design. Second, we demonstrate robust effects of consumers’ more favorable attitudes and stronger purchase intention after viewing a babyish-appearing car with green appeals. On the other hand, individuals show more positive attitudes and stronger purchase intention after being exposed to a mature-appearing car with nongreen but functional appeals. Third, the congruence between the product design and the product appeal served as a mechanism behind consumer attitudes and intention.

While overall e-commerce sales in the USA are continuing to grow, the giant e-commerce site, amazon.com, is outperforming all of the others in the e-commerce industry. So the question arises: What makes Amazon more successful than the others? The answer to this question is critical for other e-tailers who would like to benchmark Amazon. Among a variety of reasons, Amazon’s highly interactive site is one of its strengths. Amazon aims for a higher level of interactivity with customers via live chatting, e-mail, etc., and provides proactive personalization such as a recommendation system (Edelman and Singer 2015) and easy access to customer reviews on the site. Accordingly, we explored the relevant influences of the B2C versus C2C interactivity feature quality on loyalty intention mediated by flow and the technology acceptance model. In addition, the moderating effect of proactive engagement in word of mouth (WOM) was examined because the relative importance of others’ opinions could be different for those who value creating and sharing their own opinions with others.Participants in the current study were recruited using a US online consumer panel and were included if they had shopped at amazon.com within 12 months prior to the start of the study. After confirming the latent measurement model fit of the data, we tested the hypotheses using AMOS 20.0. First, several indices evaluating model fit appropriateness were analyzed. Based on good model fit, the hypotheses were tested and they yielded results supporting all the hypotheses except one: expecting the influence of perceived ease of use on repurchase intention online. A subsequent test was conducted to investigate the moderating effect of proactive engagement in WOM. Interestingly, once the moderating effect was included in the model, the effect of interactivity among consumers on flow was no longer significant, which could mean that consumers who were actively producing their own WOM were not much influenced by other consumers’ input. This might be because consumers who tend to be opinion leaders or WOM creators trust their own experiences and judgements more than someone else’s. Another interesting finding is that those who were less involved in WOM creation relied more on one-way interactivity from sellers than those who were more actively involved in WOM creation. This could be because consumers who do not create WOM tend to rely more on information given by sellers rather than on actively searching for more information through communicating with others. Finally, two-way interactivity between seller and consumer had both a significant and a negative effect on flow in the main model, but this effect was not significant in the moderating model. Considering that the quality of the interactivity feature and the frequency of using the feature were highly correlated, those who contacted sellers more often and perceived a higher quality of the features were less likely to experience flow. This is understandable because consumers usually contact sellers when they encounter problems, which could interrupt their flow experience.

Online piracy of digital content including that of music, movies, software, games, and other products continues to be a huge issue for businesses and public policy makers for a number of reasons. First, online piracy takes up significant amounts of Internet bandwidth—24 % globally, and 17.5 % in the USA. Additionally, a study from the Institute for Policy Innovation concluded that global music piracy causes $12.5 billion of economic losses every year, 71,060 lost American jobs, and a loss of $422 million in tax revenues (RIAA 2014). Given the economic and social impact of digital piracy, it is important to study what factors influence the piracy rate and especially whether key marketing mix elements, such as price, affect consumers’ decisions to engage in online piracy. This study uses equity theory as a framework in order to analyze the impact of price-, product-, and purchase-related experiences, as well as word of mouth, on digital piracy rates. Equity theory was created and popularized by Adams (1963) and is especially used in social exchange within organizations. We use equity theory in order to analyze how perceived inputs, such as price and information search, as well as outputs, including product quality and popularity, affect the rate of piracy for copyrighted products. This represents a different perspective compared to studies that focus only on the ethical side of consumers’ decisions and brings attention to product-related factors such as price and product quality. In order to measure the piracy rate for digital content, we downloaded the number of “leechers” (users downloading pirated content at a certain time) for the top 120 most downloaded games from Pirate Bay during a 10-day period. In order to test our model, we also downloaded data regarding the price for each game from Amazon, as well as the quality rating assigned in its reviews from Metacritic. We measured consumer interest in the digital product by using Google Insights and the search index provided for the exact name of the product. We performed a multiple regression procedure using SPSS, with piracy rate on a proxy showing the content from Pirate Bay as the dependent variable, with product price, review rating, search rating, and popularity index as independent variables.The key contribution of this study is represented by the confirmation of the relationship between the price of digital content and the online piracy rate. This study shows that there is clearly a positive relationship between the price of digital games and the rate of download from Pirate Bay. Other findings also underline the impact of word of mouth in social media, therefore demonstrating the effect of interpersonal sources of influence on piracy rates. Nevertheless, besides just popularity in social media, including platforms such as Twitter, consumer engagement in information search on websites such as Google is also a good predictor of online illegal downloads for digital content, as that relationship was also supported.

Research suggests that 85 % of consumers refer to online consumer reviews (OCRs) to guide purchasing decisions (Anderson 2013), and OCRs play a pivotal role in firms’ online sales and profits (Floyd et al. 2014). We define OCRs as positive or negative comments posted on the Internet by consumers regarding goods or services sold online. Despite growing adoption, OCRs are often criticized for their credibility since review information typically is not subject to verification (Johnson and Kaye 2002); and some firms strategically manipulate OCRs (Fahey and Weinberg 2003). To distinguish truthful reviews from deceptive ones, consumers commonly use peripheral cues to assess the credibility of online information (Petty and Cacioppo 1986). Therefore, it is important for firms to understand how these cues influence trust.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the hedonic dimensions of service learning that would persuade more students to participate in service learning and that alter the service learning experiences into transformational learning experiences. In-depth interviews with students participating in the Alternative Break (AB) program, as well as observations of AB group meetings prior to and after the AB trips, were conducted to develop a better understanding of how fun, feelings, and play have a role in service learning experiences of students. Additionally, posts of the participants on AB-related social media sites were followed and analyzed. The preliminary results suggest that some students participate in some service learning programs incidentally without any ideological or self-impression-related motivation, and their service learning experience is changed to a transformative learning experience as a result of fun, feelings, and fantasy in addition to rational aspects of the experience. The two main factors that intensify the importance of the hedonic dimensions are community and genuineness. These findings have significant implications to attract marketing students to participate in such a service learning context and to help them gain skills necessary for acting as socially responsible business people.

Marketing faculty as well as experts writing for practitioner audience often exhort their charges in marketing to use research and make data-driven rather than intuitive or instinctive decisions. Despite this, informal observation indicates that there appears to be significant reluctance among students to purchase research reports in classroom marketing simulations (and those writing for practitioners continue to decry inadequate use of research in marketing decision making). Little or published research appears to address the marketing research purchase question directly, though other marketing variables have been studied extensively. For example, one prominent meta-analysis (Capon et al. 1990) makes no mention of marketing research, though it does analyze marketing spending overall. Another study (Rust et al. 2004) discusses marketing spending and marketing productivity, but makes no mention of market research spending. Similarly, a more recent study (Healy et al. 2015) mentions classic marketing variables: product line breadth, offer quality, price, advertising, sales force expenditure, R&D investment, etc., but not market research. The paucity of prior research is a significant opportunity to advance scholarship and pedagogy by investigating the extent of perceived reluctance to buy research and the underlying reasons for student reluctance (to the extent present) to use research in marketing decision making. The present study involves undergraduate student teams at a public university in the eastern USA, participating in a commercial marketing simulation as part of an upper division marketing management class in the 2015–2016 academic year.

Learning, student motivation, and mobile technology are three components of most contemporary college classrooms; yet the academy has divided opinions as to what mix of the latter two maximizes the former. Many of these opinions are based only on observations in the classroom as few empirical studies exist. Arguments in favor of including mobile technology in a learning environment include providing greater access to information for students (Ferris 2015), increased student engagement (Zhu et al. 2012), and providing students the freedom and responsibility of choice (Von Schlicten 2015). Still, the evidence mounts that unfettered access to mobile technology acts as a gateway out of the learning experience (Rosen et al. 2013) and limits processing and performance of students (Mueller and Oppenheimer 2014). In fact, students typically overestimate their ability to split their attention between social uses of technology and education uses (Rosen et al. 2012) which suggests that students do not have the necessary information and experience to make informed decisions about the use of mobile technology in the classroom. This manuscript investigates those questions of student choice and student learning in a real-world setting and offers recommendations for designing a classroom policy regarding the use of mobile technology.

Given the rapid growth of social media and particularly online use of video for marketing purposes, it is important to evaluate how much exposure and skill development in video development marketing students should possess upon degree completion. Nearly all marketing courses do not include a video development project despite the rapid growth of this medium in marketing. This may be attributed to the traditional discipline boundaries which position video production elsewhere. This chapter provides one approach with which a marketing instructor may integrate a video creation project into a college marketing course. The project exposes students to script-writing, storyboarding, shooting and editing raw footage, and most importantly identifying the goal of the video. Additionally, we provide insight into student attitudes regarding this experience and offer suggestions for improvement. We hope that this chapter fosters discussion of this issue and potentially greater use of video development in the discipline of marketing.Gratitude is given to Robert Tomaski, Television Program Director at Illinois State University, and Rachael Post, owner of Luna Sky Media, for their contributions to the creation of the video assignment discussed in this chapter and to graduate students, Wynn Ontoy, Chau Nguyen, and Mumbi Gatharia, for their help with preliminary data analysis.

Today’s as well as future young assistant marketing professors face growing pressures to publish their research in top-tier marketing journals quickly upon graduating from their doctorate program. A fundamental question that needs exploring is the following: “What Ph.D. program difficulties, issues, and pitfalls must doctorate students overcome in their learning processes of becoming a researcher and scholar with capabilities of writing and publishing journal quality manuscripts?”

This study examines young American consumers’ perceptions towards product uniqueness and product popularity signal in ads. Two theories, commodity theory and need for uniqueness theory, are used. Keller (2001) posits that consumers’ brand perceptions are driven by their unique needs. Aggarwal and McGill (2012) noticed that scarcity messages will interact significantly with the brand concept as there will be stronger effect on purchase intentions due to symbolism than functionality. In addition, Micu and Chowdhury (2010a, b) agreed that symbolic appeals of product will fulfill consumers’ experiential needs. On the other hand, when there is an excess demand, it means that the product is popular, and the perception of uniqueness and scarcity as a status symbol will decrease.

Natural disasters are a rare, yet inevitable part of living on Earth. As a result, disaster planning and preparedness are crucial for the continued safety and well-being of a city or nation’s population. Planning and preparedness are also important for organizational well-being and success, and for the cohesive synergy of the individuals in a company.The success of the response to a disaster can be the direct result of the formulation and execution of the plan; however, poor response can also be attributed to a lack of adoption of a plan that contributes to the failure of its implementation. Similarly, effective plan formulation, implementation, but perhaps most importantly adoption are imperative for a successful response to an organizational failure.In this chapter we use Bonoma’s (1984) marketing strategy implementation framework to diagnose communication successes and failures in the case of four well-known international natural disasters to provide further insight into the difficulties, but also the positive impact of strong organizational preparedness and plan implementation. Using the framework, we identify four possible outcomes of the planning and implementation process that result from the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the processes of disaster plan formulation and implementation. The implications of each of the outcomes are then discussed. Using literature from marketing strategy and emergency response communication, and the four case studies of natural disasters, we then provide seven common reasons why plans are often not successfully implemented and present several lessons and takeaways that can be learned from these. These takeaways have implications to improve disaster communication plans, especially in the implementation and adoption phases.

Given the language as an important cultural factor in studying consumer’s purchase behavior, the current study explores the vocabulary use and preference by bilinguals (Semin 2012). Different vocabulary words are tested in both English and Chinese contexts. Two studies demonstrate consumers’ different preferences for adjectives, verbs, and nouns. Through self-reported questionnaires and scale-measured surveys, the current study shows that in general the use of verbs is more salient in the Chinese contexts, while the use of adjectives and nouns is more prominent in the English contexts. We also obtain an interaction of language and vocabulary for purchase intentions. In the purchase decision process, when bilingual consumers are exposed to the Chinese copy, nouns play an essential role in affecting their purchase intentions. When exposed to the English copy, adjectives play a more effective role. Taken together, the current research provides a strong evidence of word type effect for bilinguals. The results extend the previous vocabulary study into non-interpersonal contexts, and focus on bilinguals. In addition, the current research contributes to theoretical development as well as managerial implications.

An unprecedented growth in people identifying as multiracial (e.g., Black and white, or simply “mixed”) has flourished in the wake of legal, political, social, and cultural recognition (Root 2003). Despite calls for increased attention to multiracial individuals (Kang and Bodenhausen 2015), our understanding of how this group responds to advertising is still limited.

This study proposes a brand authenticity scale based on consumer assessment considering the hierarchical structure of the scale’s dimensions. A survey was conducted (780 individuals) via online panels, in Brazil and the USA. As a result, a consistent and parsimonious scale was obtained, based on nine dimensions, which form the construct: spontaneity, quality commitment, essence, nostalgia, values, simplicity, design, originality, and origin. Also, the IRT procedure was conducted in order to analyze the hierarchical structure of these dimensions. A brand can possess a dimension with higher hierarchy without others with less impact and could be evaluated as more authentic compared with another with less important dimensions. This chapter contributes to the literature of brands by developing a metric that addresses dimensions unexplored, so far. For managerial purposes, the scale is a tool to assess the brand positioning and therefore provide new strategic approaches and to keep track of the changes in brand awareness.

The communication between a political party and a voter these days is expected to be interactive (Cogburn et al. 2011) and focused on the everyday story of the voter (Weiser 1991). Unlike previous messaging, where political party maintained a royal distance as a demonstration of power, the modern approach connects the political party directly with the voter. Such new marketing approaches strengthen the connection between the candidate and the voter (Cogburn and Espinoza-Vasquez 2011). However, there is limited insight about how political brands are interpreted and understood. This is supported by explicit calls for further research in this area beyond a Western context, especially in nontraditional settings (Kumar 2009; Needham and Smith 2015). This is particularly the case with an emerging country such as India, which has more than a billion citizens, the second largest population in the world (Castells 2011). They have two categories of parties, national (6) and state level (30) (Election Commission of India), and the brand image of these parties becomes important for the voters. Most importantly, among the various parties, the leading and the currently ruling party, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), have widely used political branding approaches and developed their brand image among the young voters of India. Thus, this chapter explores the political brand image of the BJP from the perspective of young voters in India.

Reductions in government funding for higher education in the United States and the UK have increased interest in the marketing of institutions of higher education. Empirical research on the branding of these institutions, however, is still emerging, with scant research on university heritage and its impact on student choice. This inquiry examines the construct of university brand heritage. Study 1 explores the various dimensions and manifestations of university brand heritage. Study 2 utilizes exploratory factor analysis to reduce the items generated, while study 3 employs confirmatory factor analysis to assess the dimensionality. Finally, study 4 experimentally manipulates university heritage, and provides a preliminarily exploration of its consequences among a student sample. The findings are built on research in branding by examining the unique context of institutions of higher education, and provide practical guidelines for how and when to develop promotional materials that extol a university’s heritage.

Strategic collaboration within and between firms is consistently associated with superior performance. Balancing supply and demand so that firms have more of what customers want and less of what they do not want is also recognized as a means of improving customer satisfaction and firm performance. Recent studies indicate that internal sales and operations planning (S&OP) enables demand and supply integration. However, successful S&OP implementations are relatively rare because the process is not well understood. Extant S&OP research is primarily focused on describing stage models, technology implementation, and outcomes of S&OP rather than on identifying antecedent factors like organizational orientations that may facilitate effective S&OP. Building on the VRIO version of the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm, this chapter develops a conceptual framework of organizational orientation antecedents of S&OP. Our framework proposes that a series of complementary organizational orientations (service orientation, internal market orientation, financial orientation, and supply-chain orientation) collectively promote organizational culture that enables S&OP.

In recent years, academic and practitioner interest in consumer-generated online reviews (OCR) has increased. One of the potential reasons for such growth in interest is their categorization as a valuable source of information for consumers making buying decisions online (e.g., Archak et al. 2011).OCRs consist of elements dealing with review valence (e.g., number of stars), review volume (total number of reviews over the same product), a textual portion (where reviewers are allowed to openly provide further information), usefulness of the review (number of yes/no to the question “was this review helpful to you?”), and verification that the reviewer actually purchased the product. In addition to these variables, readers can also deduce the variance of the review valence, since the distribution of reviews among the different valence levels is also reported.This study presents the available methods for text classification and empirically tests their performance sorting OCRs based on their usefulness variable. Previous research has shown the importance of the usefulness variable of the review, since it correlates with sales impact (Chen and Xie 2008; Ghose and Ipeirotis 2011; Ghose et al. 2012). Useful reviews were shown to more likely impact product sales than non-useful reviews, and this effect is more important over less popular products (Chen and Xie 2008). As a general conclusion, there is no single method that performs significantly better over other methods.The global classification capability of SVM with Class Weights is the best one of all the methods, but it fails to classify the non-useful and useful OCRs. S k-means is the most accurate method to classify useful reviews, but it fails to classify the other two categories. Additionally, its total performance is lower than other methods. Finally, SLDA shows the best performance classifying non-useful reviews; however, it fails in its classification of the other two categories and it also produces a low total performance. As an additional contribution, this work documents the inability of some methods to perform this analysis, as is the case for two of the unsupervised learning techniques: LSA and CTM.The results suggest that these methods fail to address some of the particular characteristics of OCRs, such as the comprehension of the text, its readability, and the type and novelty of the information contained (Li and Zhan 2011; Ludwig et al. 2013). Additionally, none of these methods evaluate the temporal variable or when the information was released (e.g., Purnawirawan et al. 2012). Further research in automatic methods of classification should address these characteristics, which tend to be context dependent and product type dependent as it has been suggested in previous research (Hong et al. 2014). In this sense, methods that combine semantics and an algorithm or a probabilistic approach can potentially solve the aforementioned shortcomings.

Acknowledging the ontological and epistemological differences inherent between formative and reflective measurement paradigms, we advocate an information processing approach in explaining the efficacy of these approaches in conceptualizing attitudinal constructs. Specifically, we focus on the measurement of corporate reputation, examining two competing measurement conceptualizations: second-order reflective model versus second-order formative model. Drawing from dual-processing theories we explain the underlying theoretical mechanisms at play in the activation of reflective versus formative conceptualizations of corporate reputation contingent upon an individual’s level of “need for cognition” trait. Using mobile phone customers in two countries, we provide empirical validation to both conceptualizations, and thus both reflective and formative models are plausible. However, their model fit varies across the levels of individuals’ “need for cognition.” As a methodological contribution, we propose a novel “jackknifing” methodology in structural equation modeling to conduct statistical tests of our proposed cognitive contingency model. By this means, the study brings us one step closer in an attempt to reconcile the validity of both measurement paradigms.

This chapter proposes a holistic (i.e., “recipe” or “algorithm”) post-positivistic approach to theory and data analysis to learn the impacts of alternative cultural complex wholes on the proportion of service professions within a nation. The study here includes substantially re-examining and extending the theory and findings by Lynn et al. (1993) to better explain tipping behavior and to show that, depending on the other ingredients in a recipe, each cultural attribute can work in different ways to explain tipping frequency. The findings offer a deeper, richer, perspective of how cultures affect consumer behavior than conventional positivistic tests. While voluntary tipping is becoming more common around the world, the antecedents of tipping behavior are ambiguous in the existing literature and do not provide a clear mechanism for researchers or policy makers to understand tipping expectations and behavior nor how to influence them. Partly, this ambiguity is caused by studies that deconstruct the ingredients of culture and report on the symmetric “net effect” of each ingredient (i.e., each specific capability and habit) rather than investigating culture as a “complex whole” (Tylor 1871/1920).

For businesses operating globally, employees may be located overseas, which can affect their social identity, performance, and identification with their organization and assigned market. According to the current literature, when offshore employees view their organization as being especially valuable, they may lack connectedness with the assigned market. In particular, when employees have strong organizational identification with the home headquarters, they may fail to cultivate an understanding of the local market. However, it cannot be assumed that a linear relationship exists between organizational identity and international business performance.

With an increasing assimilation of consumer behavior across countries (Blackwell et al. 1994), global brands become increasingly important (Özsomer and Altaras 2008). Global brands profit from similar positioning strategies in different markets to realize economies of scale and scope (Aaker and Joachimsthaler 1999; Johansson and Ronkainen 2005; Özsomer and Altaras 2008; van Gelder 2004) and are characterized by global awareness, availability, acceptance, and demand (Özsomer and Altaras 2008). Building a global image by global advertising gives a brand more power, value, and credibility (Blackwell et al. 1994; Dimofte et al. 2008; Holt et al. 2004; Johansson and Ronkainen 2005; Özsomer and Altaras 2008; Peebles et al. 1977; Shocker et al. 1994). By creating identification for consumers, global brands symbolize values of global consumer culture (Özsomer and Altaras 2008). When purchasing global brands, consumers feel cosmopolitan, knowledgeable, and modern; are part of a specific global segment (Johansson and Ronkainen 2005); and consider global brands as a common language all over the world (Holt et al. 2004). Consumer high-tech durables (e.g., cameras or computers) are most appropriate for global branding purposes because such products are used in similar ways worldwide (Alden et al. 1999; Barker and Aydin 1994; Quelch and Hoff 1986; Roth 1995a; Ryu et al. 2006). The objective of this chapter is to examine the effects of international advertising strategies highlighting dimensions of brand globalness (global myth, social responsibility, quality signal function; Holt et al. 2004) on reactions of consumers who have a similar culture with regard to individualism/collectivism, but differ in consumer ethnocentrism. Germany and the USA are chosen as test countries because both countries are rather individualistic (Stauss and Mang 1999), but are supposed to differ with regard to consumer ethnocentrism (Okechuku 1994). This chapter contributes to a broadened understanding of how to innovatively advertise global brands by examining advertising strategies for global brands that have not yet been analyzed.

Touch is one of the five senses, which plays an important role in the evaluation of product and purchase decision. This chapter tries to see how need for touch is a barrier in an online shopping context, where it is not feasible to touch a product. This study tried to identify two factors, return policy and e-tailer’s image which may act as a compensatory mechanism for inability to touch a product during online shopping. Through this study, we proposed that need for touch moderates the relationship between these factors and consumer response. The study tries to propose the role of return policy and e-tailer’s image as a compensatory mechanism for inability to touch a product while shopping online. Potential contributions and directions for future research have been discussed in detail.

This chapter examines how the displacement performance (i.e., a positive or negative change from the prior time period) of service quality attributes influences customers’ service experiences. Random-effect GLS regression is applied to analyze this effect in a sample of over 50,000 observations from the post-transaction surveys of a Fortune 500 rental car company. Results confirm that displacement performance has a significant effect on customer experience evaluation, even after controlling for the influence of attribute positional performance (i.e., the static performance levels) and the customers’ prior overall service experience evaluation. Further analyses indicate that the displacement performance effect is stronger for some service quality attributes when there is a short time interval between service deliveries. Finally, the study shows that negative displacement performance has a greater influence on experience evaluation than positive displacement performance. The results imply that managers should manage displacement perceptions in order to enhance customer experiences.

What is the firm’s role in influencing their customer’s experience? Despite its prominence and popularity in practice, it is unclear what customer experience management (CEM) as an overall business focus means or entails. To establish what is known about CEM and conceptualize a construct for it, we systematically and critically review existing empirical evidence. This study identifies 37 studies that explicitly research CEM within a business-to-consumer (B2C) context, and from a firm’s point of view. The authors find 26 CEM practices, each falling within 3 types of CEM: (1) strategizing, (2) operating, and (3) enabling the customer experience. Emerging from our study is the emphasis on studying and designing experience journeys and fostering an experience-centric organizational orientation. Implications for marketing management strategy emphasize the need to focus on experience quality and not just product, channel, or service quality.

Consumer misbehaviors are externally directed acts that violate social norms in consumption situations and cover a wide range of misbehaviors. Misbehaviors are, importantly, viewed by consumers and marketers as varyingly disreputable with some misbehaviors causing serious financial, physical, or emotional impact while others are perceived as having negligible impact. While the breadth of misbehaviors is wide, most studies have focused on “individual, extreme, or unusual forms” of misbehavior that have substantial impact, leaving a research gap in the investigation of customer misbehaviors that are perceived as trivial. This chapter studies the apparently innocuous end of the misbehavior continuum.

Experiential consumption represents a unique, and exceedingly popular, type of marketing behavior. Existing theory and research in the field of psychology suggest that one of the primary drivers of experiential consumption could be the concept of self-expansion. However, self-expansion as a factor in experiential consumption research has yet to be fully explored. The present research examines the following questions: What type of experiences lead to higher levels of self-expansion? What factors lead to self-expansion and how does self-expansion influence outcome variables such as evangelizing, price consciousness, and repurchase intention? Using a scale adapted from social psychology, self-expansion, as it relates to experiential consumption, is explored, levels of self-expansion stemming from different experiential categories are compared, and the influence of self-expansion on outcome variables is examined.

In recent decades, the consumer goods sector has proliferated with private labels, competing with national brands (Olbrich et al. 2009; Olbrich and Grewe 2009, 2013; Hundt et al. 2016). Intense price competition at the retail level corresponds with the strong growth of private labels (Olbrich et al. in press), which target not only lower and middle price segments (generic and classic private labels) but also upper price segments (premium private labels) (Jonas and Roosen 2005; Ter Braak et al. 2014; Schnittka 2015). As a result, retailers are now serious competitors to their existing business partners, namely, members of the branded goods industry (Olbrich and Buhr 2005).

Continuous supply of innovations is important for firms to remain profitable in a rapidly changing technological and market environment. This chapter, first, builds on the notion of persistent innovation with reference to approaches to learning about and tracking customer needs, the development of new market offerings, the development and implementation of internal processes, and the development and implementation of specific marketing programs. Second, characteristics that reflect a strong marketing and R&D interface, that is, connectivity, cooperation, knowledge exchange, and knowledge integration, are identified. Third, recognizing that firm orientations, that is, internal customer orientation, market orientation, learning orientation, technology orientation, and entrepreneurial orientation, are important for firms focused on persistent innovation, a conceptual framework that synthesizes relevant literature streams is developed. The framework reveals empirical potential for better understanding of how organizations can continuously innovate for competitive advantage in the marketplace. Discussion and future research directions are provided.

Extant research (e.g., Atuahene-Gima 2005; Cohen and Levinthal 1990; March 1991) explicitly recognizes the inherent tensions involved in searching for new ways of doing things (exploration) while currently leveraging and building upon what has already been learned (exploitation). Organizational ambidexterity is a popular approach to balancing explorative and exploitative activities in organizations, and has been recommended as an effective means to sustain organizational performance (e.g., Gibson and Birkinshaw 2004; March 1991). In this chapter, we suggest that an organization’s strategic orientation is important in shaping ambidexterity and address two research questions: (1) How do different strategic orientations facilitate or hinder ambidexterity and subsequent firm performance? (2) How does an organization’s knowledge stock influence these relationships?

Committed employees lead to a better long-term organizational performance. Therefore, organizations make substantive investments in the development and implementation of commitment-enhancing measures. Nevertheless, enhancing organizational commitment remains a challenging task because such measures show mixed effects on employees’ organizational commitment. We argue that these mixed effects result from individual differences in the perception and evaluation of commitment-enhancing measures. Thus, enhancing organizational commitment requires the explicit consideration of individual differences in employees’ perceptions. Long ago, customer-oriented marketing faced a similar challenge, resulting in the development of customized marketing activities. Against the background of internal marketing, which treats employees as “internal customers,” we call for extending the strategy of customization from the customer-oriented to an employee-oriented perspective.

Although online reputation has attracted significant attention among marketing practitioners, research in this area is still limited. In this chapter, the authors examine the antecedents and consequences of online reputation from the customer’s perspective. A structural equation modeling approach is used to test the model based on data from a survey of 1100 French online buyers. The results show the impact of trust and heritage on online reputation, as well as how online reputation affects customer commitment and word of mouth. Several implications either in terms of conceptual or managerial insights are then discussed.

Consumers expect greater involvement in the product and service offerings of firms. In response, the integration of consumers into the product development process, a technique known as collaborative product development (CPD), has become of interest to researchers across disciplines. CPD has become a “looking glass” technique that fosters an enhanced sense of shared identity. Here, consumers’ perceptions of the firm change from an “us versus them” perception to a “we” orientation. As such, the strategic utilization of CPD emerges as an important consideration for brand managers who need to build and support the firm’s reputation. Currently, most collaborative relationships with consumers are conducted ad hoc—without precedent to guide managers’ decision making. What, then, are the implications of consumer collaboration across the most common business practices including product development and promotion? Does CPD become more influential in product evaluation as it becomes more embedded in a business’s core offering? In other words, collaboration used to promote a new product (i.e., late-stage collaboration) may not create as strong of a connection with the consumer as collaboration used to create and develop that new product (i.e., early-stage collaboration).

Online consumer reviews (OCRs) are important in determining sales and price of products because they build trust in the seller (Pavlou and Dimoka 2006). Trust is the driving force in e-commerce (Gefen et al. 2003). One of the key ways in which trust is applied in ecommerce is through e-WOM (electronic word of mouth), such as that created through OCR (Dellarocas 2003). Accordingly, interest in OCR has increased from both academics and practitioners as a valuable source of information for consumers making online buying decisions (e.g., Archak et al. 2011). These decisions are influenced by the negative and positive information about a product or service posted online by other consumers (Forman et al. 2008).

With over two billion users worldwide (Bennett 2014), social media is a ubiquitous entity that has fundamentally changed how individuals and businesses communicate. Although initially slow to adopt, business-to-business (B2B) organizations are allocating more time and money to the development of social media initiatives, especially within the information technology (IT) sector. IT is leading social media adoption, owning 54 % of the overall B2B global share of voice, and three of the top five social B2B companies in the USA are IT companies (Brandwatch.com 2015). However, while IT companies are producing more content than any other B2B industry, they are struggling to reach and engage existing and potential customers via social media (Brandwatch.com 2015). This suggests that the IT industry is not effectively capitalizing on social media’s full potential. In order to get the most from social media, businesses must first understand why and how their customers are using the technology in relation to their brand.

In recent years, the Internet has played a significant role in the success of election campaigns and influencing voters (Baines 2011). The use of social media in political marketing can facilitate bidirectional engagement between political parties and their audiences, although actual social media adoption by political parties is akin to prior, dissemination platforms (Larsson and Moe 2011). In the UK, the 2015 General Election became known as the ‘Selfie Election’, with party leaders engaging with the electorate through photographs shared across different social media platforms, especially Twitter (The Telegraph 2015). As parties further utilize social media for engagement with the electorate, and traditional media channels report social media posts as news, it becomes increasingly pertinent to understand the communication between political parties and the public in order to optimize our understanding of successful communication. For political parties this means the potential to address their message for effectiveness, for the public it means the ability to interpret opinion polls more fully alongside conversations that are occurring online in real time, and for wider knowledge this identifies the potential of Twitter posts for use as predictors to general election success.

In recent times, experiential design has become prevalent in tourism services to enhance consumer engagement (Ritchie 2009). Well-known examples in the USA, on a large scale, are Disney theme parks and the Las Vegas Strip and, on a smaller scale, American Girl Stores and Cabela’s Stores. In this chapter we seek to explore how consumer’s interactions with art works contribute to experiential tourism design. We refer to these interactions as consumer metaphoria, meaning how the deep metaphors of consumer experiences are revealed in their engagement with art. The study uses the fact that consumers interact with artwork in a symbolic expressive way, guided by deep metaphors. Metaphors are universal orientations of mental processes through which one thing is understood in terms of another (Zaltman 1997). Deep metaphors are an unconscious viewing lens of consumers that affect how they process and react to information or a stimulus (Zaltman and Zaltman 2008). They manifest themselves in surface metaphors used in everyday conversation. Deep metaphors reveal as well as construct consumers’ emotional states.

An emerging challenge for sport event organizers is to convince the city council to grant licenses for hosting events. One effective means is to empirically show how events could add value to the host city. Recent years have seen an increasing number of sport events that brand themselves through associating with a city brand. These events adopt the city name in the event name structure to establish the sub-brand—master brand relationship with the city brand. Based on the brand architecture framework, this study proposes a conceptual model to investigate the relationship between consumers’ perception of an event, as a sub-brand, and the image of a city, as the master brand, in the context of a regional sports event. Brand architecture is an organizing structure representing the relationship between brands in a brand portfolio (Aaker and Joachimsthaler, Calif Manage Rev 42(4):8–23, 2000). From a top-down perspective, researchers find that the image of the master brand could influence the extended brand (Völkner et al., J Serv Res 13(4):379–396, 2010). Yet it is important to investigate how image transfers from a bottom-up perspective since service brands are consumed at the sub-brand level.

Increased commercialization of professional sport teams has led to increased competition, making it imperative for sport managers to develop and maintain fruitful relations with their fans and other stakeholders (Naik and Gupta 2013a; Bauer et al. 2005). The stakeholders might include participants, owners, team administration, governing bodies, financial stakeholders, and community at large. To ensure a team’s economic success, team owners and managers lay strong emphasis on “team branding” to build a loyal fan base (Naik and Gupta 2013b). It has been observed that higher loyalty of fans ensures their involvement in the team’s activities and leads to its economic success. In a recent survey by Gallup in 2009, it was observed that more than 56 % of the respondents were watching a sport because they were the fans of a particular participant team. It is therefore important for team management to identify critical factors that have an impact on the success of the teams. Researchers have argued that high team brand equity can result into increased fan loyalty, global presence, differentiation of team, positive fan attitude, and increased purchase intentions while ultimately leading to economic success (Naik and Gupta 2013a; Bauer et al. 2005). Measuring and evaluating brand equity of a team on a continuous basis should be considered a strategic marketing decision by the team manager. There are plenty of scales that have been developed to measure sport teams’ brand equity (Gladden et al. 1998; Gladden and Funk 2002; Bauer et al. 2008; Villarejo-Ramos and Martin-Velicia 2007; Ross 2006; Ross et al. 2008; Naik and Gupta 2012b). With these scales using reflective indicators, there is serious question on their coverage of the concept meaning as well as practical application.

Technological advances have enabled consumers to take greater control over how and when they view television programming, with many consumers choosing to time-shift consumption. Yet, preferences for live viewing vs. time-shifting viewing vary across program types, with news, special event, and sports programming showing higher real-time viewing than other program types. While indeterminacy is one factor that has been shown to predict consumer preferences for real-time broadcasts, drawing on literature related to the uncertainty of outcome and suspense, we argue that there is more to this preference than indeterminacy alone. More specifically, we propose that entertainment experiences contain two types of suspense (outcome and process suspense) and we show how process suspense impacts consumer preferences for time-shifting in TV entertainment consumption. Our research enriches our understanding of the nature of suspense and the relationship between outcome knowledge and the ability to experience suspense while also providing practical insights into why consumers choose to time-shift some programs, but not others.

Research on motion picture success has considered a multitude of different factors that influence the success of a movie. Nevertheless, one of the most prominent characteristics of a movie has been widely ignored: its title. As movie titles, which are considered equivalent to brand names, can give consumers an idea of how a movie will look or feel like, it could be used as a first reference point to inform consumers’ purchase decisions. Although managers reportedly have the feeling that a brand name alone can influence sales, empirical evidence for this influence is limited. In this research, we apply a unique two-step procedure to investigate the influence of movie titles on motion picture success. First, we introduce a consumer-level model to analyze the role of the movie title in the consumer decision-making process. Second, we extend the consumer-level model to the market level, incorporating behavioral data on actual product sales. We thereby shed light on the question whether a title influences the generation of sales when other information cues such as advertising and existing brands are available.

The market for Hollywood movie sequels has boomed in the last decade with sequels in every possible genre of movies. There are instances where a sequel has earned more box office revenues than the original movie (e.g. Harry Potter) and vice versa (e.g. Amazing Spiderman 2). Given the background, oddly enough, there has been very little academic interest in investigating why consumers watch sequels. The limited research in this area has either investigated the prediction of revenues for a sequel from a modelling perspective (e.g. Hennig-Thurau et al. 2009) or explored characteristics of sequels (such as name) (e.g. Sood and Dreze 2006) and how they lead to consumer choice. To the authors’ knowledge, there is no study that explores the consumer’s perspective and what leads them to select and watch sequels.

The media landscape has been changing during the several few years. The TV model based on a passive audience sitting in front of a screen is challenged by the advent and proliferation of broadband, anytime, anywhere, consumer-controlled alternatives (Bradley and Bartlett 2007). New information and communication technologies (ICTs) are reconfiguring the media landscape, shifting industry boundaries towards comprehensive ecosystems which integrate previously separated industries such as content, telecommunications, and computers. Mobile devices enable a ubiquitous connectivity scenario, creating opportunities for access and content creation (Labrecque 2013). Those new ICTs can be disruptive in the media ecosystem (Christensen 1997) given their impact on markets and business models. The Brazilian media environment is unique in both its audience behavior and advertising spending. Broadcast TV is present in 98 % of Brazilian households, earning a 68 % share of advertising budget. Dissemination of new media has direct impact on the way people entertain and inform themselves. Broadcast TV audience has steadily decreased over the last few years. The Internet grew considerably, but captured less than 5 % of total share (Projeto Intermeios 2014). Sports play an important role in this environment, both because of the huge audience and the valuable live content, which fits the grid of linear channels and keeps the traditional broadcast and pay-TV business models healthy for some years to come. Within a scenario of many changes and uncertainties, this study seeks to shed light on the key challenges and opportunities faced by Brazilian TV, given changes in consumer behavior and the advent of new media. This study’s objective is to understand how incumbents are dealing with opportunities deriving from new media from a company’s perspective, analyzing the case of a young and innovative sports media group: Esporte Interativo.

In the management literature, despite increased attention to corporate social responsibility (CSR) in general, suspicion and disbelief of such endeavors of companies appear to have grown (Basu and Palazzo 2008; Ellen et al. 2006; Godfrey 2005; Porter and Kramer 2011). This research study includes an in-depth review of literature and survey research (N = 740) in an effort to identify potential factors (i.e., congruence and reliability) that may influence consumer attitudes toward a sport organization’s cause alliance campaign in the domain of the National Football League (NFL). Furthermore, how these consumer attitudes toward the cause alliance campaign influence their subsequent responses (attitudes toward the sport organization, intentions to attend the sport organization’s game, attitudes toward the sponsoring brand, and purchase intentions toward the sponsoring brand) is examined.

A mismatch is becoming apparent between academia and leading marketing research practitioners in their use of mixed method research (MMR). Reviews find very few marketing papers in leading journals reporting MMR (Hanson and Grimmer 2007; Harrison and Reilly 2011; Davis et al. 2011). Likewise, our content analysis of leading textbooks in marketing research finds little attention to MMR, except in specialist MMR texts such as Tashakkori and Teddlie (2010) and Creswell (2014). Conversely and despite greater time pressures typically in commercial settings, MMR is becoming the norm in major companies and agencies. This raises questions regarding the validity and effectiveness of some academic research, and also instruction in methodologies for market(ing) researchers and future practitioners.Our objectives here are to (1) define mixed methods from academic and industry perspectives; (2) examine use of mixed methods in commercial consumer marketing research; (3) develop a framework for understanding use and drivers of MMR in practice; (4) assess parallels/mismatches between industry and academic practices; (5) and discuss implications for marketing researchers, educators, and managers.Using a grounded theory approach (Strauss and Corbin 1994), our theoretical sampling, data collection, and analysis developed concurrently. Elite interviews with four senior insight directors of multinational companies lasted for 60–120 min and involved multiple interviewers. Twelve further phone interviews with experienced insight directors followed, each lasting for around 60 min. Using the constant comparative method for analysis of transcripts (Boeije 2002; Bowen 2008), each researcher identified the reoccurrences of codes and themes (Lincoln and Guba 1985), with inter-coder agreement at 91 %. The findings are grounded firmly in our interview data rather than preexisting theory.The chapter provides insights into industry use of MMR, including how it is defined, practiced, sequenced, and evaluated. A structured framework of MMR in practice emerges, addressing drivers of MMR use, challenges, configurations and techniques, communication of findings, and evaluation/rigor of MMR projects. The work has strong relevance for validity and rigor of industry research, and thus the quality of marketing decisions and consumer satisfaction/welfare. Understanding contemporary best practice in industry research is also fundamental both for marketing education and for conduct of research that is robust and relevant.

A modern management of user experience in the current digital age requires a profound knowledge of its main elements and consequences. With regard to the measurement of user experience, science and business practice often refer to conventional, explicit measures such as self-reports. However, social psychology and neuroeconomics argue that most mental processes are of so-called implicit nature, taking place hidden in the unconscious mind. With that said, the current research focuses on the explicit and implicit impact of user experience on brand-related behavior. For that reason, a conceptual model integrating explicit and implicit information processes of hedonic and pragmatic user experience is derived. Furthermore, a new measurement instrument incorporating explicit and implicit measures of user experience is developed. The empirical results of the conducted online study provide evidence for a satisfying performance of the presented conceptual model and the related user experience measures. In detail, findings indicate significant effects of user experience on brand attachment both on an explicit and implicit information processing level.

The marketing area is traditionally built in the positivist perspective, as the methodological background makes evident. Although appropriate for the general market perspectives, the quantitative techniques fail in the identification of very sensitive and specific details in the context that sometimes matter. The field details are poorly perceived in service settings. This academic research, positioned in the interpretive perspective by Burrell and Morgan (1979), proposes phenomenological and ethnomethodological procedures as a way to explore in a qualitative perspective the understanding of service details related to consumer behaviours, specially in the notions of relationship marketing, service co-creation, and service failure recovery. As mentioned by Edvardson et al. (2011), the social service systems deal strongly with the notion of value-in-social context, indicating that exploring phenomenological and ethnomethodological research consists in a way to contribute to service marketing context. Phenomenology can be seen as a qualitative research, which intends to explore human experience (Ehrich 2005). The most important authors of the phenomenological movement were Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. Other important contributors are Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler, Maurice Merleua-Ponty, Jean Paul Sartre, and Gabriel Marcel (Sanders 1982). As a philosophy in the late nineteenth century, phenomenology emerged as a reaction to the dominant scientific paradigm, the positivist (Ehrich 2005). Burrell and Morgan (1979) position this perspective of science in their interpretive quadrant paradigm. The notion of ethnomethodology deals with the everyday life situations, as the case of service context. Many strategies were adopted to build the ethnomethodological research, for example, the meaning of communications and conversation analysis (Sacks 1992; Flick 2009). Garfinkel (2006) mentions that the purpose of this orientation is the explanation of daily actions that are executed in ordinary everyday life. People that are part of the context can give better descriptions and explanations about the environmental practices, procedures, and behaviors. Burrell and Morgan (1979) emphasize that real life is part of a singular social life context. The general way to act sometimes provides important details for study than the results itself, for example: behavior of service providers to identify the real service quality. The ethnomethodological research chooses the immersion in social interactions for the construction of meaning. In this way, Carolillo et al. (2008) understand this research approach as a way to better understand the reality, which emerges from the individual and collective experience. Daft and Weick (2005) mention the possible procedures as a system of meaning, which only makes sense in the real-life context. Ehrich (2005, p. 8) states that “the contribution of phenomenology is its ability to uncover and unravel the essence of lived experience” that has the potential to understand the management phenomena as a practice and a process that the human dimension is central. The same observation of the author is valid for ethnomethodology. These methods can contribute to the evolution of the marketing field, especially in the service arena. The development of new perspectives for collection and analysis of qualitative data is a challenge to researchers. Even challenging, choosing of these alternatives is a methodological way to obtain information that can contribute to marketing.

Growth among multilingual consumers in the United States requires service marketers to consider service language use. While the limited research to date asserts that multilingual consumers prefer service in their native language, these studies do not consider contextual factors, including social influence. The current research investigates the moderating role of the presence of a friend whose native language differs from the language of the focal consumer on the relationships between service language and service satisfaction. In contrast to prior research, we find that minority language (i.e., Spanish) speakers prefer service in the majority language (i.e., English) when their friend’s native language is different from their own.

Cultural products such as transnational television programs have been an important area of international business. In this chapter, we employed concepts from the country-of-origin literature and developed a model to identify factors influencing viewers’ decision to consume South Korean soap operas. Our study used a questionnaire survey method to collect data from 553 respondents in Taiwan. Regression analyses found that, except for cultural proximity perceptions, Taiwanese viewers’ country-of-origin perceptions significantly predicted their decision to consume television programs from South Korea. We also employed hierarchical regression analyses to explore if COO perception factors continue to predict Taiwanese consumers’ viewing intention, when taking into consideration program quality perceptions and judgement. The results showed that, while some COO perceptions remain to be predictive, program quality factors turn out to be stronger predictors. Discussions and implications were included.

Interacting with immigrant customers poses a challenge for many service providers. This study focuses on the key issues, challenges, and opportunities service providers face in service encounters with immigrant customers. The study is based on 13 qualitative, exploratory interviews with frontline and marketing employees of a large Austrian financial service provider. Findings provide evidence that service encounters involving immigrant customers differ significantly from those with domestic customers. Several challenges (e.g., coping with different cultures, lack of role clarity in coproduction) and even more opportunities (e.g., more trust in the service provider, higher word of mouth, provision of information through small talk) arise. From a managerial perspective the study indicates that service providers should implement human resource strategies for assigning staff to serve immigrant customers and training frontline employees. In addition, they should educate immigrant customers to enhance role clarity in coproduction, and then leverage existing opportunities to a higher extent.

In Peter Pan, all the world is made of faith, trust and pixie dust. Words that could perhaps be equally applied to the world of financial service marketing, particularly Islamic banking where trust and compliance with the Islamic faith are considered to be important to consumers. But do customers trust Islamic banks to comply with the Shariah principles where money cannot be made from money? Trust is multilayered and dynamic, changing according to context. The aim of this study is to explore how and in what form trust, in this case in an Islamic bank’s compliance with Shariah law, occurs in two distinctly different contexts, namely England and Pakistan, and how this in turn influences banking behaviour. The results identify similarities and differences in cognitive, affective and behavioural trust between the two countries and suggest that not all consumers, and particularly those in non-Muslim countries, trust the promises Islamic banks make to them.

The ever-increasing immigration worldwide compels marketers to understand how a new mainstream culture that embeds immigrant consumers might shape their consumption behavior. Specifically, this study examines whether minority groups of the same cultural heritage, living in different countries, vary in their cultural orientations (i.e., mainstream vs. heritage cultural orientations) and consumption outcomes (i.e., desire for unique products and fashion consciousness). A proposed model and hypotheses were tested in two samples of Russian-speaking adults from the former Soviet Union (FSU) who migrated to either Israel or Germany. Results from a survey indicate that FSU immigrants show a stronger orientation to their heritage culture in Israel and stronger pattern orientation toward the mainstream culture in Germany. In turn, these cultural orientations affected immigrants’ consumption preferences. These results confirm that the cultural orientations of the same immigrant group can differ across countries, which can be explained by contextual factors such as the differences in the immigration history and policies of the receiving countries. Theoretical and managerial implications are further discussed.

In this chapter, we argue that independent self-construal influences the willingness to purchase foreign products through the degree of consumer cosmopolitanism and ethnocentrism. To test these arguments, survey data (N = 444, TR = 234, US = 210) was collected from Turkey and the United States. Results of a parallel multiple mediator model show that independent self-construal has a positive effect on the willingness to purchase foreign products, and furthermore, consumer cosmopolitanism and ethnocentrism mediate this relationship. In addition, consumer cosmopolitanism and ethnocentrism are positively and negatively affected by independent self-construal. Moreover, we show that consumer cosmopolitanism and ethnocentrism affect willingness to purchase foreign products, differently.

Language is one of the most important dimensions of one’s ethnic identity (Jafari and Visconti 2014; Richard and Toffoli 2009). For this reason, language is used extensively as a strategic tool to reach multicultural consumers in countries of increased ethnic diversity. Two major sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic theories—the speech accommodation theory (Giles et al. 1973) and the revised hierarchical model (RHM) (Kroll and Stewart 1994), respectively—seem to provide a motivation for using vernacular language in marketing communications. Drawing on the two theories, researchers argue that marketing communications in the vernacular language express marketer’s sensitivity and congruity to the audience’s cultural heritage (Holland and Gentry 1999; Koslow et al. 1994), facilitating, at the same time, message comprehension (Luna and Peracchio 2001). However, using a vernacular language can be criticized as employing a mono-ethnic prime, which risks being interpreted as an indication of multiple identity blindness (Kang and Bodenhausen 2015). In today’s society ethnicity is situational and an ethnic individual can have multiple, parallel ethnic identities that cannot be grasped through mono-ethnic marketing messages (Binning et al. 2009; Jafari and Visconti 2014; Stayman and Deshpande 1989). The current study addresses the theoretical inconsistency in the extant literature on the effectiveness of vernacular language use in marketing to multicultural consumers. We follow a constructivist/interpretative approach to data collection and data analysis to explore how ethnic consumers feel about ethnic language depiction in marketing communications. This chapter reports on the results of 16 in-depth interviews with multicultural consumers with diverse ethnic backgrounds, occupations and lengths of residence in the UK. In the interviews a photo elicitation technique was employed, participants being exposed and asked to interpret a series of ethnic embedded print advertisements employing vernacular, standard and bilingual messages. The data collected were analysed inductively using thematic analysis method, which followed the six steps recommended by Braun and Clarke (2006) and Yin’s (2016) recommendations on interpretation and concluding. Our findings seem to contradict the principles of accommodation theory in that employing vernacular language cues in marketing communications as a high level of accommodation does not trigger positive affect in ethnic consumers, unless the media used is ethnic congruent. Our results point to new directions of advancing the RHM framework in marketing research by exploring the symbolic roles of second/standard language use in ethnic targeted communications to facilitate cross-ethnic relations and the ethnic individuals’ feeling of social involvement in the host country. The current study makes an important theoretical contribution to the literature on cross-cultural consumer behaviour and international marketing. Our findings aim to reach marketers and researchers in the multicultural marketing discipline.