Marketing Dynamism & Sustainability: Things Change, Things Stay the Same…

Consumption is a historically shaped mode of socio-cultural practice that emerges within the structures and ideological imperatives of dynamic market place. Consumer culture theory (CCT; Arnould and Thompson 2005) is fundamentally concerned with the cultural meanings, socio-historic influences, and social dynamics that shape consumer experiences and identities in the context of everyday life. In CCT–;s research program, consumers are conceived of as interpretive agents whose meaning-created activities range from those that tacitly embrace the dominant representations of consumer identity and lifestyle ideals portrayed in advertising and mass media to those that consciously deviate from these ideological instructions. CCT focuses on how marketing communication and fashion industry systematically predispose consumers toward certain kinds of identity projects (e.g., Zhao and Belk 2008a, b).

In multi-cultural environments, product endorsements addressing minority groups may not be appreciated by the majority of consumers. This renders such endorsements potentially controversial should there be animosity between the majority (in-group) and minority (out-group).

In today’s dynamic global environment consumer data is gathered through traditional and emerging channels and marketers. As technology improves it allows for more sophisticated data collection spanning the globe. New privacy harms are continually introduced because of such advances that ultimately impact consumers, policy makers, and businesses. Considering the global stage that market interactions occur on, it is increasingly important to understand consumer privacy perceptions and identify what information is considered sensitive. Despite the global nature of privacy and personal information, much of what is known about privacy stems from a US perspective. Furthermore, a clear understanding of what types of information consumers consider sensitive beyond personally identifiable information (PII) (i.e. social security number) is largely absent from policy guidelines and the marketing literature. Information considered non-PII, referred to as linkable information, is defined as a situation where two or more

unidentifiable

data pieces can be aggregated and used to identify an individual (FTC 2009; NIST 2009). In this paper we address this void and examine consumer privacy issues in terms of PII and linkable information in a cross cultural context, specifically Brazil and the U.S.

Recent research in the sales literature has begun to investigate the traits and performance characteristics of effective sales managers (i.e., Deeter-Schmelz, Goebel and Kennedy 2008; Deeter-Schmelz, Kennedy, and Goebel 2002). Those efforts have attempted to fill a gap in the sales literature related to sales manager effectiveness that is not fully explored by previous research on sales manager job satisfaction (e.g., Kantak, Futrell, and Sager 1992) and the sales manager/salesperson relationship (e.g., Brashear et al. 2003; Castleberry and Tanner 1986; Dubinsky 1999; Martin and Bush 2006). Understanding the salient factors leading to sales manager effectiveness is important because of the vast influence sales managers have on virtually all aspects of the salesperson’s job responsibilities and her/his job outcomes (cf. Brashear et al. 2003; Castleberry and Tanner 1986; Dubinsky 1999; Evans et al. 2002; Guest and Meric 1989; Sager, Yi, and Futrell 1998). In addition, extant research undertaken to investigate sales manager effectiveness by Deeter-Schmelz et al., (2002, 2008) have utilized a research methodology, value-laddering, that can be described as more qualitative in nature and not appropriate for making statistical inferences. The purpose of the current study is to expand this nascent research base by investigating a key set of constructs and relationships that have been linked to sales manager effectiveness. Specifically, drawing from the hierarchical value map derived from salesperson responses in Deeter-Schmelz, Kennedy, and Goebel (2008) this study tests the relationships between salesperson — sales manager communication and important salesperson outcomes.

Precepts from servant leadership theory are used to tests a model that links servant leadership with interpersonal conflict with the supervisor, ethical climate, and organizational outcomes. Study findings show that servant leadership is conducive to lower levels of interpersonal conflict with the supervisor and higher ethical climate perceptions. Conflict with the supervisor affects work-family conflict and felt stress, eventually impacting job satisfaction and turnover intention. The model was tested with survey responses from 85 frontline employees working for an airline in South America.

Hiring competent salespeople and keeping salespeople motivated and engaged to enhance job performance is a major objective for sales managers. This study tests the relationship between employee–s self-efficacy, perfectionism, work engagement and job performance. In addition, given the entry of millennial (also called GenMe or Generation Y) to the workforce this study explores whether generation gap can moderate the relationship between perfectionism, engagement and job performance.

Performance goals or quotas, also termed targets, are extensively used by sales organizations despite the fact that their impact on behavior and sustainable performance is questioned in the literature. Performance goals define a ‘desired’, ‘promised’, ‘minimum’ or ‘aspirational’ level of performance, for example, to attain 10 percent more of profits, usually within a specified time period. About 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies use performance goals in their sales compensation schemes (Joseph and Kalwani, 1998). Zoltners et al. (2008) estimate that sales compensation in the US economy totals about $800 billion, almost three times the amount spent on advertising.

In recent years researchers have shown interest in studying sales management (Powers et al., 2010; Shepherd & Ridnour, 1995; Tanner & Castleberry, 1990; Castleberry & Tanner; 1986; Butler & Reese; 1991; Anderson, Mehta & Strong; 1997). Some of this research has focused on the relationship between the sales manager and the sales person (Lagace, 1991; Tanner & Castleberry; 1991). Another research stream has examined leadership style and its effect on sales performance (Butler & Rees, 1991), whilst others have looked at the type of training that sales managers need to equip them for their role (Powers, De Carlo, & Gupte, 2005; Shepherd & Ridnour, 1995; Shepherd & Heartfield, 1991; Anderson et al., 1997). Yet, with the exception of Butler & Reese’s (1991) paper on sales leadership skills, extant literature lacks an overall definition and categorization of the skills and capabilities needed by sales leaders.

Perception of authenticity from a consumer point of view is more important than the origins of any particular piece of music. The fields of sociology and consumer behavior have contributed to the body of knowledge for authenticity in general terms, and as a perceived element of music consumption. Researchers in sociology present evidence that authenticity is a communally and sometimes situationally constructed perception. For example, Uzelac (2010) suggests national ceremonies must be viewed as performance, not ritual, to develop a perception of authenticity. This is a temporary construction, however, because when the audience dissipates at the end of the performance so does the authenticity. The fluidity of perceived authenticity is also seen in how its elements are presented. For example, Scottish folk music can be framed either as banal tradition or contrived spectacle to stage a particular type of authenticity (Knox 2008).

Celebrity endorsement is considered an effective promotional tool by marketers worldwide. Researchers have found that celebrity endorsements result in favorable advertisement ratings and product evaluations, which ultimately have a substantial positive impact on financial returns for the companies (Silvera and Austad, 2004). Particularly, sport celebrities have been considered to be attractive endorsers because they represent healthy, strong, vigorous, enthusiastic and energetic images that many agencies/companies pursue to be associated with (Bush, Martin, and Bush, 2004). A sports celebrity endorser is a famous athlete or coach who uses public recognition to recommend or co-present with a product in an ad (Bush, Martin, and Bush, 2004). Indeed, most top professional athletes, who maintain endorsement contracts as one main source of income, reach considerably higher level of financial success than other athletes without contracts. Interestingly, however, not all athletes reap similarly lucrative benefits from such endorsement contracts. Numerous highly successful athletes occasionally fail to make endorsement contracts due, in part, to awkward match, or mismatch between a product and the athletes’ image. Hence, the strategic match or fit between athlete endorser and product brand is considered to be one of the most important aspects in maximizing endorsement effectiveness in product, brand or company marketing goals such as enhancement of corporate image (Daneshvary and Schwer, 2000; Smith, 2004; Till and Busier, 1998). Accordingly, this study attempts to develop the Model of Strategic Match in Athlete Endorsement (MSMAE), a systematic evaluation tool for assessment of strategic match or fit between athlete celebrities and products/brands. Specific aim of this study is to examine the image match between an athlete endorser and product by using a three-dimensional visual map.

The impact of the recent recession has led consumers to assume more voluntarily simplistic (VS) lifestyles — that is to say, they consume more frugally and/or ethically. However prior research on voluntary simplicity has failed to assess the antecedent marketing conditions of VS. This paper uses survey data to explore the relationships between consumer impulsiveness (Puri 1996), materialism (Richins 1994; 2004), and mindfulness (Bahl, Milne, and Ross 2011) and VS lifestyles (values) and associated attitudes and behaviors (Iwata 1997). The data supports relationships between the antecedent variables and VS lifestyles but is mixed with relation to VS associated attitudes and behavior.

Although marketing scholars have recognized the role of creativity in marketing, we argue that it has been underestimated, particularly in light of the new marketing paradigm (Vargo and Lusch, 2004) in which the focus is on the co-creation of value between firms and their stakeholders, including customers. We heed the call of organizational creativity scholars (e.g., Hennessey and Amabile, 2010) by proposing a systemic approach to creativity in marketing which recognizes the interdependence between the individual and organizational processes of creativity as well as the strategic role of creativity-enhancing systems and processes in producing creative outcomes and, as a result, value for the firm and its stakeholders. This paper aims to contribute to the issue at hand by (a) offering a review of the construct across a range of disciplines and levels, and (b) developing a Creativity Marketing Ecosystem model which lays the foundation for future research on the multifaceted and crucial role of creativity in marketing.

The evolution of the marketing perspective made it essential for firms wanting to differentiate themselves in the marketplace to offer a unique product. Whereas simply producing a quality made product sufficed in the past, consumers’ are increasingly clamoring for products with social or environmental appeal (Handelman and Arnold 1999). As such, firms are engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies at an increasing rate. In particular, sustainability efforts are increasing in order to meet regulatory and consumer standards. Firms are not only producing green products, they are also enacting sustainability-oriented strategies to help “green the firm.” In fact, a recent study by MIT Sloan Management Review and the Boston Consulting Group finds that 70 percent of managers surveyed expect to increase their investments in sustainability efforts in 2011. Although organizations are enacting green

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marketing strategies at a soaring rate, an examination of consumer perceptions of the fit between the strategies enacted, and consumer beliefs regarding those actions, is lacking in the literature.

Notwithstanding the growing literature on strategy making, limited attention has been given to the formulation process of marketing strategies. Grounded on enactment theory, this study perceives the external environment as a source of information and organizations as information-processing entities. Our conceptualization emphasizes on the strategic paradigm of intended and realized strategies and within a nomological framework of antecedents and consequences, we examine the deterministic role of market uncertainty on marketing strategy making (

MSM

). An empirical study, conducted among 215 UK manufacturing firms, reveals that market uncertainty components (i.e., dynamism and complexity) influences the formulation of intended marketing plans. Furthermore, the data support that market dynamism controls the association between intended and realized marketing strategies. These findings provide further understanding and new insights on how intended strategic plans are designed and why these deviate from their initial pattern. Finally, the study examined the mediating role of organizational adaptiveness on organizational performance.

The world religions could help in overcoming the ideology of consumerism, and the social-economic practices associated with consumption, before the damage to the planet is too great to sustain ‘civilised’ forms of living. (Bocock 1993, p. 119)

The Internet has changed the media consumption patterns during the last decade and half. Many newspaper organizations are struggling with the aim of turning their online news into profitable products. In this task it is crucial to first (1) understand consumer behavior in the Internet and then (2) assess the relationship of this behavior with consumers’ willingness to pay for the content of newspaper websites. In the present study we explore the above mentioned two issues. First, this study contributes to the theory of consumer behavior in the Internet. While advances have been made in studying consumers' Internet behavior, the main focus in the past studies was the potential risk of cannibalization, where newspaper websites and Internet news were expected to draw audience from traditional printed newspapers. As a consequence, the researchers spent their efforts on studying consumers’ choice between printed newspapers and their online versions (see e.g. Flavian & Gurrea, 2009a). Recently, however, it has been acknowledged that a large proportion of consumers are actually ‘hybrid’ or ‘multi-platform’ readers. For example, a recent study on U.S. consumers indicated that consumers of local newspapers are mainly ‘hybrid readers’, who read the news both from printed newspapers and their websites (Chyi et al., 2010). In the light of these recent findings, it seems that the assumption of pure choice between printed and online newspapers does not hold, and further understanding on the nature of this ‘multi-platform use’ is needed. The past studies have revealed that consumers have different motivations for reading a newspaper (see e.g. Flavián & Gurrea, 2007a; 2009b), but no studies to our knowledge have yet assessed the consumer motivations for the multi-platform use in this context. The websites of the newspapers offer also more interactive content than traditional printed newspapers, and therefore the motivations for the multi-platform use need to be assessed separately. Basing our work on the uses and gratifications (hereafter U&G) theory (see e.g. Katz, Blumler, & Gurevitch, 1974; Rubin, 2002), according to which consumers have varying motivations to use media, we explore consumer segments that differ in their multi-platform use patterns. Secondly, since the different consumer segments have different motivations to use newspaper websites, we assume that their value perceptions of these websites differ also. We operationalize consumers’ value perceptions as their willingness-to-pay (hereafter WTP) and we apply Homburg et al.'s (2005) proposed model of nonlinear relationship between consumers’ WTP and satisfaction to explore the differences in the levels of willingness to pay for the digital content between the identified consumer segments. Based on above, we derived two research questions:

Research Question 1: Can consumers be segmented by their multiplatform newspaper consumption patterns?

Research Question 2: How do the consumer segments differ in terms of their willingness to pay for newspaper websites?

A number of researchers have examined the influence of word-of-mouth and brand referrals on consumers’ choices, pre- and post-usage attitudes, expectations, and purchase decision (e.g., Arndt, 1967; Herr, Kardes, and Kim 1991). The advent of the Internet and social networking sites has made it significantly easier for consumers to voice their views, preferences, and experiences with others in the online environment. Accordingly, researchers have begun to focus attention on factors that influence customer-to-customer communication in online settings (e.g., Hennig-Thurau et al. 2004), how such communication influences actual behaviors (De Bruyn and Lilien 2008), and relative advantages of such communication versus traditional marketing (Trusov, Bucklin, and Pauwels 2009). This study contributes to the evolving literature on the antecedents of consumers’ propensity to engage in consumer-to-consumer communications about a specific brand in the online environment. We conceptualize consumers’ online brand referrals as consisting of two components: a) positive brand referrals which include favorable statements about a brand and b) oppositional brand referrals which include unfavorable statements about competing brands. This conceptualization is consistent with prior research which holds that consumers are likely to discuss merits of preferred brands and disparage competing brands (Muniz and O'Guinn 2001; Thompson and Sinha 2008). Extant research holds that consumers’ brand referral intentions are influenced by individual and brand-related factors (e.g., Hennig-Thurau et al. 2004; Kim, Han, and Park 2001. In this study, we examine the relationships between brand identification, brand trust, brand attractiveness, and customers’ extraversion and the subsequent impact on the propensity to provide both positive and oppositional brand referrals online.

The web has become a mainstream shopping channel in developed countries. Whereas 79 percent of Americans use the Internet, 72 percent of these Internet users shop online and 78 percent seek information online about a product or service prior to an intended offline purchase (Pew Internet n. D.). Similarly, online shopping in Australia is booming. Internet shoppers spent an average 2,500 A$ in 2007 with online sales expected to grow to around $10 billion over the next five years (Sydney Morning Herald, 2011; The Daily Telegraph, 2007). For shoppers the web offers vast information and 24/7 access to online stores worldwide. Consequently for 78 percent of Internet users convenience is the main reason to shop online, followed by saving time and the chance to get bargains (Horrigan 2008). Furthermore online experience, using the web for work and other activities such as reading news, predicts online buying behavior (Bellman, Lohse and Johnson 1999).

The number of higher learning institutions offering distance education courses has grown dramatically since 2000. Institutions have seen aggressive growth in online degree registrations, with an 18.2% average annual growth rate in enrollments between 2002 and 2010. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, over 6.1 million students took at least one online course at a college or university in fall 2010. In a recent survey of online education conducted by the Babson Research group (2011), sixty-five percent of reporting institutions claimed that online learning was a critical part of their long-term strategy.

The marketing department’s power is an important topic in current marketing debate. Previous scholars have focused largely on exploring its capability-related and contingency-related antecedents, its dispersion, and its performance implications. Customer connection, as a critical organizational capability, has been related to increasing marketing’s power. However, this capability has seen equivocal results as a source of power. For instance, Moorman and Rust (1999) confirm its relevance to the emergence of marketing power, while Verhoef and Leeflang (2009) do not. The mixed results indicate that different context factors must be at work and they underscore the need to explore contextual moderators (e.g., Verhoef et al., 2011). As marketing literature has mostly neglected the close link between Resource Dependence Theory (RDT) and Strategic Contingency Theory (SCT), our study advances previous work by combining RDT and SCT to argue that the relationship between power sources and power is contingent on context factors. Based on RDT, the customer connection capability represents a critical resource to firm success, so that firm’s depend on marketing’s customer-connecting role and marketing thus gains power. According to SCT, however, this relationship is additionally affected by contextual circumstances under which capabilities like customer connection are enhanced or hindered to function as sources of power. The study develops and tests a model based on Yan and Gray’s (2001) framework comprising of six context factors—asset specificity, selection and training, market orientation, environmental dynamism, differentiation strategy, and political skill of the head of marketing—that affect the availability of alternatives and strategic importance of resources like the customer connection capability.

Environmental issues have become increasingly prevalent in society since the 1960’s (Cohen, 2009). As a result, environmentalism has blossomed as the foundation of a great deal of academic research. Given its early involvement in the study of the environmentalism, marketing serves as a useful analogue for the greater collection of business disciplines. Research in the marketing discipline related to the environment traces back at least as far as the early 1970’s (Anderson & Cunningham, 1972). Early work in marketing focused on differentiation of “green consumers” from other individuals (Bohlen et al., 1993). As environmental awareness has grown and spread, so too has green consumption to the point that simply describing demographic differences among consumers no longer seems feasible or applicable. However, that is not to say that researchers have abandoned the notion of individual differences in the environmental context. On the contrary, Environmental Concern (EC), as an individual difference construct, has been developed and demonstrated as useful in the examination of various topics. In light of this, in addition to continuing to study consumer behavior in regards to environmental concern, companies may benefit from looking inward at the environmental attitudes of their own employees.

This study focuses on understanding employee environmental behaviour in professional service firms that are implementing pro-environmental strategies. To date research has mainly focused on environmental management programmes (EMPs) within manufacturing, however, the size of the service economy’s contribution to GDP in more economically developed nations adds to the importance of exploring environmental issues in service firms (Kassinis & Soteriou, 2009). The research seeks to develop a model to explain employees’ motivations to engage with the organisation’s EMP. Although EMPs have the potential to improve an organisation’s environmental performance, adopting an internal-marketing approach to promote positive environmental outcomes by service employees may enhance the realisation of environmental objectives.

The marketing communication environment has drastically changed in recent years due to the proliferation of interactive technologies and a new consumer attitude in view of publicity. The challenge to evaluate communication effectiveness and efficiency, a relevant issue for both academics and marketing managers, has therefore intensified. The objective of organizations that invest considerable amounts in communication activities is to identify the importance of each media in the process of approach and significance of the brand, creating congruence between the promoted positioning and the brand value recognized by consumers. This article proposes a theoretical model and a quantitative method for supporting decisions to measure effectiveness of the communication mix as well as of the media used to generate results in the context of products of mass consumption, and at the same time understands the relations between the constructs of the proposed model. The proposed model also considers the communication process, including the consumer’s process of understanding the message and sharing meaning with others before taking the decision. So that, it includes the sales force present in the marketing channels and the consumers as receivers and transmitters of information, both considered to be part of the communication process.

As the importance of marketing communication to support branding increases, so does the need for new and actionable insights into how to develop more effective marketing communication techniques. One approach entails increase marketing communication effectiveness by paying more attention to audience segmentation by examining individual differences. Efforts to understand this phenomenon have prompted a few scholars to suggest that preferred information sources differ across individual consumers. However, work examining media preference based on such individual difference is still sparse. This study investigates the relationship between individual differences and the preferred marketing communication media. The study also investigates the influence of individual differences and preferred marketing communication media on consumers’ experiences and attitudes. The individual difference focused in this study is modality difference in learning (learning style).

Recent developments in the media landscape have fundamentally changed the way consumers search and use information to guide their purchase decisions. Insight into consumers’ search for and use of information across media is still in its infancy. This paper aims to answer the question: which media are used in what stage of the purchase process for what type of products? A representative sample of 347 Dutch consumers was asked about recent purchases and the role of different media in the purchase process of this specific product. Results showed that media were most important in the stages of the purchase process before the actual purchase was made. Media that were most influential across the total purchase process were the Internet, TV and free door-to-door newspapers. Non-advertising media that were important were conventional shops and Word of Mouth. Consumers indicated that cinema, mail and outdoor advertising were least important in influencing their purchase decision. Various small differences were found between the role of specific media in the various stages of the purchase process. Interesting differences were found between high and low involvement products, between males and females and between younger and older consumers. The paper gives insights into the optimal choice of media and combinations of media for advertising campaigns.

Since the Web’s inception, marketers as well as the advertisers have attempted to harness its great potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of both marketing and advertising. Even though interactivity is regarded as the Web’s most unique and valuable characteristic, there is still no agreement on what actually constitutes the interactivity construct. One of the most important reasons why interactivity is so hard to define is that it is multi-dimensional and can be observed from such different levels as feature, process and perceptions. Among all the existing definitions of perceived interactivity, Liu and Shrum’s is used most often and it serves as the conceptual foundation for our scale development. In addition, we incorporate the responsiveness element proposed by Johnson, Bruner and Anand and designate perceived interactivity as a four-dimensional construct that consists of communication, control, responsiveness and speed.

Online shopping sites have risen rapidly. As forms of networked communities, they provide non-transactional opportunities for consumers to interact for personal and social reasons (Dholakia, Bagozzi, and Klein Pearo 2004; Verhoef, Reinartz, and Krafft 2010).

Co-creation of value provides extensive benefits and competitive advantages to both buying and selling firms in business-to-business (B2B) relationships. Identified as an area for needed research by the Marketing Science Institute (2010), the ability to co-create value offers firms competitive positions and relational benefits that surpass basic buyer-seller exchanges. Inherent in this concept is the extent to which buyers trust sellers to engage in this process and are confident sellers act in the best interest of the customer firm. This level of trust is established through relationships in which buyers consider a representative of the selling firm as a trusted advisor (TA) who facilitates the co-creation process, while increasing the value of the relationship for both firms. Using transaction cost theory, the author will demonstrate that the value added to B2B relationships by a TA is a competitive advantage for firms operating in this domain, and will conceptualize and identify the reflective indicators of a trusted advisor.

We examine how value priorities of second and third generation Turkish college and university students in Germany are related to three dimensions of consumer behaviour: consumer innovativeness, optimum stimulation level and materialism. As expected, we find that there is a significant relationship between value priorities and these dimensions. We also find that consumer innovativeness is not only motivated by a general desire towards variety and change, but also by materialism values. The results of this study contribute to several research streams in the literature, including consumer innovativeness and immigrant consumer behaviour.

Ethnic identity has been shown to play an important role in Hispanic consumer behavior research. The measurement and statistical treatment of ethnic identity measures, however, have been mixed across studies. First, the operationalization of ethnic identity has varied with some studies defining the construct by behaviors (e.g., language use) and others using theoretically-based measures. Second, different research questions and statistical treatments of ethnic identity as a predictor have been applied. Ethnic identity measures have, for instance, been used to create groups of self-identified Hispanics and non-Hispanics so that comparisons in consumer behaviors could be done. Studies later relied on within-group comparisons of behaviors between Hispanics reporting relatively high ethnic identity levels to those reporting relatively low levels. In these examples, ethnic identity was essentially treated as a categorical variable. The present study uses structural equation modeling to define ethnic identity by two latent, continuous dimensions and statistically treating them as such. Comparisons to past approaches to the measurement and statistical analysis of ethnic identity suggest a latent variable modeling approach may aid in understanding the relationship between ethnic identity and Hispanic consumer behavior. The goals of this study are 1) to evaluate a single measure of ethnic identity as a predictor of HCB and 2) to compare results from the former to predictions of HCB using distinct but related aspects of ethnic identity, namely attitudinal and behavioral.

Halal endorsements are certifications that a product was prepared in accordance with Islamic principles and that it does not contain an components that are prohibited by Islam (IFANCA 2011). Despite muslims being a minority in the United States it is projected that the percentage of Muslims in the United States will increase from 1% in 2011 to 1.7% in 2020. Furthermore, Islam is one of the fastest growing religions in the world (Foreign Policy 2007) and this growth in muslims around the world has lead companies to seek Halal certifications to target such a segment. For example, 75 out of Nestlé’s 465 factories are currently halal certified and KFC, a major fast food chain, has conducted trials of halal restaurants in the U.K. (Economist 2009). Despite this growth in Halal endorsements in the market, there is a dearth of literature examining the impact of Muslim endorsements, often referred to as halal, on consumers’ reactions to products that hold such endorsements.

Internet technologies create marketplaces for consumers to purchase product or services from online Web sites instead of shopping in the traditional market channels such as department stores. Online shopping sites can be categorized into two types: (1) seller’s own Web sites, such as Walmart.com and Dell.com, offering online shopping options to buyers or (2) third-party (T-P) Web sites, such as eBay.com and Amazon.com, providing online platforms facilitating transactions between buyers and sellers. While previous studies often focus on the Web site quality for selling products directly, this study concentrates on the quality of third party Web sites that manage the exchange network between buyer and seller (e.g., eBay or Amazon). Specifically, Pavlou and Gefen (2004, p.40) suggests that “these online marketplaces, as endorsing institutions or intermediaries (“cyber-mediaries” or “info-mediaries”), are the equivalent of traditional middlemen (Song and Zahedi 2002).”

To describe and apply teleological approaches from complexity sciences in services. The performance of service encounters and the outcome of service quality are dependent upon complex and dynamic interactions between service providers and service receivers. A set of teleological approaches from complexity sciences is incorporated and applied in the context of service settings. A teleological application from complexity sciences in relation to the interactive nature of the performance of service encounters and the outcome of service quality is likely to trigger and encourage innovative research designs and alternative methodological approaches to new research problems in services. A suggestion of further research is to address where and how we can learn from other research disciplines that have explored the addressed aspects of teleological approaches from complexity sciences in a more advanced way, and how we can transfer and incorporate these aspects and knowledge into services. The research opportunities into service quality and service encounters by applying teleological approaches from complexity sciences are extensive. They might also stimulate innovative analytical techniques that could produce groundbreaking research findings, in extension, with important implications for practice. A continued emphasis on multi-disciplinary research may contribute to improve current research and practice of services.

The widely used American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) has never been extended to charitable fundraising. Altruistic helping behavior is often accompanied by a warm glow effect (Andreoni, 1990). Marketing cannot do much altruistic traits, but it can help sustaining the warm glow.

The blogosphere is a relatively new arena for marketing and communications, and provides a lively arena for consumers’ exchange of opinions about brands and products (Universal-McCann 2009). A recent Technorati survey (2010) showed that 42% of bloggers surveyed reported they blog about brands they love or hate. This exemplifies the key role bloggers play in this one-to-many communication method and their role as e-fluentials, opinion leaders who spread information via the Internet (Burson-Marsteller 1999). Drawing from the literature on opinion leadership and electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM), as well as Uses and Gratification (Blumler and Katz 1974), this study explores differences between bloggers and their audiences (blog readers) in terms of opinion leadership and motivations to use blogs.

Consumers today face many informational benefits and challenges owing to the Internet. However, with information being seamless, limitless, and often anonymous, what is noise and what is valuable information? This information overload is one of the reasons why understanding online word of mouth (eWOM) becomes pivotal to consumers for their decision making as well as essential to marketers to know where to focus their efforts.

Although text message argot has permeated all digitally based written communications, its efficacy in ads—especially ads embedded in video games—is unknown. To help close this research lacuna, we develop two between-subject experiments grounded in distinctiveness theory and communication trust theory. The results suggest that ads with SMS-type copy outperform ads with traditional copy on viewers’ responses about ad novelty, attitude toward the ad, attitude toward the brand, emotions toward the ad, perceived brand trust, ad persuasiveness, and intent to purchase the advertised brand.

This study empirically examines that marketing planning and sales autonomy both invigorate sales activities to achieve better business performance. Here an organization has effective remedies for the marketing myopathy that may afflict it when its salespeople cannot vigorously engage in on-the-spot activities. The study reveals a dilemma: sales autonomy encourages sales activities, but it also results in negative business performance. The authors examined the contribution of marketing planning in attaining better performance. Marketing planning guides salespeople in a right direction without inviting any negative aspects.

Market orientation, an important organizational concept, is fundamentally driven by the marketing department, as marketing exerts its power to spread a market-oriented mindset throughout the organization. While the determinants and success-related benefits of market orientation have been broadly studied, the conditions under which it is established have been largely neglected. Addressing this gap, this paper investigates the associated role of the marketing department’s power in the creation of market orientation and how it is moderated by means of managerial control. Based on a Resource Dependence Theory (RDT) perspective, it is argued that top management depends on marketing to exert its power in order to induce market-oriented behaviors and values firm-wide, and that to manage this dependence top management iniates control. To observe the moderating effect of managerial control, we differentiate between formal and informal controls as Organizational Control Theory (OCT) suggests that the feasibility and effectiveness of controls is affected by the respective task context. Previous literature noted that establishing market orientation reflects a process of cultural transformation (Gebhardt et al. 2006) and therefore describes a changing and uncertain environment. Following OCT, formal controls are impaired in uncertain context settings, whereas informal controls serve as a “fall-back” option that is effective in such contexts. Therefore, we advance current conceptualizations of management control in market orientation research by applying formalization, centralization and output control as forms of formal control, and being the first to include socialization and selection & training as informal controls. The study aims to show that informal controls are suitable mechanisms to foster marketing departmental power in the creation of market orientation.

Customer-linking capability fosters a profitable customer base and ensures that there is a fit between the product or service offered and the customers served (Rapp, Trainor and Agnihotri 2010; Hooley et al. 2005). Innovation capability, in turn, provides a source of organizational renewal. This is necessary because customer preferences change and competitors' innovative activities erode the ability of existing products and services to cater to the needs and wants of the customer (Kim and Pennings 2009; Coad and Rao 2008). Thus, the firm’s customer-linking capability and innovation capability support one another (Maciariello 2009).

Social representation theory posits that individuals are influenced not only through the collective behaviour of their friends and colleagues but also through their life experiences (Penz, 2002). Because the working environment constitutes a large proportion of an individuals life it is interesting to explore how perception of work experiences may evolve in the business context where hierarchical influence shapes performance and work-related attitude. Management behaviour may evoke positive or negative effects on the way employees approach the tasks that are set through organisational strategy. This is believed to be influenced by personality.

In the rapidly changing international business environment of today, a company’s brand can be the key feature for a retailer to distinguish itself from other competitors and to compete with manufacturers. In fact, the dynamics of competition between these players and private labels (PL) brand power can be an important element. The main purpose of this research is to measure and explain the PL’s market power across different retailers and categories through the use of the price’s differential between national brands (NB) and PLs, using a proxy for an Lerner’s index (L) of each category.,. Assuming a Cournot behavior of oligopoly’ competitors, L=H/ε (H = Herfindahl concentration index and ε= elasticity of demand), the retailer market power depends simultaneously of supply characteristics (concentration) and demand characteristics (elasticity). The logic beyond this approach is that the higher the consumer’s satisfaction and brand awareness of a product related to a brand, the higher the consumer’s willingness to pay. As the willingness to pay to a PL product increases, the differential between NBs product and PLs decreases, implying a higher PL market power.

Private Labels have been gaining increasing importance throughout the world (Kumar and Steenkamp 2007) with store brands being present on almost every product category (Geyskens, Gielens, and Gijsbrechts, 2010). Private labels (PL) are estimated to account for one of every five items sold every day in USA (Ailawadi, Pauwels, and Steenkamp, 2008), representing about 20% of the average purchases made worldwide (Lamey et al., 2007). Moreover, nowadays we are assisting to a proliferation of segmentation strategies at the level of private labels (Kumar and Steenkamp, 2007), indicating that retailers are not just competing on price, but instead are trying to conquer a significant market share traditionally owned by manufacturers. From an initial focus on price, private labels have moved to a quality positioning, and more recently, to a status orientation positioning, extracting benefits from the retailers’ own-brand image (Steenkamp, Heerde, and Geyskens, 2009).

There is growing evidence that private label brands have become more innovative (DelVecchio, 2001; Mintel, 2009). Private labels have been considered of special importance in recent years for retailer strategy and have clearly evolved through time. Private labels are becoming more sophisticated and are delivering a broader and more complex portfolio (Kumar and Steenkamp, 2007). The latest generation of private labels is positioned around innovation and quality. They originated in the UK, where they are critical for the strategy of some of the most important retailers (Burt, 2000; Verhoef et al., 2004). Despite this new trend, the impact of private label innovativeness on store image and customer relationships has not yet been investigated. The purpose of this paper is to examine how consumer perceptions of private-label innovativeness influence retailers’ store image and their relationships with their customers.

Despite space limitations and inventory costs, retailers frequently increase product assortments to attract more customers, However, there is an ongoing debate in the literature and in the retailing industry about whether “more is better” or “less is better” in terms of product assortments. Given that understanding customers’ perceptions and preferences about product assortments is complex and challenging (Grewal and Levy 2007; Mantrala et al. 2009), this study addresses a gap in the literature by examining situational and individual factors that may moderate the choice overload effect. Shopping enjoyment and time pressure are assessed as potential moderating variables of the relationship between product assortment size and customer choice overload. An experimental research design is used to survey 164 participants about their affective responses (i.e., feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, confused, and regretful when dealing with a purchase) to either a large assortment (24 items) or a small assortment (4 items). ANCOVA analyses are performed on the data. The results show that, as product assortment increases, choice overload is more common among customers (1) who enjoy shopping less and (2) who are under time pressure. The findings may be helpful for retailers in understanding the characteristics of their customers and designing product assortments to offer better shopping experiences.

Past studies indicate that even though consumers develop ownership feelings towards the product they touch, they often decide to select a “fresh” untouched piece while making the final purchase selection. This study offers insight on the above unexplored issue and suggests that the reason behind such switching behavior is consumers’ low perception of freshness towards the self-touched product. The study introduces a new variable known as “perceived product freshness” and suggests that low product freshness perception attenuates consumers’ ownership feelings towards the self-touched product. Furthermore, the study also suggests that such ownership feelings vary from one consumer to another based on their chronic regulatory focus. Implications and future research are discussed.

The study examines the effectiveness of selected social advertising campaigns that target the youth in influencing behavioral change in the Egyptian youth, with the moderating role of advertising skepticism towards social ads using the Advertising Response Model (ARM) to measure social advertising effectiveness. The ARM measure social advertising effectiveness through two paths: Central route and Peripheral route. Face to face interviews were conducted with 400 Egyptian youth, using a structured questionnaire. The results showed that the Egyptian youth were less likely to be influenced through the central route of persuasion than the peripheral route of persuasion. Moreover, it was observed that the Egyptian youth are skeptic towards social advertising, which in turn, makes them less likely to adopt the social behavior advertised for. These findings highlight the need for marketers and public policy makers to tailor social marketing campaigns and programs that is specially directed at Egyptian youth because they are more persuaded by social ads that are well executed than the presence of issue-related information. Keywords: social marketing, advertising campaigns, behavioral intentions.

The Internet has increasingly changed from a pure uni-directional information medium to a multi-directional exchange medium and thus nowadays holds a strong position in peoples’ daily life. Today, the worl-wide-web is used for information search and for vivid interchange of opinions and ideas amongst consumers. Especially the communication between users has experienced an enormous boom during the last decade. Out of the 140 billions monthly visited web sites, about 25% are social media like facebook, google+, and twitter (Rösch 2010). Social Media offers users a platform on which people all over the world can talk about their desires and need as well as about products or brands online (Theobald 2009). Listening to these discussions is worth for companies because this so called user-generated content presents a large and mainly free accessible knowlegde base (Schaffner and Mohr 2009).

A growing number of marketers have recognized the strategic importance of firm-created WOM (FCWOM) activity, which is defined as a firm's proactive management of customer-to customer communication. However, the basic questions of whether the implementation of FCWOM can drive more profits compared with non-implementation and when a firm should implement FCWOM are still largely unanswered. To answer these questions, the authors analyzed a panel data of WOM generated by movie distributors in the movie industry. Findings show that the implementation of FCWOM improves box office revenues; however, the early launch of FCWOM does not always lead to better firm performance.

Service dominant logic provides a framework for understanding buyer supplier exchange. One of its key claims is that operand resources, when combined with operant resources facilitate the creation of value. While this conceptualisation provides an interesting framework for the assessment of value creation, it does not capture the specific activities performed by operant resources. I argue that a gap exists in SDL in that it does not address resource application. Further, the understanding of value is vague. It does not capture the non-financial or non-functional value drivers held by customers. This exploratory study defines four broad categories of activities (the application of resources) performed by project teams in medium and large-scale service deliveries. It then proposes a framework that identifies the effects of these behaviours on customer perceived value as well as potential moderators of those relationships. These findings derive from a webethnography based on the professional social networking site

www.Linkcdln.com

. The paper discusses these findings and offers suggestions for future research.

The contemporary view in marketing literature is that value is uniquely and phenomenologically determined by the beneficiary (Vargo and Lusch 2008:7). This conceptualization changes value from being an exogenous variable (Priem and Butler 2001; Srivastava et al. 2001) to an endogenous variable (Lusch and Vargo 2006). This distinction has important ramifications as it implies that value is derived by customers and firms working together to facilitate service success through the co-creation of value (Barnes et al. 2009). Thus value-creating resources are not confined to the firm; customers, suppliers and other stakeholders also contribute operant resources to value creation (Vargo and Akaka 2009). Support for this phenomenological view of value comes from the means-end theory (Woodruff and Flint 2006; Vargo and Lusch 2004. However, a serious drawback of the means-end framework in its current form, is that, it mainly focuses on product attributes/features and the resulting consequences and goals. The, current discussion on value, however, imply that in value co-creation, all parties are resource integrators. Therefore, value assessment based on product attributes alone is limiting. Another long standing criticism of the “means-end theory framework has been that means end chains has generally assumed a static goal structure, with little discussion on how goals evolve” (Huffman et al. 2000: 11). The paper proposes an “extended means-end value framework” (EMEVF) that incorporates the antecedents and implications of value co-creation and thus can be used to measure the co-created concept of value. A qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews was employed to examine the links between the means, consequence and end. The main contributions of the paper are first, that it expands upon the goal development process, and the role of different types of resources in that process, that consumers go through in their pre-purchase deliberations. Second, findings suggest that value co-creation is an all encompassing process and examining the links between the goals and the resources provide a useful way of understanding how consumers infer value from the service. Results are presented using quotes and with visual illustrations of the EMEVF. The paper concludes with a discussion of the results, its implications and directions for future research in this area.

Value co-creation has become an integral part of the marketing discipline. However, the current understanding of value co-creation falls short. Drawing upon the literature on social media, corporate social responsibility, conscious capitalism, and the stakeholder view, the paper makes three propositions that expand the scope of value co-creation. Different ways are presented by which today’s empowered consumers increase the value of co-creation and by which companies can leverage this value. Based on a conceptual analysis, a gap is identified: While the recent definitions of marketing indicate the growing importance of considering all stakeholders, the definition of value co-creation considers only dyadic customer-company relationships. Proposing that all stakeholders can co-create value, the paper redefines value co-creation. As a first step in applying this expanded definition, the study introduces the community as a co-creator of value and embeds it in a triadic customer-company-community framework. Suggestions for a continued expansion of the scope of value co-creation are provided.

The study of marketing institutions as the main approach for the study of marketing gave way to the functional approach in the 1950s followed by the managerial approach in the 1960s. The managerial approach and its correlate process type applications such as management of marketing channels, supply chain management, customer relationship management, and customer service management evolved throughout the 1970s — to date. The advent of e-marketing and its derivative Internet Marketing evolved during the first decade of the 21st Century and resulted in the disintermediation of a number of traditional marketing institutions. Institutions such as retailers and wholesalers were replaced by or supplemented with new types of marketing institutions, “infomediaries,” engaged in mobile marketing, social media, new media, e-commerce, e-loyalty and e-satisfaction programs, search engine marketing, and search engine optimization. Not only the altered nature, function, structure, and management of the new institutions warrants study, but also, a revival of the study of the traditional institutions is necessary for emerging marketing scholars to understand and develop an appreciation for the structural arrangements of institutions engaged not only in the creation and communication of value, but also the last mile in the marketing process; i.e., delivery of the value.

Undoubtedly, the services marketing literature addresses questions pertaining to improving service processes and customers’ experiences, with the broad assumption that the organization and service personnel operate in systems designed to provide levels of service that are adequate or above. From 30 years of focused research, a knowledge base of practices and systems has emerged capable of providing service levels necessary for success, when implemented properly.

It is widely acknowledged that well-designed customer-service programs enhance customer satisfaction, customer retention, market share, revenue, and profits. These issues are of particular importance in the airline industry, in which the delivery of high-quality service to passengers has been shown to be essential. However, although the link between airline service quality and passenger satisfaction has been established empirically, the exact nature of the relationships that exist among the constructs of airline service quality, passenger satisfaction, and loyalty remains unclear (Park

et al.

, 2004).

The emerging service-dominant world has highlighted the significant issue of service brand building. Creating and succeeding in selling service brand image to consumers can help a firm build competitive advantages. However, the perception toward the image of service brand differs from individuals based on personal differences. As clothing can be a form of non-verbal communication, it can help individuals express themselves and send messages to others. The theory of symbolic interactionism, proposed by Kaiser (1983), indicated that people create their features by managing their appearance in utilization of clothing, and they dress themselves on the basis of symbolic meanings attached to clothing. Hence, this study attempts to explore service brand from individuals’ apparel preference.

As people tend to avoid embarrassing situations (Verbeke and Bagozzi 2003), consumer embarrassment when purchasing personal products is an important concern for retailers. Customers who are embarrassed often avoid making purchases they would have otherwise made (Lau-Gesk and Drolet 2008), for example condoms. Even though people are very supportive of condom usage for safety and health related reasons, consumers may still feel embarrassed buying them. Yet, while there is a growing body of literature about embarrassment and embarrassing situations in daily life, not much is known in embarrassment in sales interaction (Verbeke and Bagozzi 2003). Customers are likely to feel more embarrassed buying from some sales clerks than others. We contend that gender and age difference between the sales clerk and the customer might create powerful embarrassment for many consumers when buying a personal product. To address this research gap, this study explores whether customers prefer to buy from salespeople who are of the same gender and age.

Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) and subsequent work on service-dominant logic [S-D logic] (Lusch and Vargo, 2006; Vargo and Lusch, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c) provides a focus on the role of customers in value creation. S-D logic challenges the conventional idea that value is embedded in goods, emphasizing value in use. This perspective recognizes that customers are co-creators of their own value and determine what is of value (Ballantyne, Williams, and Aitken, 2011). S-D logic also puts a focus on the resources used by both sides in the process of exchange.

An emerging area of research within marketing, and the services literature in particular, examines the impact of customer engagement on key organizational outcomes. Rooted in service-dominant (S-D) logic, this notion of customer engagement posits that customers are key actors in value creation in the service consumption experience. The current research looks at key connections among customers, specifically the network connections

between

customers. Limited research has investigated customer support that occurs face-to-face despite the efficacy of customer-to-customer linkages in predicting organizational outcomes. Drawing on the customer engagement literature, the authors develop a theoretical framework providing insight as to what influences customer connection and how to leverage these relationships. Using network theory, we extend the customer engagement literature by exploring how customer-to-customer connections foster inter-customer social support and ultimately firm performance. This framework is tested in a health club setting, where customers frequently interact with other customers and the organization. Results suggest that connecting customers lead to greater levels of inter-customer social support. In addition, inter-customer social support leads to higher levels of firm performance, customer satisfaction and ability/role clarity in future co-creation. Based on our results, managers should facilitate customer connections and leverage these as resources that will increase both affective and objective performance outcomes.

The role of the individual customer in the development of the customer experience continues to expand through individual empowerment via technology. As a result, total customer experience is decomposing into

customer-initiated

and

firm-initiated

experience. The combination of increased customer empowerment and a more individualized consumption orientation interact to create customer-initiated experience. The authors propose that the increasing proportion of customer-initiated experience in the total customer experience enhances the functional component but dilutes the non-functional component of perceived value. This differential effect induces ambivalence toward services, resulting in a decrease in customer loyalty.

This study examined the reciprocal effect of store brand extension using a two-year scanner panel dataset provided by A.C. Nielson. Reciprocal effect refers to the impact of an extended product on consumers’ purchasing behavior of parent brand after their initial trial of the extended product. The results from four sub-studies reveal evidences of positive reciprocal effect after a successful store brand extension. Interestingly, reciprocal effect of store brand extension shows stronger impact on prior non-users. Furthermore, national brand extension is found to be more effective when utilizing the existing customer base, whereas store brand extension can be employed as a more effective strategy for attracting new customers.

Although the benefits and outcomes of value co-creation have been discussed in the academic literature before, scholars primarily concentrated on customer involvement in service co-production and new product development. Brand co-creation is explored as an innovative way for consumers to experience brands and a unique and invaluable strategy for companies to develop brand identity and image. The study employs Self-Determination Theory (Deci and Ryan 1985) to understand how the type of reward (internal vs. external) and the likelihood of being rewarded for customer brand co-creation (low vs. high) influences self-brand connection. The results demonstrate the importance of customer co-creation in brand development. In confirmation of self-determination theory, customers who are encouraged to participate in the brand co-creation activity by referring to self-development, report higher self-brand connection than individuals offered external reward.

The paper looks specifically at the role that celebrity personalities play in bonding brand attributes and community networks together. Athlete endorsers are frequently used as role models for positioning sports products and brands because of the social influence and community ideology attached to sport and because image and reputation foster brand identification. Studies have found cognitive associations are linked to the athletes’ personal characteristics instilling

trust, power, status and credibility

into the product offerings. Sport branded products imply communality and are novel because of the opportunities for managers to use professional role models to target specific socialisation outcomes. Iconic sporting figures have also become symbols in the promotion of a wide range of non-sports brands – e.g. David Beckham - Pepsi Cola; Gary Lineker -Walkers’ Crisps. Celebrity endorsement provides an opportunity for image transfer and co-creation (Sujan and Bettman, 1989; Brooks and Harris, 1998; Erdogan, 1999; Hsu and McDonald, 2002).

How should a firm respond in situations where consumer trust has been shattered? Corporate apologies are a common response, but there is uncertainty regarding this being the best approach. Prior research has compared apology to alternative corporate response strategies without fully considering the elements that constitute an effective apology. We apply insights from the inter-personal relationships literature to an experimental examination of a corporate apology issued following a guilty plea to charges of misleading advertising. Structural equation modeling shows that perceived sincerity of the apology statement plays a central role in enhancing assessments of reputation and trust in the brand, minimizing brand damage. Excusatory statements and high stability both detract from sincerity, but corrective action reinforces it. Our findings provide important guidance for restoring reputation and regaining consumer trust.

The prevailing legal authority in the United States for the right to one’s trademark was, until 1995, the Lanham Act of1946 (15 USC 1125 et seq.). In 1995, The Trademark Dilution Act amended the Lanham Act. .

Research on account of the prior outcome effect suggests that individuals would become risk-seeking upon prior gains as they are funded with house money (e.g., Gärling and Romanus 1997; Thaler and Johnson 1990). Yet some others (e.g., Heath 1995; Thaler and Johnson 1990) propose that prior losses increase risk-taking for deficit accounts closure by break-even seeking. The studies that discuss the above effects mostly focus on sunk costs incurred from prior behaviors and influences on subsequent choices. The concept of resalable merchandise as liquid asset is less addressed. Also, the house money effect is largely examined through experiments of gambling or uncertainty scenarios (e.g., Gärling and Romanus 1997; Thaler and Johnson 1990). Studies in more current decision-making contexts such as the rising online resale will help expand the theory’s applicability. As such, study 1 demonstrates a 4 (prior outcomes: multiple gains, multiple losses, mixed gains, mixed losses) by 2 (topical product: handheld game console/down jacket) experimental design and verified how consumer resellers’ sequential perceived online resale value as well as desired profit are influenced by prior outcomes. In line with house money effect (Thaler and Johnson 1990) and Gärling and Romanus (1997), consumer resellers incline consumer resellers incline to escalate their commitment and to be risk seeking in the domain of gains instead of losses, thereby increasing their perceived online resale value as well as desired profit. Again, the results of this study confirm Chu and Liao’s (2007) statement, manifest consumer resellers treat their resale-oriented merchandise as liquid assets rather than unrecoverable sunk cost, thus, sunk cost effect submerged in this study. These liquid assets turn into the house money in hand that encourage consumer resellers to take risk, increase their resale value as well as desired profit.

Companies that move beyond product attribute positioning to fostering affective-laden relationships with customers would seem wise, as customers today often want to feel part of the brand they purchase. In some cases, customers view themselves as co-creators of their beloved brand’s image. Such cult or tribe-like followings are a core reason why certain brands evolve prosperously; these brand tribal members share something emotively more than brand ownership and use. Although beguilingly to marketers, proven instruments measuring brand tribalism and studies investigating its explanatory power are limited. Leaning on Sahlin’s (1961) anthropological theory of segmented lineage, we offer a three-study approach to help fill this research fissure. In Study 1, we develop and evaluate the measurement properties of a new brand tribalism scale. In Study 2 and Study 3, we examine the applicability of brand tribalism on brand-response variables across two diverse technological contexts. The data confirm scale validity and explanatory power of brand tribalism.

In this paper we propose a conceptual framework consisting of four marketing relationship models – market, hierarchy, partnership, and community - that a company can enact to coordinate its interactions with customers. These models describe the proactive or reactive posture of the firm and its customers concerning their respective status and role in the value creation process. We develop conceptual arguments that identify the exchange characteristics that are best suited for each relationship model and hypotheses that link market and hierarchy models to transactional customer response and partnership and community models to relational customer response.

As the tourism marketplace is becoming more highly competitive, destination marketers are adopting branding techniques to craft an identity which focuses on the uniqueness of their products —their tourism destinations. Similar to those marketing consumer products, destination marketers have had to turn to branding to distinguish their “products” and to convey a positive message that will motivate the tourists (Roodurmun & Juwaheer 2010). Using a combination of destination image and destination personality as a strategy to differentiate their destination brands from other competing destinations has been necessary for destination marketers (Ekinci & Horsany 2006; Usakli & Baloglu 2011). In addition, the creation of brand saliency—the development of an emotional relationship with the consumer—can hold the key to destination differentiation (Morgan & Pritchard 2010). Successful destination branding involves establishing a mutual relationship between destinations and tourists by satisfying their emotional (i.e. relaxing, pretty) and basic needs (i.e. eating) (Ekinci 2003).

This paper explores the ethical ideologies and the renegotiations of traditional Confucian values (TCV) resonating with the younger generation of Mainland Chinese consumers. It examines the extent embedded Confucian ethics play a part in consumption and the prospect of ethical consumption and sustainability in China. The study finds that notions of individualism and rampant materialism have superseded the value of collectivism, righteousness and the long-term orientation of saving. The TCV of face (mianzi and lien) along with frugality still maintains to be of great significance. Implications of each value for ethical consumption are discussed. This study’s inclusion of Confucian ethics addresses some fundamental gaps and contributes to the ethics literature by encompassing crucial elements of Chinese philosophy needed to holistically further understand Chinese ethical reasoning, intention and consumption behavior.

This paper assesses the role of product knowledge on consumer response to product-harm crises. An experiment with three product categories – cars, notebooks, and sports drinks – was carried out. The study reveals that the company’s product evaluation, as well as company attitude and company trust depends on subjective product knowledge. Results indicate that in the case of notebooks and sports drinks experts react more positively towards a company and its products than novices do. Particularly, experts put more trust in a company facing a crisis. Moreover, they show a more favorable attitude towards the company and evaluate its products and the product confronted with the crisis higher than novices. Following these findings, assumption are made that this is based on the fact that experts have more information stored in their memories about the product category in general, and adding one piece of information – even if it is negative – makes little difference in how consumers react. The results did not confirm the hypothesis for the product category of cars; there are no significant differences between experts and novices.

In recent years a greater shift of market power towards consumers is observed and consumers are referred to as “the new counterbalancing force to capitalists” (Murphy & Bendell, 2001). In this context, individuals may take consumer decisions evaluating different dimensions of the augmented product offering, including its ethical features (Brinkmann & Peattie, 2008). This has led to the gradual consolidation of the ethical consumers that express ethical concerns about issues such as environmental degradation and sweatshops in Third World countries through their consumer decisions.

Consumers around the world are increasingly encountering with self-service technologies during their shopping experiences. Self-service technologies (SSTs) are “technological interfaces that enable customers to produce a service independent of direct service employee involvement” (Meuter et al., 2000, p.50). Drive-through retailers and service firms are commonly offering a variety of self-service technologies (SSTs) to enhance customer’s experience and they are mainly motivated by factors such as cost cutting, speed, convenience, enhance customer experience, and satisfaction. A range of service delivery points such as ATMs, automated hotel checkouts, Internet services (such as banking over the Internet) self-service kiosks (digital photo kiosks, information kiosks, interactive music and movie samplers, and electronic kiosks for gifts), grocery self-checkout lines and pay-at-pump gas stations are offered by the retailers to enhance their customer services.

The current context in which large retailers operate is characterized by a need for legitimacy, competitiveness, and differentiation. In this regard, earlier studies outline two independent phenomena: first an upsurge amidst retail players for the socially responsible argument (Aouina-Mejri and Bhatli 2011) and second, an increasingly important role given to the private labels (PL) by retailers in their strategies of differentiation (Steenkamp and Dekimpe 1997). Given the importance accorded to PL’s role and being socially responsible, retailers have augmented interest in understanding consumer responses towards these social efforts. Hoch and Banerji (2000) show empirically that the evolution of the market share of PL was related to their perceived quality. In this regard, other studies establish significant links between, (a) corporate social initiatives and positive emotional, cognitive and behavioral responses from consumers (Sen and Bhattacharya 2001), (b) social practices of companies and the perceived quality of their products (Maignan and Ferrell, 2001), (c) social practices of companies and purchase intentions vis-à-vis their products (Brown and Dacin, 1997), (d) perceived quality improvement and loyalty (Corstjens and Lai 2000; Steenkamp and Dekimpe, 1997), (e) forms of socially responsible consumption and personal values (De Pelsmacker et al. 2005). Furthermore, Cristau and Lacoeuilhe (2008) show the relationship between competitiveness of PL and making a smart purchase. To understand the consumer’s responses to the PL’s social quality, an experimentation was used, through mobilization of two independent groups, Nl, a control group and N2 an experimental group (where Nl = N2 = 400) using an online panel company. The sample for the experimentation was representative of the French population in terms of age, sex and socioeconomic status. The T test, comparison of means for independent groups were used to test the effect of disclosure of the social quality of PL on its perceived quality and on the loyalty of the PL and the retailer. The test relationship between dependent variables and the role of individual variables were determined with the structural equation model. The role of socio-demographic variables was tested through the use of ANOVA. During the exploratory and confirmatory studies, measures of loyalty to the PL and the retailer did not show discriminating validity and resulted in a composite variable that we call “overall loyalty”. The exploratory and confirmatory analysis of measurements of the dimensions of personal values from Schwartz’s inventory resulted in two dimensions of the values of social power and values of universalism. Our results seem to confirm the positive impact of the disclosure of a social commitment of firms on their relationships with their customers. Retailers, in particular, are rewarded with a positive intention of loyalty that occurs through improved perceived quality of their own brands. For the 400 individuals in the experimental group, competitiveness, a dimension of attitude towards the PL appears to be the most important explanatory factor in the perceived quality of the socially responsible PL, which in turn determines the consumer loyalty to the brand and the retailer. Universalism’s values seem to explain the perceived quality by the consumer of the PL with social quality. In addition, we found that women have the highest level of perceived quality and global loyalty of the socially responsible PL and that there exists a higher overall level of loyalty among 20–34 year olds than among other age groups.

Due to the rapid growth of e-commerce, many traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers are today employing multi-channel retailing strategies. A multichannel retailing strategy is becoming popular as it can enhance consumers’ shopping experience by offering consumers the options of searching for product information, buying products, and returning products either offline or online. However, a multichannel retailing strategy does not necessarily imply the integration of all steps in the shopping process. One interesting difference across multichannel retailers is how the return process is handled. Previous research has shown that some return policies may affect purchase intentions. There is no research to date that specifically investigates the effect of the nature of the multichannel return policy on online purchase intentions. However, since a generous return policy increases costs, it is important to investigate to what extent it may also increase revenues by increasing purchase rates. Such knowledge could help multichannel retailers to better design and manage their return policy. The objective of this paper is to propose a study of the influence of offering a multichannel return policy on online purchase intentions. Additionally, we propose the investigation of the roles of the three potential moderators: level of online purchasing experience (extensive vs. limited), product type (search vs. experience), and brand familiarity.

This paper embraces the theme of the 2012 Academy of Marketing Science Annual Conference: Marketing Dynamism & Sustainability: Things Change, Things Stay the Same, with a specific focus on the sustainability movement within the apparel and textiles (AT) industry. As part of this paper, sustainability as it pertains to the AT industry is addressed, including both social and environmental issues in the production, distribution, and consumption of apparel and textile goods. The paper also presents previous research findings examining consumers’ knowledge of and attitudes towards these issues, including an analysis of the relationships between knowledge, attitudes, and apparel-purchasing behavior. Finally, the paper notes barriers to sustainable apparel-purchasing behaviors and concludes with a discussion regarding areas for future research.

Fashion retailing has become more and more competitive as new retailers are constantly entering the bricks and mortar as well as the Internet marketplace. The more products become available, the greater the interest among apparel consumers (Bianchi and Birtwistle, 2010). This consumer interest is apparent, as according to Mintel (2010) women spend, on average, $597 annually on apparel, and eight out of ten women have made an apparel purchase within the last year. In recent years, however, some women have gravitated toward acquiring clothing through exchange rather than purchasing new. These clothing exchange venues, often referred to as “clothing swaps,” allow apparel consumers to swap their gently used clothes for stylish, new-to-them garments of others without having to spend money (The Hamilton Spectator, 2011). Currently, the clothing swap phenomenon has gained such popularity that it extends beyond the local in-person event and occurs on a regular basis on websites designed specifically for the purposes of clothing exchange. For instance, Swapstyle.com - now in its 9th year - claims to be the world’s largest and most popular free online fashion swap site and currently has 55,000 active members (Swapsryle.com, 2011).

As the global economic recession continues, the consumption of second-hand clothing has received considerable attention among consumers across the globe. This phenomenon has resulted in the proliferation of thrift stores, open-air weekend markets (or flea markets), garage sales, and rummage sale where consumers may acquire second-hand clothing products. This global growth trend has changed consumers’ interest in, and evaluation of, second-hand clothing and is particularly observed in many developing countries such as Thailand. Researchers have contended that the dialectical perspective of shopping (provisional and hedonic orientations) may help explain the growing consumer interest in second-hand clothing (Bardhi and Arnold 2005). Given the aforementioned trends, we are interested in understanding the reasons why consumers choose to visit a weekend market for second-hand clothing. This understanding is particularly relevant because it can help local small business entrepreneurs to attract and maintain their customers.

Fighting obesity has been an issue of growing importance in the US and elsewhere in recent decades. Most marketing research efforts addressing this problem have focused on consumers’ intrinsic motivations toward (or against) behavior change, applying different behavior change models. Relatively little has been explored on how external influences, e.g. perceived Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) of manufacturers and retailers, can both help consumers reach their dieting goals and avoid damage to corporate reputations.

Materialism, the importance that people attach to possessions that become central to their lives (Richins and Dawson 1992), has recently received renewed attention in the media and in the public discourse in the wake of the global economic crisis. Materialism is viewed as a system of personal values with possessions and acquisitions as the main personal goal that dictate one’s way of life (Richins and Dawson 1992). For materialists, possessions and their acquisition are

central

, providing meanings and structure to their lives, are essential to their satisfaction with life, well-being and

happiness

, define

success

, and project desired images of themselves. Materialism is perceived as the “dark side” of consumer behavior due to the motives related to its pursue as well as the behavioral and cognitive consequences that are an outgrowth of this quest. For example, research found materialism was positively related to a lack of happiness, depression, anxiety, negative emotions, and low self esteem (e.g., Chang and Arking 2002; Christopher and Schlenker 2004; Kasser 2002; Kasser and Ahuvia 2002; Saunders and Munro 2000; Solberg et al. 2004). In addition, materialism was found to be related to a number of consequences such as a lack of overall life satisfaction (e.g., Ahuvia and Wong 2002; Belk, 1985; Mick 1996; Richins and Dawson 1992), exploitation of natural resources (Banerjee and McKeage 1994; Saunders 2007), time spent shopping (Fitzmaurice and Comegys 2006). Previous studies mainly examined these relationships by viewing materialism as an overall construct. Using Richins and Dawson’s (1992) conceptualization of materialism, this study places happiness, centrality, and success—facets of materialism—as individual-level characteristics in the center of a model with several antecedents (i.e. depression, anxiety, self-esteem, and negative affect) and consequences (i.e., time spent shopping, environmentalism, innovativeness, and life satisfaction). This closer look into materialism facets, its antecedents and consequences provides a fine-grained model for understanding materialism. Thus, some domains are more associated with specific drivers and consequences, but not others.

This paper explains how the self-concept and a number of mediating traits impact luxury consumption. Even though Leibenstein (1950) described several “external effects” on utility, in marketing luxury consumption is still seen as a single, generic, behavior aiming at status gains (Han, Nunes and Drèze, 2010; Nelissen and Meijers, 2011). Research, however, points that external effects exist in luxury markets (Vigneron and Johnson, 1999; Tynan, McKechnie and Chhuon, 2010) and that one’s self-concept and personality could explain these behaviors (Wong and Ahuvia, 1998; Kastanakis and Balabanis, 2012). Hence, luxury consumption is very complex with many sub-variants and antecedents. While this has implications for managers and theory, there is little research (Kastanakis and Balabanis, 2012), on the factors leading into one or another of these behaviors. We propose a model where some traits act as mediators between the self (independent/interdependent) and three types of luxury consumption: snob, Veblenian and bandwagon. With the help of the literature and exploratory research (in-depth interviews with consumers and managers of luxuries), four traits appear to mediate this relationship: consumer need-for-uniqueness, vanity, status consumption, and consumer susceptibility to interpersonal influence.

Materialism as used in common language often is accompanied by negative connotations. Some people might view being materialistic as akin to being greedy or overtly possessive. It is a construct that has received considerable attention in various fields. It is an acknowledged fact that materialism has come to denote an individual’s need or desire for material objects (Richins and Dawson 1992). Richins and Dawson (1992) have even argued that at higher levels of materialism, an individual might be putting themselves at a certain level of risk. Belk (1984) suggests that for highly materialistic people, their possessions often determine extreme levels of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. There are numerous other examples in extant literature where materialism has been viewed in a negative light.

Service-dominant logic suggests that consumers are always co-creators of value, and that consumer value is determined not only at the point of purchase of a good or service, but also as the product is used or consumed. Further, consumers’ own operant resources, such as their skills or motivations can help augment this value in use.

The tightened competition in global markets demands that firms continuously develop new products and service innovations. In recent years crowdsourcing has increased in popularity as a method of gathering new ideas outside the organization for product and service development. This means that firms can apply the wisdom of the crowd for certain tasks and challenges instead of only relying on the know-how of their employees or a few experts. However, to make crowdsourcing work, there is a basic requirement to make external parties aware of the challenges or problems that need to be solved. Various digital marketing communications tools and social media platforms seems to provide new channels to enable this interaction. The purpose of this paper is to examine how industrial business-to-business (B2B) firms could interact with their products’ end-users via social media in order to receive new ideas, feedback and solutions to improve their innovation process. We propose a framework to assess how social media and crowdsourcing can be integrated in an industrial B2B context. The results of this paper reveal significant practical challenges to overcome before social media can be effectively utilized in the industrial B2B sector as a fully functioning crowdsourcing enabler.

In recent years, technology-based services (TBS) are on the rise. Such services often require an active engagement of the customer within service provision and consumption, which is referred to as customer co-creation. Although the topic of customer co-creation is very popular among researchers and practitioners, extant literature on customer co-creation is still in its infancy. Especially, no one has yet examined customer reactions to service failures within the context of co-created TBS. Thus, the purpose of our paper is to close this research gap by studying the dark side of customer co-creation for TBS. Specifically, we test the mutual influence of service failure and level of customer co-creation on customer satisfaction. Moreover, depending on the level of customer co-creation we examine the effectiveness of different types of service recovery strategies to restore customer satisfaction.

This paper describes the use of self-regulation to deter green-washing in the sustainable architecture context. While “sustainability” and “greenness” have emerged as powerful competitive forces in the architecture industry, no clear institutional standards allow legitimate firms to differentiate themselves from green-washing competitors. This creates a potential “tragedy of the commons” environment, where firms and other stakeholders have an interest in self-regulating the green marketing activities of peers to protect the industry’s shared reputation. Drawing on case study methodology we propose an analytic framework that describes the self-regulation of reputational incentives in the sustainable architecture context to deter green-washing based on four themes: (1) An organization’s ability to appear above commercial considerations, (2) An organization’s ability to frame their production methods as craft (3) An organization’s appropriate use of Corporate Visual Identity, and (4) The industry’s use of formal (e.g., awards and other recognition) and informal (e.g., peer acclaim and “street cred” [ibility]) classifications of in-/out-group membership. Theoretical, managerial, and societal implications and opportunities to generalize our framework are discussed.

In a typical purchase situation, consumers often have to evaluate different product alternatives which are incompletely described on the attributes they entail. When being confronted with only limited information on certain attributes, consumers are likely to infer beyond given properties to assess the value of these unobservable attributes (Kardes, Posavac, & Cronley, 2004). In an era of increasing public attention towards issues such as sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR), it is likely that these concepts are also mirrored in consumers’ inference formation. We want whether consumers draw inferences about a product’s sustainability based on other observable attributes.

Many firms market products that encourage environmentally friendly consumption. These firms can use of one two forms of advertising appeals to promote this consumption. They can highlight the benefits to the consumer (i.e., self-benefit appeals), such as providing cost savings, or they can highlight benefits to society (i.e., other-benefit appeals), such as lower emissions. Across three studies we find that the ability for each type of appeal to generate environmentally responsible consumption is influenced by the consumption setting. In settings where public accountability is high, other-benefit appeals are more successful, and in private consumption settings self-benefit appeals are more successful.

By integrating social identity theory with brand personality, the authors test a model of how perceptions of athlete human brands affect consumer’s level of cognitive identification. The authors contend that contrary to the trait schema of human personality, brand personality is a state rather than a trait. States are temporary, brief and caused by external circumstances, while traits are stable, long-lasting and internally caused. The findings suggest that consumers view athletes as human brands with unique personality states that influence consumer perceptions. Additional findings demonstrate that athlete prestige and distinctiveness leads to the evaluation of athlete identification.

In 2010 the combined value of all brands in BrandZ’s Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands increased by 40% compared to 2006, to $2.04 trillion. Moreover, the consideration of the brand name when making a purchase decision has increased by 20 percentage points in 2010 relative to 2005 (Joanna Seddon, CEO of Millward Brown Optimor). The main mechanism through which brands grow is product development, meaning line and category extensions. By line extension it is understood a new product launched in the same product category, under the same brand name, while brand extension is a totally new product in a different product category.

The paper investigates how product ratings affect the relationship between brand names and consumer perception which is measured by brand attitude, purchase intention, advertisement feeling, and advertisement attitude. The results show that the national brand elicits more positive consumer perception than does the foreign brand. The findings suggest that product attribute information moderates the relationship between brand names and consumer perception.

The Value concept evolves over time. Many faces are attributed to this important notion on the business context in general and in the specific Marketing strategy and thinking. For example, in the co-creation context, studied in a Marketing perspective by pioneer authors as Vargo and Lusch (2004) and Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004), the notion of value is central as an effect of adequate practices of co-creation (the premise of co-creation of value). The notion can be general, as a social value, or as mentioned by Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2003) related to a timely determined value in the lens of a customer experiencing a service. Value conceptualization changes and evolves over time as the entire business scenario.

This research Project titled: The proposal of an innovative tourist destination: The Case of the State of Colima, Mexico, presents, in general terms, a proposal for the designing and constructing of an integral tourist destination model for the state of Colima. It is expected that said model allow for the unification of the existing micro destinations of the state and thus giving the state a more integrated tourist image.

In order to keep a competitive advantage and to fullfill the needs of customers, service companies must offer favorable customer experiences and services. A service experience may be seen as a service process that creates customers’ cognitive, emotional and behavioral responses, resulting in a mental mark, a memory (Johnston and Clark, 2001). If the service experience is negative, the customers’ perceived justice influences complaint behaviors (Schoefer and Diamantopoulos, 2008), as well as their emotions and loyalty towards the firm (DeWitt et al., 2008).

This study seeks to explore specific principles in organizing for mutually beneficial services through value co-creation in ethnic markets. The study therefore considers how value co-creation is coordinated in service ecosystems in ethnic markets. Service ecosystems are the organization and combination of services in ways that have not been envisaged by their original providers such as more convenient access to adaptable end-to-end services within communities. We examine five Latino and Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in the Chicago land area and how they operate as a facilitator to value co-creation.

Creativity awards have been used by agencies, clients, and academics as exemplary creative work and if the campaign is a winner, everyone has a hand in the co-creation process. However, there is surprisingly little research as to what co-creation elements they actually represent and the agencies functions needed to make this happen. Key agency executives were selected to assess their own campaigns in terms of originality and strategy, and were also queried about whether those campaigns would win creativity, and effectiveness, awards. Findings show that the campaigns deemed worthy of wining creativity award recognition are usually highly original. Yet most valued award winning work is rarely regarded as being highly strategic. These results are then used to better understand how co-creation elements within agencies can be managed to achieve different creative outcomes.

Recent developments in supply chain and customer relationship management call for firms in the value chain to work closely together. Value co-creation with the upstream (i.e. suppliers) and downstream (i.e., customers) partners has become a critical strategy for many successful companies in their effort to integrate value chain management to the center stage of enterprise management (Flint & Mentzer, 2006). A value co-creation strategy draws on expertise, knowledge, and resources from the customers and suppliers alike to enhance the firm's knowledge development and innovation process. Strategic implications of value co-creation have been recognized (Fang, 2008; Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004), and significant theoretical advances have been made (Blazevic & Lievens, 2008; Payne, Storbacka, & Frow, 2008). However, systematic research that explores the antecedents, conditions, and performance outcomes of value co-creation is still lacking, and therefore, many fundamental questions remain unanswered.

The notion of value appropriation or value capture is a primary way benefits realization is described in buyer-supplier relationships. Using the concept of value as the operational term, this literature considers the realization of benefits as a tradeoff between the sacrifices and the paybacks rendered through buyer-supplier exchange. However, an assumption exists in this literature that value appropriation/ capture occurs

at the expense

of other activities such as value creation and is inequitably distributed between exchange partners (Mizik and Jacobson 2003; Wagner, Eggert and Lindemann 2010).

Many consumers communicate through social media channels. A positive product review may be as persuasive as a well-designed picture advertisement. Recent research suggests that advertisers should place more emphasis on pictures and visual components and less weight on verbal elements (McQuarrie & Phillips, 2008). On the other hand, consumers, especially younger consumers, are reading product reviews, blogs, and other social media resources to gain information useful for making product decisions. Communications structured as narratives can be more persuasive than analytical presentations of product features (Escalas, 2007). Most consumers live in a world of narratives in which they encounter stories—and write their own stories—through there consumption patterns (Pace, 2008). Students researched their own online communications in a YouTube video, “A Vision of a Student Today” (2007). They determined that in a single year the average college student wrote over 500 pages of emails through social media. What this student-conducted research reveals is the value of online resources. Refusing to utilize this information can place a company behind the curve by neglecting the next generation of consumers. The present study may assist managers as they attempt to create social media strategies.

A growing body of research considers the higher education experience heavily connected with developing product satisfaction and brand loyalty (McCollough & Gremler, 1999; Vander Schee, 2010; Voon, 2007). This is particularly the case with MBA students and website design who use the Internet interface to connect with the program (Heslop & Nadeau, 2010; Johnson, Thomas & Peck, 2010). The e-service component can either meet student needs (Oyvind, 2008) or lose the opportunity to further engage. This study adds to the body of knowledge by providing website design guidelines for a collegiate website presence.

It can be readily observed that not only the usage of the Internet by consumers, but also the usage of Internet advertising by marketers and advertisers are rapidly increasing, especially with the advancements and changes in the technology, more specifically communication technologies, in contemporary society. On the one hand, this widespread usage of the Internet by consumers can be considered to be a vital indicator of their growing Internet literacy, which refers to the essential skills, knowledge, and competence consumers ought to have in order to be able to use the Internet efficiently and effectively (Hoffman and Novak 1996). On the other hand, since the amount of time consumers are spending on the Internet and the amount of resources marketers and advertisers are spending on Internet advertising are rapidly increasing, consumers are increasingly exposed to Internet advertisements in their daily life, and thus form their attitudes towards Internet advertising accordingly. Therefore, it is crucial for scholars to examine these attitudes consumers form towards Internet advertising. Furthermore, it is crucial to examine Internet advertising separate from advertising in general because the Internet has distinctive characteristics compared to traditional advertising vehicles such as TV, radio, and print (An and Kim 2007).

Travel and tourism is one of the largest industries in the world with 260 million jobs worldwide. Technologies, especially the Internet, have transformed consumer behavior and hotel strategic business practices dramatically in the past few years. Nevertheless, limited academic research has been conducted on these topics. This work focuses on hotel social media strategy & brand reputation on the Internet.

Many environmental problems caused by transportation are particularly related to the use of internal combustion engines (ICEs) (Høyer, 2008; Meyer & Winebrake, 2009). Alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs) hold the potential to solve a number of these environmental challenges (Van Bree et al., 2010). However, adoption of AFVs by the general public is still in its infancy (Yeh, 2007; Mills, 2008). From both, the consumer as well as the organizational and environmental standpoint, it becomes increasingly important to analyze and better understand the factors that influence the adoption of AFVs (Jansson et al., 2011; Lane & Potter, 2007). The aim of this research is to investigate adoption factors that positively trigger consumers’ intention to adopt alternative fuel vehicles. Previous studies only included a narrow assortment of adoption factors. Furthermore, there has been a lack of values, behavior-related variables and attitudes facilitating consumer adoption of AFVs (Jansson, 2011; Wang et al., 2008). Thus, this study provides typology of essential innovation characteristics of AFVs and supplements them by consumer factors (values, behavior-related variables) to determine the relative influence of all adoption factors on the adoption for AFVs.

To meet AACSB’s commitment to the concept of diversity in people and ideas, business educators must integrate diversity-focused exercises and discussion into their curriculum. While some do, many educators may assume that topics of this nature are discussed elsewhere, such as in multicultural management or business ethics courses. Moreover, the activities provided in textbooks and teaching materials tend to focus on topics like understanding how culture influences consumer and team behaviors and the value of diversity in the workplace, while ignoring services marketing issues such as employee-to customer discrimination. The goal of this paper is to address these shortcomings in services marketing textbooks and classroom discussions by providing services as well as retailing educators with a cultural diversity exercise that they can employ in undergraduate, graduate, and executive MBA courses. This paper offers educators an easy-to-implement, active learning exercise that shows students how many consumers fail to obtain quality service in the marketplace. Through this exercise, students develop an appreciation for diversity and understand how to manage a service setting so that all customers receive optimal service quality.

When it comes to business, numerous types of relationships exist between the organization and its constituents. These relationships are fundamental building blocks in the corporate environment in order to ensure success of the organization. However, the same cannot necessarily be said about the approaches universities employ when dealing with the treatment of students. Can we compare the post-secondary education experience with that of a business, equating the duties of the administration, faculty, and staff with those of positions in the corporate world? In other words, can a business model be applied to higher education to understand and enhance the relationship among university personnel and the student body?

The fuzzy front end of innovation presents one of the biggest opportunities for improving the overall innovation process and thus success in the marketplace. However, in the teaching of graduate students, universities have only recently begun to pay attention to this significant and uncertain phase. This paper attempts to develop and test course structures to suit the complex nature of the fuzzy front end and to shed light on student learning experiences in a cross-functional concept development course in an international context. The paper adopts an experiential learning perspective and relies on real-life experiences, students’ trial and error processes, conceptualization, and reflecting on learning experiences. The results reveal student learning with respect to (a) understanding the process of innovation in the fuzzy front end, (b) cross-functional and cross-cultural teamwork, (c) project management, and (d) presentation skills. These skills help students build and experience a professional identity. Finally, the paper presents and discusses suggestions for developing graduate teaching in the fuzzy front end.

Over the last ten years, competition in the global higher education market has intensified. Universities and business schools operate in an environment of international competition for the best students and employees. Furthermore, because of technological developments such as social media and increasing mobility in the context of higher education, the sense of empowerment among students is rising. Therefore, universities have to identify factors that lead to attractiveness and competitive advantages. Students can be considered empowered consumers who are the main target group of the university as a service provider. The present study is based on a managerial point of view and assumes that management of higher education must be seen from a customer-oriented perspective. The applied theoretical concepts are derived from the research fields of market-based and strategic management.

What specifically should students know and be able to do after completing a degree in marketing? It seems to be a simple question, but there is not simple answer. This research asked academicians and practitioners this very question and to compare how each value specific marketing concepts and skills. Responses revealed several topics of agreement, but also several areas of disagreement regarding the importance of a specific concept or skill.

Item analysis

refers to the evaluation of items, i.e., questions, comprising tests. Its purpose is, “…toward the determination of the best possible items for inclusion in a test.” (Rogers 1995, p. 388) The most basic construct is item difficulty. “The classical approach [to item analysis]…begins by computing difficulty…” (Millman and Greene 1989, p. 358) There exist a handful of straightforward measures of item difficulty, each having a different conceptual underpinning. The purpose of the present research is to estimate the extent to which three measures of item difficulty are intercorrelated.

Banks of multiple-choice questions, and the taxonomies into which the questions are classified, e.g., by difficulty and question type such as application, accompany virtually all marketing textbooks. Only a few independent assessments of the questions and taxonomies have been published. (Dickinson 2005 and 2011; Dickinson, Faria, and Whiteley 1991 ). The present study examines the question bank accompanying a widely adopted retailing management text (Levy and Weitz [LW] 2009). Assessment of this particular test item bank, of course, should be of interest to adopters of the text. Also, though, the assessment may provide encouragement of and a pro forma for similar assessments of other question banks and a contribution toward establishing norms for such banks.

Although, extant studies have explored consumer-character relationship within a programme (Karrh, 1998, Scott and Craig Lees, 2003 and Russell and Stern, 2006), no study has explored the effect of celebrity status of an actor portraying a character in any given placement sequence. This paper seeks to extend current understanding of brand placements by attempting, for the first time, to establish a link between popularity of a celebrity and memory effects. It also examines the mediating role of character likability and multiple shots as mise-en-scene strategies and their influence on brand recognition.

An artist’s personality is said to be a key differentiator in the market. The literary market is a saturate one and an artist’s ability to distinguish himself can be the determining factor between success and failure. The following essay explores whether bestselling authors communicate Aaker’s brand personality in the online environment. We argue that content analysis facilitated by a computer is relatively reliable and less tedious than that performed by human coders. We analyse the content of websites on the presumption that this reflects what the author wants to say about him/herself. The study offers a new technique for content analysts and marketing communicators to quantify various aspects of marketing communications and goes a little further towards the evaluation and mapping of websites using correspondence analysis.

From 1993 to 2007, Oprah Winfrey ranked in the top three among Americans’ favorite TV personalities (Harris Interactive 2010), and occupied the number one spot 10 of those years. That changed in 2008 when she fell to number four. While that may not seem like a fall from grace, one must ask what happened that could account for, what was for her, an unprecedented decline in popularity. In May 2007, Winfrey announced she was supporting Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency – the first time she endorsed a political candidate. Could that have been the cause for her drop in support?

Scholars report low stability of brand-attribute associations in free choice affirmative binary rating tasks (“yes”-option, ticked or not, indicating whether a brand has a specific attribute or not). A multi-brand meta-analysis by Rungie, Laurent, Rily, Morrison and Roy (2005) reports stability levels of 49% over a period of three months; another by Dolnicar and Rossiter (2008) an average of 53% for 20 brands with a one-week interval between two measurements. Dolnicar and Rossiter (2008) provide a set of recommendations to attain higher levels of stability, for example shorter questionnaires, or sampling only category users and brand aware respondents.

An eco-friendly brand image positions a brand as being environmentally friendly or sustainable with its products/services. According to Chen (2010), the eco-friendly brand image is defined as “a set of perceptions of a brand in a consumer’s mind that is linked to environmental commitments and environmental concerns”. His study focused on eco-friendly image and eco-friendly equity and found that that eco-friendly brand image lead to eco-friendly brand equity. In the quest for greater brand equity, however, it has become popular for companies to emphasize eco-friendliness because it is trendy, regardless of a firm’s motivation or actual efforts. However, what if consumers suspect a firm has ulterior motives or that its efforts are minor? And even more broadly, how does perceived eco-friendliness relate to general brand image and intentions to purchase a brand?

This research examines the conceptualization of industrial brand personality. Until now, brand personality has been captured and investigated exclusively in consumer markets and research so far has neglected the specific characteristics of industrial markets with respect to aspects dominating exchanges in these markets which largely differ from consumer markets.

Research in the marketing-finance interface increasingly recognizes that firms’ marketing actions in the product market can have spillover effects on the behavior of financial market participants (Srinivasan and Hanssens 2009). For example, companies’ product market advertising has been shown to influence the behavior of investors in the stock market. However, while these and related studies focus on the spillover effects of marketing actions on investor behavior, less is known about the reverse effects that we examine: Does investor behavior also affect companies’ marketing actions, such as advertising?

Case studies are empirical investigations where the area of study is circumscribed to a small number of units, enabling the researcher to look in depth at a topic of interest or phenomenon. Case study research generates knowledge that is context dependent with a rich and nuanced view of reality (Flyvebjerg, 2006). Adherents (for example, Eisenhardt, 1989; Yin, 2009) extol its value in answering questions that start with “how”, “who” and “why". Concerns about the quality of case study research nonetheless are well entrenched and the purpose of this paper is twofold, firstly to evaluate existing approaches for the quality of case study research, and, secondly to propose a framework to strengthen arguments for quality and hence contribution. The structure of this paper is as follows: first, an overview of case study research, then a discussion of positivist and interpretivist approaches to quality in case study research, concluding with a proposed framework for convincingness as a means of demonstrating overall quality in case study research.

When marketers wish to communicate a change in a quantifiable product attribute, such as price, weight, or volume, they often do so by providing the original quantity along with the amount of the change. The original quantity can be referred to as a primary, or base, value, and the change amount can be referred to as a secondary value. Secondary values are typically indicated in one of two formats: (1) as a percentage of the primary value (e.g., 20 oz. plus 10% extra) or (2) as an absolute value (e.g., 20 oz. plus 2 oz. extra). Interestingly, even when the two formats convey equivalent quantities, research suggests that consumers may not perceive them as such (e.g., Chen, Monroe, and Lou 1998; DelVecchio, Krishnan, and Smith 2007; Heath, Chatterjee, and France 1995; Kim and Kramer 2006a).

This article examines the effect of Internet on the relative thinking phenomenon — the tendency of consumers to consider relative savings and not just absolute savings in their decisions to search for a deal or purchase an item. Previous experimental evidence suggests that consumers are influenced by relative thinking (Saini, Rao and Monga 2010, Saini and Thota 2010, Azar 2007, Azar 2007). However, this paper establishes that the Internet results in a breakdown of the phenomenon and suggests that individuals are not completely insensitive to spending time in order to achieve a superior search payoff that results in finding a lower price.

Dynamic pricing has been utilized in a variety of contexts to frequently change prices with changes in demand or supply conditions, or to stimulate short-term demand. Its use historically has been limited due to the menu costs of changing price. However, advances in data-driven price modeling and Internet pricing capabilities have dramatically reduced these barriers and expanded the accessibility of dynamic pricing to marketers. While dynamic pricing offers the potential to increase firm profitability, it also increases buyer uncertainty about what they should be willing to pay, and when they should purchase. Research has found that consumers are often confused by dynamic pricing strategies (e.g., Cary 2004, Wirtz and Kimes 2007), perceive dynamic pricing to be unfair (Haws and Bearden 2006, Huang, Chang and Chen 2005, Kimes 2002), and generally do not understand these pricing approaches (Cary 2004). Previous consumer research has focused on the impact of dynamic pricing on various perceptual dimensions, such as price fairness, purchase satisfaction (Haws and Bearden 2006), price unfairness, perceived trust and (re)purchase intentions (Lee and Monroe 2008).

In the sport consumption context, cognitive factors such as personal beliefs and feelings for a particular team have been shown to influence fan behavior. Further, fans often engage in team-related discussion and behaviors rooted in cognitive and emotive perceptions; yet, research examining such factors jointly as determinants of sport consumption is limited. Using undergraduate business student samples from the southwest U.S., this research develops, tests, and shows support for two dual-process models for revered (Studyl) and reviled (Study 2) NFL teams.

Negative WOM (nWOM) as an evaluative response to dissatisfactory consumption experiences is deemed of greater referral value when it communicates negative disconfirmation of consumption-related expectations. Nonetheless, the nWOM is frequently a demolition force to brands and companies, causing less desirable brand evaluations and purchase intentions. It is essential to understand how negative WOM is capable of producing contagious influences among consumers. As with the development of the Internet, sites of online forums and product review platforms proliferate and intensify the spreading of eWOM. Concerning diffusion speed and reach, the contagious influence of nWOM via Internet cannot be overlook for its devastating power on brands and marketers. Thusly, the present study focuses on nWOM recipients’ viewpoints at the communicators and investigates how the recipients’ perceptions of the communicators’ motivation, ability and opportunity in message encoding will affect nWOM communication effect in the web-mediated context. The presentation of service consumption experience in online WOM is of a greater concern to the study considering service’s intangibility and adaptability properties which might demand more concrete information for WOM reception and evaluations. Using three experiments, the study applies the MAO theory (motivation, ability and opportunity), posits and tests if WOM communicators’ vivid presentation of personal dissatisfactory experience will provide a better information processing opportunity to receivers. In addition, nWOM communicators’ perceived benevolence (motivation) and expertise (ability) in articulating personal experience are examined to see if these two factors further enhance the contagious influence of a vivid experiential presentation (opportunity) of online nWOM.

The experiential/material distinction, which is based on the variance of people’s intentions when making a purchase, suggests that when people have the main intention of getting a life experience they make experiential purchases; on the other hand when their main purpose is to get a physical possession they make material purchases (Van Boven & Gilovic, 2003; Van Boven, 2005). The objective of this study is to determine whether sources of information consulted and the extent of information search made differ between experiential and material purchases. For this purpose two experiments were conducted. In the first experiment participants were presented with three hypothetical scenarios of either a material purchase, experiential purchase or a mixed purchase. Andreasen’s (1968) classification of information sources, representing five different categories of information sources as personal independent, personal advocate, impersonal independent, impersonal advocate and direct observation, was employed to evaluate participants’ choice of information source. In the second experiment participants were asked to recall either an experiential or a material purchase that they made and asked about their reliance on different source types and the extent of total search made for this purchase.

The paper discusses the low stability issue of free choice brand-attribute associations where the same sample of respondents during a second interview do not repeat the positive answers they gave during the first interview. The authors recommend a novel two-step approach, using Unrestricted Attribute-Elicitation procedure Mapping (UAM) in conjunction with Longitudinal Generalized Procrustes Analysis (GPA) to resolve the low stability problem. The paper offers a general discussion of the subject along with specific propositions.

How do brands develop personalities? This research is an attempt to extend the concept put forth by Aaker (1997) i.e. the development of a brand personality scale. Brand Personality is defined as “the set of human characteristics associated with a brand” (Aaker 1997).The concept of Brand Personality is predicated on the assumption that certain human personality traits are assigned in general by consumers to brands. This research thus intends to investigate how new brands can develop these human-like personality traits.

In light of modern media culture, sports stars are more than just athletes but they are “a social sign, carrying cultural meanings and ideological values, which express the intimacies of individual personality, inviting desire and identification; an emblem of national celebrity, founded on the body, fashion and personal style” (Gledhill, 1991, p. xiii). The concept of “athlete brand” has emerged from their multi-functional and multi-platform nature. In marketing research, those athletes are considered not only as a vehicle for advertisement or product endorsement, but also as cultural products that can be sold as “brands” (Gilchrist, 2005). In fact, many athletes start managing their individual brands with various sport agencies. In this highly competitive agent industry, building and managing brands for athletes are becoming an essential task (IBIS World Industry reports, 2008). Despite the increasing importance in the practical field, the research about branding strategy for athletes is limited. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the link between athlete brand image and sport consumers' brand loyalty toward the athletes and clarify the specific consumers’ loyalty creation mechanism toward athlete brand.

There is a sense of urgency for environmental action growing among consumers and most governments around the world, and companies are under increasing pressure to operate in a sustainable manner. There is also a growing conviction that environmental sustainability challenges require actions that will directly impact business strategies and supply chain practices. Systematic surveys and frameworks for environmentally sustainable supply chain management (ESSCM) which can be transformed into business practices continue to be excogitated. Such an evolution necessitates an understanding of the developments to recognize auspicious directions. Based on a comparative analysis of relevant literature, this paper proposes an evolutionary framework for ESSCM. It is intended to provide a framework for research and dialogue among industry managers and academicians to address environmental sustainability in supply chain management for long-term success, and provide a roadmap for organizations seeking to improve their sustainability practices.

Logistics is a fundamental part of building a sustainable company contributing to the efficient use of resources within the firm and throughout the supply chain. Sustainability has received much attention in the literature and its impact is clearly seen around the globe. The continued expansion of economic development requires a much more efficient use of the planet’s limited natural resources. To better manage scarce resources, managers have embraced the triple bottom line.

The ability to co-create value in high technology, capital-intensive, markets requires close cooperation and goal congruence between allied firms. The aerospace industry is such a market, so it provides an appropriate context to explore supply chain relationships and how they contribute (or otherwise) to sustainable value co-creation. Whilst the concept of value co-creation has received research attention in the last decade (see Vargo and Lusch, 2008), there is little research on the co-destruction of value and the contexts and mechanisms that lead to it. This research explores a fraught inter-organizational relationship between an aircraft manufacturer and one of its key suppliers. The two organizations are highly interdependent, possess advanced technical capabilities, and have signed a risk sharing partnership. Top management across the two companies regard the relationship as vital for the success of both businesses. Despite these integrative factors, the relationship is described by managers in the dyad as “short-term-istic”, “transactional”, a “struggle”, and “deteriorating”. In order to highlight the behaviors that lead to the co-destruction of value, we research the expectations and perceptions of key individuals in the relationship using semi-structured interviews within the case dyad. We found that, in spite of the existence of formal mechanisms to govern the relationship, key individuals engaged in processes of self-legitimization, biased interpretation of the contract, and justification of positions that severely contaminated the relationship. Our study suggests that this leads to what we label ‘relational strabismus’, incongruence between stated goals and demonstrated practices, whereby partners are focused on protecting immediate interests as opposed to on building a longer-term relationship. This led to value co-destruction, potentially compromising the long-term sustainability of the partnership.

Using a convenience sample (n=309) consisting of members of the social couponing website “A Full Cup” (

www.afullcup.com

), the purpose of this study is to report the opinions of coupon users on the concept of extreme couponing. While some have been intrigued and increasingly attracted to couponing by the buzz created by the TLC show “Extreme Couponing,” it has become clear that many longtime coupon users are less than enthusiastic about the concept.

This paper compares the effects of anti-tobacco ad parodies and visual cigarette package warnings on emotional and cognitive responses of young adults. The findings indicate that graphic-only ad parodies can compete with warnings in their attempt to damage consumers’ attitude toward tobacco brands through the health beliefs they lead consumers to associate to the brand. On the contrary, text-only ad parodies prove counterproductive and lead to a boomerang effect characterized by an increase in consumers’ tobacco brand attitude.

It is widely accepted that customer relationships are important to the profitability of a company. Especially, customer relationship development drivers such as customer loyalty, word of mouth, share of wallet and duration of the relationship are critical factors in increasing profitability and creating long-term relationships between the organization and the customer (e.g. Garbarino & Johnson, 1999). In the service based context, those variables act as the crucial glue in developing relationships, because of the service intangibility and complexity (Day, 1999). It has been recognised that the nature of customer relationship variables are polymorphous and is influenced by the nature of services. However, the moderating effect of the type of service on customer relationships has not been clearly addressed by academic research. This paper is going to examine the link between customers’ attitudes and behaviours based on the moderating effect of hedonic and utilitarian services. It has been argued that the hedonic-utilitarian dichotomy is one the most important dichotomies in services marketing (e.g. Jones, Reynolds & Arnold, 2006). Propositions from the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) are used as a theoretical platform to examine intentions to repurchase from the same service provider. The paper tries to address some of the criticisms of the TPB and to extend it in the context of services marketing and customer relationships. As the service contexts are heterogeneous in different ways the paper examines how variations of services on the hedonic and utilitarian dimension alter some of the theoretical propositions.

Sellers are interested in selling their products for the profit maximizing price. Often, this price is set based on an examination of the cost function of the product (Nagle, 2011), or it is based on market research querying customers price sensitivities for the offered product (E.g., Rao, 1984). Researchers trying to estimate profit maximizing sales prices have also focussed on setting prices in competitive markets using a game theoretic approach (See, e.g., Jiang et al., 2011).

Of three main orientations to pricing in industrial markets - cost-based, competition-based and customer value-based - most marketing and pricing scholars consider the latter superior - but few firms use it. The literature is silent about how organizational and behavioral characteristics of industrial firms may affect pricing orientation and, more specifically, how managers integrate cost, competitive and value information in their decision-making process. Semi-structured interviews with 44 managers of small to medium size U.S. industrial firms yielded insights into firm pricing orientations, processes and decision making patterns. We identified the organizational characteristics influencing the pricing decision making process: the existence and locus of a pricing function in the organization; firm’s ability to diffuse organizational capabilities, and center-led pricing process specialization. Our data demonstrates that pricing orientation in firms strongly influence the decision-making process. The adoption and internalization of a modem pricing orientation such as value-based pricing requires a long, tenuous and deep transformation process supported by experiential and transformative learning.

We address the following paradox: most scholars consider value based pricing as superior to cost and competition based approaches in industrial markets -yet, few firms use it. Semi-structured interviews with 44 managers of small to medium size U.S. industrial firms revealed key characteristics that are common to the firms who successfully implement value-based pricing: the ability to face deep transformational change, the role of champions as transformational leaders, the creation and diffusion of organizational mindfulness, the building of organizational confidence to fuel the transformation, and the design of center-led and specialized teams of experts supporting the firm’s pricing process. Our data demonstrates that value-based pricing is not simply adopted but internalized through a long and purposeful process supported by a mindful, experiential and transformative learning environment.

In doing primary data collection, social marketers must ask people questions about topics such as smoking, sickness, sex, and charity- topics that touch people’s deepest fears, anxieties, and values. While people are generally willing to be interviewed about these topics, they are more likely to give inaccurate, self-serving, or socially desirable answers to such questions than to questions about cake mixes, soft drinks, or cereals. (Bloom and Novelli 1981, p.80)

Today’s consumer markets are characterized by an increasing market saturation and product homogenization, two factors that have led to fierce competition among companies. As a consequence, consumers are exposed to promotional clutter. This, in turn, decreases the probability that they become aware of a firm’s communication activities. The corporate website on Facebook, the so called “Facebook page” or “Fanpage”, has recently emerged as a novel communication instrument that offers companies the opportunity to break through promotional clutter by relying on the principle of communication pull. However, research and practice both lack evidence about the effective implementation and marketing potential of Facebook pages.

While the application of single items (SI) for construct measurement was generally accepted in the 1960s and 1970s, seminal works by Churchill (1979), Peter (1979), and Jacoby (1978) marked the start of a rethinking process by pointing out their deficits in terms of validity and reliability and by offering comprehensive guidelines for developing and validating multi-item (MI) measures of theoretical constructs. Afterwards, the use of MI scales has become an implicite condition for succefully publishing in academic literature. In the last decade, however, an increasing number of articles has appeared that revive the question whether theoretical constructs can be adequately captured with SI measures. Considering the practical advantages of Sis — such as brevity, ease of use, and lower survey costs — they are still an appealing alternative to long MI scales. However, if researchers — after carefully weighing up pros and cons — decide to opt for SI measurement, one fundamental question remains: what should this item be? Unfortunately, extant literature is not very informative on this issue.

Our research finds evidence that matching the construal level of advertising copy to that of the focal product can improve product attitudes by facilitating processing fluency, a finding that has significant implications for attitude and advertising research. Construal level theory (CLT) research has shown that desirability is more abstract than feasibility, idealistic values (respect, honesty, etc.) are more abstract than pragmatic and functional concerns (uses, extrinsic benefits) and hedonic products (music, chocolate) are also more abstract than utilitarian products (glue stick, ball point pen). CLT has also discovered that psychological distance can be affected by temporal, geographical and social distance in such a way that objects that are farther away on these dimensions are construed more abstractly.

Industry sources have suggested that gay male and lesbian consumers are extremely loyal to companies that incorporate them in their internal corporate policies and develop gay-oriented marketing practices. However, academic research provides little guidance about factors that may influence the importance that gay consumers’ place on different types of gay-oriented corporate activities with evaluating the "gay-friendliness" of a company. This research explores the influence of gay identity and gender on gay consumers’ perceptions of the gay-friendliness of gay-oriented corporate activities, both internal and external to the firm.

While professional services providers such as lawyers, accountants, advertising agencies, and financial planners depend heavily on personal selling and relationship building (Koku, 2009), advertising has an important role in signally the promise of delivering service quality and communicating the corporate brand identity (Balmer, 2001). Advertising also cultivates commitment and trust by aligning promises and expectations (Moorman et al, 1993), which can enhance firm relationships.

The present contribution aims to test the links between ethical behavior, ethical climate and job performance using a multidimensional scale with four latent variables (peer behavior, ethical procedures, role of salary, and sales practices). A quantitative study carried out on 157 salespeople in April 2011 shows the influence of ethical climate and of salespeople’s ethical behavior on their job performance. Several proposals for management can be put forward: first, this study clearly confirms the multidimensionality of ethical climate and need for the researchers to use this scale rather than a one-dimensional scale that very often only measures ethical codes; second, if companies wish to create a strong ethical climate, they need to take account of the four dimensions identified in this research; finally, the link between job performance, ethical climate and ethical behavior should encourage companies to make sure that their salespeople develop ethical behavior toward customers.

As a result of a greater focus in sales management practice on customer loyalty than on making the sale and even on customer satisfaction, sales research has turned its focus to questions of what strengthens salesperson-customer relationships (Fenwick, Porter and Crosby 2001; Weitz and Bradford 1999). Considering doctors as salespeople and patients as their customers, in this research we ask if stronger relationships motivate the customer (the patient) to take better self-care. In addition to diagnosing illnesses and prescribing medication, doctors need to be agents of lifestyle change. A significant proportion of their patients have lifestyle illnesses, such as hypertension and diabetes, and need to improve their diet and exercise to get well. Doctors regularly prescribe diet and exercise changes but tend to achieve only a 40–50% compliance rate (Toussi, Fujioka and Coleman 2009), although failure to comply is often costly—in terms of wellbeing—to the patient. Failure to comply is also costly in terms of health care costs, as it leads to more visits to the doctor’s office and more diagnostic testing. Improving doctors’ ability to persuade their patients to take better self-care is of considerable importance.

Salesmen have a set of sales influence tactics (SITs) at their disposal when approaching customers in a face-to-face setting. This paper argues that in order to transform e-commerce into e-selling, SITs need be able to be adapted to individual customers rather than the average customer. Next, via a field experiment, we show that the revenue of an e-commerce platform can be increased by dynamically adapting SITs to individual customer responses. We explain how sales professionals can modify their e-commerce platforms to implement the same personalization they use in face-to-face selling.

Consumers are often presented with instances of unwarranted tip requests throughout their shopping experiences. Examples of these events include having a “tip line” on a take-out receipt when no service was received or a tip jar at a register in a convenience store location. These unwarranted tip requests present consumers with an unpleasant service experience causing a rise in self-conscious emotions which result in a change in attitude and repatronage intentions. Using a sample of 282 students from a Southeastern University, the authors conduct a 2x2 (tip request: request or no request; decision: tip or not tip) between subjects experimental design. This design examines the effects of tip requests and tipping on emotions, attitudes and repatronage intentions, and then provides evidence of a process model explaining the aforementioned effects.

The US retail industry loses billions of dollars a year because of product returns, but scholarly articles examining consumers’ return intentions have been somewhat limited. This study explores how cognitive dissonance after purchase affects product return intentions. Using cognitive dissonance theory, it examines return intentions in the context of both lenient and strict return policies. The study proposes that cognitive dissonance after purchase positively influences return intentions in lenient return policy situations, but the relationship weakens in strict policy return situations. The implications and future research are also discussed.

SMEs are not small-scaled versions of large organizations. Although both kinds of firms may share the final objective of building a strong brand over time, their inherent characteristics are unique, and because of this, the processes they need to follow to reach this final objective are different. Considering the limited theoretical framework existing for SME brand management, and that mainstream branding theories are based on large corporations, the proposed model attempts to contribute to narrowing this gap.

The traditional method to identify/select the proper number of segments (clusters) has been to (i) cluster analyze the core data (e.g. AIOs, satisfaction statements), (ii) use one (or more) of several suggested criteria to select the most homogenous cluster solution, and finally (iii) profile the selected number of clusters by cross tabbing them with demographic data. This final step enables the researcher to design specific/directed media messages for each segment from the “best” number of clusters. Our approach is somewhat in the reverse of this process (at least in determining the “best” number of segments). We first do the clustering with the core data (as in (i) above) and then use a matrix matching criterion, the Adjusted Rand Index, to select the most appropriate number of segments by comparing how each cluster solution set is defined by the demographic variables. The cluster solution set that has the best match, i.e. highest average Adjusted Rand Index, with the demographics is selected. By selecting the “best” number of clusters in a reverse matching of the demographics, we yield a more unique profile for each segment. This process, does not use a traditional clustering criterion to select the number of clusters, but instead uses the Adjusted Rand Index to maximize the uniqueness of the profiles. To test the efficacy of this process, we designed a simulation study using core data with varying amounts of cluster and demographic structure. We then compared the results of number of clusters selected using the proposed process to that of the original cluster structures. Results indicate that the average Adjusted Rand Index value reached its highest levels when the “correct” numbers of clusters are selected. Implications for research are discussed.

This study seeks to test a research framework designed to explain the direct effects of brand love, image and personality upon word of mouth in different two contexts. Using data collected from two different countries (United Kingdom and Switzerland), the survey instrument was tested for reliability and validity using confirmatory factor analysis. Hypotheses are then developed related to the consumer-brand relationship across the two countries which are then tested using structural equation modeling. The findings showed that, there is a significant relationship between excitement and brand image, brand love and word of mouth. This is particularly true in both samples. The impact of brand image on word of mouth was not found significant in the two countries in the study. The primary limitation of the study is that the two sampled countries were European. The study explains the relationships among different branding constructs to maximize word of mouth in a wide range of market environments. Although aspects of consumer-brand relationships heavily studied in the US market, much less research exists across markets and in non-US context. This paper redresses this imbalance.

Given that brands are important for consumers’ recognition of country of origin (COO), recent investigations have focused on the influence of county of brand (COB) on consumers’ purchase decisions (Martin Martin and Cerviño 2011). Based on information diagnosticity theory, we propose that the effect of COB on product evaluations depends on the market characteristics of a given product category.

We argue that conflicting results of global branding studies with regard to the impact of globalness of brands may be due to a crucial distinction that has been left out in these studies: the distinction between domestic global and foreign global brands. By using consumer data from thirty different countries and cross-classified random effects modeling, we empirically test the effect of and the interplay between perceived brand globalness and domestic brand origin on brand attitude across countries with varying economic development levels. Our results show that both perceived brand globalness and domestic brand origin are significant determinants of positive brand attitude, and these effects are stronger in less economically developed countries. We also find that the effect of a domestic brand’s being perceived as global has a greater positive effect on brand attitude for consumers from less economically developed countries than those from more-economically developed countries.

Marketing literature has neglected cross-border acquisitions in a developing country by a developed country brand. However, research in this field appears necessary, when considering both the sensitiveness of developing country consumers to foreign brands and the common practice of western/global companies to enrich their brand portfolio through local acquisitions. The following paper deals with possible chances and challenges for such international brand portfolio transactions from a consumer perspective. By drawing on signaling theory, the resource based view and the theory of consumer reactance, we develop a simple hierarchical SEM model which is tested in China with 36 consumer goods brands. The study questions such an international takeover, since our findings point to a decrease in consumer loyalty and stagnant willingness to pay, despite rising quality expectations from consumers.

The adoption of social media marketing by organizations for branding, marketing communications, and customer relationship marketing creates a need for a new course in the marketing curriculum. For marketing faculty accepting the task of teaching a course on social media marketing, there is a learning curve based in part on the recency with which the field has developed. In this special session, a framework for teaching social media marketing will be presented along with resources and suggested activities by marketing faculty with experience teaching the course.

Social media marketing (SMM) appears to be especially advantageous for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) due to their greater flexibility and higher need to contain marketing communications costs. Most of the existing theoretical and applied research on SMM in SMEs is case-based and anecdotal, describing best practices, innovations, and experiments with fan pages, Twitter parties, and designer contests. However, with increasing adoption of social media by businesses and their growing experiences with "muddling through" various tactics and techniques, it appears possible to identify the emerging consistencies, and classify these recurring patterns into managerially relevant strategic types. This paper develops a taxonomy of social media strategies in SMEs based on cluster analysis of self-reported SMM usage data by 116 marketing executives. It also explores the relationships between company characteristics and cluster membership, and assesses association of each inductively identified strategic approach with performance indicators. The hierarchical cluster analysis optimized at a threecluster solution for both the 2009 and 2010 sub-samples, confirming the stability and reliability of the selected clustering variable for arriving at unique clusters.

This study investigates how the online environment allows industrial companies to overcome traditional marketing communication measurement challenges. Specifically, it examines the perceived benefits of web analytics (WA) and social media monitoring (SMM) with regard to solving the measurement difficulties in three global industrial companies. In order to illustrate the challenging operational environment encountered by industrial businesses, we compare the results with experiences from within the financial services industry. As a result of this explorative case study, we discover that WA and SMM have enabled industrial companies to improve their marketing communication measurement ability, although some problems remain unsolved.

Companies are investing substantial time and resources in their social media efforts; worldwide 2011 social spending exceeded six billion dollars (Sterling 2012). Despite this, marketers still lack a solid understanding of why consumers engage with brands through social media, and ultimately the outcomes of these investments. Social networks, like Facebook, were originally designed as environments for interacting with close friends, although countless brands have successfully crossed into this realm. This research offers an empirical investigation to explore the elements for developing strong consumer-brand relationships on social media channels and the value that these interactions have for brands.

Despite the increased cost of using a well-known personality as an endorser in an advertising or marketing campaign, the number of celebrity spokespeople has significantly increased over the past few decades. According to recent studies of world’s second largest market research organization Mill ward Brown (2006), one out of four commercials in the United States draws on celebrity power. Previous studies have shown a multitude of positive effects that can be exploited by using celebrity spokespeople. The majority of research deals with theories or presents empirical evidence regarding how celebrity endorsement positively affects attitudes and intentions of consumers as well as firm value (e.g., Agrawal and Kamakura 1995; Dean and Biswas 2001; Mathur et al. 1997).

This paper investigates the effects that the communication source has on a customer's perception of a company transgression. A company transgression can be viewed as any act that negatively affects or disappoints customers (Huber et al., 2010). The authors describe the results of a critical incident study in which the participants described a company transgression that he or she heard about through another source, whether communicated via word-of-mouth or through various media outlets. The authors categorize these incidents to differentiate how customer reactions and thus the customer-company relationship change depending on how a customer hears about the transgression. Results of this study indicate that even if a customer did not experience a transgression directly, the customer may have an adverse reaction to the company. Major differences are discussed between the sources of information (word-of-mouth communication vs. through the media).

There is a phenomenon recurrently noted in the persuasion literature, called the sleeper effect, in which there is a greater ‘delayed’ than ‘initial’ impact on attitudes of a persuasive message in the presence of a discounting cue (Hovland & Weiss 1951; Gruder et al. 1978; Pratkanis et al. 1988). A hypothesized mechanism accounting for the sleeper effect that is debated in the literature is dissociation; where the association between the discounting cue and the message content become separated in memory over time (Kumkale & Albarracin 2004). Despite finding the sleeper effect in several studies (Gruder et al. 1978; Pratkanis et al 1988; Mazursky & Schul 1988), the mechanisms underlying the process of increased attitude change over time have yet to be fully conceptualized and conclusively tested. A similar effect is hypothesized in social influence literature, called social cryptomnesia; whereby the negative source identity comparison and the validation of message content are dissociated (Perez et al. 1995). The result is said to be conversion, or latent and internalized attitude change (Van Avermaet 2001). Although never empirically tested, social cryptomnesia provides an additional theoretical level to the sleeper effect by suggesting aspects from social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner 1979), such as ingroup favoritism and outgroup discrimination, as potential explanations for dissociation. The aim of this study is to further conceptualize and empirically test the proposed mechanisms underlying increased persuasion over time. Planned future experimentation will investigate the roles of potential mediators and moderators of the effect, including inter group bias and information processing. The study is important, because the internalized attitude change characteristic of this process is more persistent (Moscovici 1985), and persistent attitude change is more predictive of behavior (Petty & Cacioppo 1986). The study is expected to have broad theoretical implications, as well as practical implications for interventions involving marketing communications.

On March 23, 2010, section of 4205 of the U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was enacted, requiring chain restaurants and vending machines throughout the U.S. to provide nutrient content information for standard menu items. As a result, consumers will be provided with nutrient content information (e.g., calorie and fat content) at the point of ordering in major chain restaurants in the near future. With the growing health concerns, company activities related to consumer health and well-being are particularly important to a broad range of stakeholders. The current study examines the potential for information about a company in areas related to stakeholder well-being, namely CSR, to either positively or negatively impact how nutrition information disclosure affects the firm. The proposed study measures the relationship between consumer attitudes toward the provision of nutrition information and subsequent outcomes related to firm performance such as consumer perceptions of service and value (Study 1 and 2). This relationship is expected to vary based on 1) a firm’s CSR reputation (Study 1) and 2) the degree of fit between the CSR-related information disclosing act and other product offerings by the firm (Study 2). Extending the results, Study 3 examines how the impact of CSR on consumer service evaluations in different contexts; specifically, fast food chains and casual restaurants.

Since the 1960s, extensive research efforts on country of origin support the assumption that origin cues impact consumption behavior (Al-Sulaiti and Baker, 1998). Peterson and Jolibert (1995) state country of origin as one of the most widely studied phenomena in all the international business, marketing and consumer behavior literatures. When looking at the research on country of origin, we see a development from understanding the effect one-dimensionally as any positive or negative influence that the country related to the product might have on the consumer’s choice processes behaviour (Schooler, 1965, Chao 1993, Samiee, 2004, Papadopoulos and Heslop, 2003) to a more specific understanding of where a product is made (Zhang, 1996). Most of the existing studies therefore focus on “made-in“-effects (country of manufacturing) or image spillover with regard to the country of assembly (Nebenzahl, Jaffe and Lampert, 1997, Yong, 1996). Following management challenges arising from globalization and leading to a repositioning of company activities to a number of different countries, the one-dimensional understanding of the country of origin effect seems out-dated (Bluemelhuber, Carter and Lambe, 2007). Johansson and Nebenzahl (1986) therefore postulate the differentiation of the effect in country of manufacturing and country of branding. Their proposition is supported by a number of studies showing that consumers are able to distinct different effects of the country origin (Chao, 1993, Sadrudin and d’Astous, 2002, Thakor and Lavak, 2003, Brodowsky, Tan and Meilich, 2004). Hence, in more recent studies the focus is on the country of branding (Johansson, Douglas and Nonak,a 1985, Ozsomer and Cavusgil, 1991, Phau and Prendergast, 2000) or, as other authors call it, brand origin (Thakor and Kohl,i 1996, Johansson, Douglas and Nonaka, 1985, Chattalas, Kramer and Takada, 2008). Additionally, even more detailed specifications like the country of design (Nebenzahl, Jaffe and Lampert, 1997, Jaffe and Nebenzahl, 2001), the country of parts or the origin of top management are examined (Pharr, 2005).

In the past years, corporate social responsibility gained a lot of popularity from researchers and managers around the world. Its influence on consumer behavior has made it an element of strategic importance for the diverse companies that compete on the market. This situation is not different for sport professional teams that are embracing a multitude of forms of socially responsible activities (Irwin et al. 2003). Professional teams leaders have built CSR strategies for both social and commercial purposes (Mintzberg 1984). Although CSR practices have been a growing part of marketing literature, investigation in relation with the sport domain is quite limited and recent. Given this perspective, this research examines the impact of the perceived social responsibility of a specific team on consumers’ responses. In addition, the authors want to demonstrate the moderating effect of the type of groups of fans on the benefits stimulated by a team’s CSR initiatives.

From New York markets at 6

th

and 26

th

, to El Rastro in Madrid, to Portobello Road in London and to numerous marchés aux puces in Paris, multitudes of Flea markets exist around the world. However few studies in consumer research have explored this phenomenon. As Sherry (1990) points out “academic research into flea markets has yielded a rather small and circumscribed literature of discontinuous quality”. This study is an effort to fill this gap.

Increasingly, cultural diversity impacts the salesperson’s role. Whether involved in global sales, multinational team selling or navigating his/her organization, the salesperson today must be prepared to interact with a diverse workforce globally or domestically. The U.S. Census Bureau (2010) projects growth rates for the next decade at 26.3% for Asian Americans, 25.1% for Hispanics/Latin Americans and 12.1% for African Americans compared to a growth rate of 2.4% for Whites. These statistics coupled with the increasing globalization of work call for the importance of salespeople with cross-cultural and effective communication skills. This paper explores capabilities that can enhance the salesperson’s ability to effectively interact in any situation. We offer a series of propositions that associate a salesperson's intelligences and interactions with his/her performance. Specifically, cultural intelligence (Early and Ang 2003) and emotional intelligence (Mayer, Salovey and Caruso 2008) are proposed as antecedents of a salesperson’s external (adaptive selling, Weitz, Sujan and Sujan, 1986) and internal (intraorganizational employee navigation, IEN, Plouffe and Grégoire 2011) interactions. Both adaptive selling and IEN have been shown to positively impact sales performance (Spiro and Weitz 1990, Plouffe and Grégorie).

This study aims at (1) examining the marketing department’s ability to generate market intelligence to be disseminated by the overall organization in order to improve the service quality of frontline salespersons, and (2) providing empirical support for the significance of “ownership,” a concept proposed by Heskett et al. (2008). Ownership refers to the connectedness between individual salespersons and their organization. Mere satisfaction of employees does not lead to individual behavioral output, but ownership does. This study empirically shows how an organization improves its service delivery through an organizational process of intelligence generation and dissemination and through ownership of frontlone salespersons.

Salespeople play the important boundary spanning role that ensures the voices of customers are heard within the selling organization and that their needs are effectively met. To achieve these goals, salespeople need to be psychologically empowered to make decisions that are sound and timely. In this research we investigate the consequences of psychological empowerment of salespeople. Our results reveal that sales force empowerment favorably impacts the (a) attitude of salespeople (reduced role conflict, enhanced salesperson job satisfaction, and heightened organizational commitment), (b) job outcomes ( increased customer-oriented selling and organizational citizenship behavior), and (c) customer outcomes (augmented customer relational satisfaction and customer loyalty).

The purpose of the present study is twofold. The authors first present a review of the customer relationship management (CRM) literature between 2003 and 2011. Second, this study introduces an analytical framework of the evolving nature of CRM research and offers novel insights into re-thinking the role and utilisation of customer data in CRM. The authors then argue that a paradigmatically emerging service orientation, value co-creation and social CRM perspective exert pressure to reconfigure the role of customer data. The diminished customer centricity of CRM and the increased pressure to reconfigure the role of customer data, fuelled by new technology and communication channels, stimulates firms to move from an internal use of customer data towards an external use that involves refining and giving customer data back to customers. This suits those firms striving for a service orientation and opens up a variety of business opportunities. Finally, the paper discusses the implications of the new framework for theory and practice.

Nearly two centuries ago, negotiation was a common practice before department stores began setting fixed prices in the 1850s. After that time, asking for a deal seemed more like an embarrassing and demeaning act that suggested a customer could not afford to pay. Today, customers are reviving the age-old strategy of negotiation and retailers are willing to accommodate today’s highly price-conscious customer that is armed with information. This shift in thinking is the result of more customers accustomed to comparing prices and bargaining online. Consequently, there is a new frugality in consumer spending (Pew Research, 2010).

This research aims to integrate theoretical contributions in customer satisfaction and relationship marketing research to determine if and to what degree relationship stages impact the relationship between functional utility, experiential utility and customer satisfaction. Functional utility is gained by benefits that solve externally generated consumption-related problems, and experiential utility is derived from benefits that provide sensory pleasure, variety or cognitive stimulation. Understanding the need for these two distinct types of utility allows a firm to develop identify specific marketing mix elements that can cultivate stronger relationships with customers.

Evidence suggests that both cognitive and emotive factors elucidate consumer decision processes; yet, research exploring such factors jointly (i.e., a dual-process approach) as antecedents of high involvement, lasting purchases is lacking. To address this paucity, we developed a preliminary dual-process model for explaining consumers’ intention to purchase a tattoo. Tattoos represent a unique purchase due to their permanent alteration of the body and their relationship to personal expression, creativity, and identity. Although previously shunned upon, the adoption of tattoos by mainstream society is now widespread; yet, research on tattoo buyer behavior lags this movement (e.g., Kjeldgaard and Bengtsson 2005). To better understand determinants of tattoo acquisition and to offer insight to both advertisers’ design strategies and marketers’ modeling efforts of purchase behavior, we propose a dual-process model of intention to acquire body art in the form of a tattoo.

Consumers surround themselves with material goods and experiences. Sometimes they consume out of necessity (i.e., to eat), other times to build relationships and experiences (i.e., attending a play), or to enhance their self-view (Belk 1988). Possessions can serve as security against fears and anxiety (Belk 1988). This study investigates how possessions mitigate against such anxiety, particularly existential anxiety, in light of mortality salience. Our concern is two-fold: how do consumers orient and cope with mortality; and how is materialism, or the emphasis placed on possessions, affected as a result of this coping.

With the growth of the internet usage, customers often search online for product information and have access to dozens or hundreds of product reviews from other customers. Some reviews are helpful to the information seeker as evidenced by the helpfulness vote of the review in a website like Amazon, while some other reviews do not get as many helpfulness votes. Recent research showed that helpfulness votes of customer reviews can have a positive influence on sales. While it is clear that the helpfulness vote of a review is important, less is known about why certain pieces of online reviews are more helpful than the others. Past research showed that valence of a review affects the informational value of the content and thus the helpfulness vote of reviews. However, in a purchase or information search situation, people encounter a variety of emotions which are likely to be expressed in the reviews. Potential customers read the reviews to collect or verify information and to see what the other people think. Despite the fact that reviews contain emotions, few studies have investigated how emotions expressed in the review affect the helpfulness of the review. Do discrete emotions have differential informational value in this case?

This study surveyed related literatures regarding social marketing, pro social behavior, and helping behavior to classify four types of social behavior (altruism, compensatory, reciprocity, and egoism) by two dimensions: (1) who are the welfare appealed, (2) the level of restitution intention. Furthermore, this study constructed a social behavior model for social marketing and utilized two social issues—“Bag-Taking” and “Blood Donation” to test the social behavior model. The empirical conclusions are as follow: social behavior could be directed and positively affected by actual control factors (external objective factor) and social behavior intention (personal subjective tendency); social behavior intention could be directed and positively affected by actual control factors and social behavior motivations (including relieving personal distress and evoking empathy); the social behavior motivations (internal emotion response) could be directed and positively affected by social norms (external pressure) and personal norms (individual perception of norms); the personal norms and economic evaluation could be directed and positively affected by social norms (external pressure). Finally, this study submits marketing implications to academic professionals and industrial practitioners.

Most benchmarking methods used by companies are based on comparing financial and operational indicators with that of the leader in the market. Comparing financial and operational indicators may not be a sustainable approach in today’s highly competitive and dynamic markets. This paper proposes a dynamic customer-driven benchmarking approach that captures changes in customer’s expectations and subsequent changes in service standards set by “experienced customers as best practice.”

BRIC (Brazil-Russia-India-China) countries, the largest and fastest growing emerging markets representing about a half of the world population (Wilson & Purushothaman, 2003; Lanzeni, 2008), need particular attention from the marketing scholars and practitioners. Rapid change of disposable income and accumulated wealth in BRICs resulted in steep increase of luxury consumption significantly exceeding the growth rate of GDI per capita (O’Leary, 2008). This phenomenon was registered by brand managers and advertisers catering to the luxury market segment, but consumer behavior requires further scholarly research to be adequately explained (Conway Dato-on & Moustafaeva, 2004; Okonkwo, 2009). Russia due to its unique social, cultural and geopolitical characteristics represents a particular challenge for such research.

This study examines the relationships between the pattern of use of two types of information networks (i,e., supply chain benchmarking network and supply chain partner network) and two types of supply chain alertness (i.e., strategic supply chain alertness and operational supply chain alertness). Drawing from social network theories and supply chain management literature, this study proposes that the strength of benchmarking ties of a firm has positive effect on strategic supply chain alertness and this relation is moderated by the diversity of benchmarking ties of a firm; the strength of supply chain partnership of a firm enhances operational supply chain alertness and this relation is moderated by the tie diversity of a firm’s supply chain partners. Data from 78 firms supported the moderating effects. Based on findings, we introduce a framework to guide future research in the area of supply chain alertness.

For firms grappling with the issue of understanding sources of differential performance outcomes, an emerging view is that strategic interfirm partnerships are critical in generating superior performance (e.g., Dyer and Hatch 2006). Paralleling the strong growth of interest in interfirm partnerships, supply chain management (SCM) strategy has become a mainstay in efforts to generate competitive advantage and enhance customer value. However, despite the anecdotal and empiricai evidence, literature review suggests a lack of adequate understanding of the complex interactive relationships in the supply chain (Narasimhan et al., 2009).

Authenticity has been well studied in the consumer research realm, as well as in many other academic disciplines such as tourism, communications, politics, religion, anthropology, etc. However, it is mostly absent from the business to business (B2B) literature.

Customer engagement in online communities seems to be key to building a successful online business. We show that while at an aggregated level customer activity and customer spending are indeed positively related, the contrary is the case at an individual level: Customer engagement in online communities substitutes spending. Substitution effects emerging from reveling can explain this empirical finding: Customers satisfy their needs for products or services by experiencing them online without purchasing them. These findings suggest that marketers should be cautious about actively increasing online customer engagement.

Online product review sites contain an impressive amount of positive and negative consumer feedback. However, many marketing or community managers have difficulties handling these huge amounts of information, and thus these qualitative data often are wasted nowadays. The authors seek a practical solution to automatically determine consumers’ satisfaction levels according to the linguistic dimensions that appear in these product reviews. Based on a sample of 1, 014 real-life online consumer reviews, the authors propose an automated classification model that achieves an unprecedented time/performance ratio for consumer feedback classification. The authors test its performance against the categorization performance of manual encoding of the consumer narratives by 507 experienced marketing managers. Ultimately, this research contributes to marketing science by proposing an alternative way of measuring consumer satisfaction.

Analysis of online networks can identify cascades as they flow through communities but, often, the reasons for their initiation are tacit. This paper draws on social capital theory to investigate the characteristics and behaviours that can lead to this phenomenon. The relationships between structural, relational and cognitive sources of social capital and two dimensions of influence are investigated using 1,970 respondents from three large-scale online communities. The model of influence that leads to the intention to diffuse a message is strikingly similar to that of direct influence; presenting strong support to the notion that contagion-based cascades through networks are predictors of persuasion. The paper proposes a bridge between the theories of social capital and personal influence, which have not previously been discussed. Further, techniques are suggested which can help organisations to identify opinion-leaders and, if required, subvert or redirect the nature of their influence.

Most health institutions strive to make quality information available to consumers. Currently, more than 80% of internet users gather health information from online. In addition, a national telephone survey found that new healthcare-related topics are continually expanded to health information searches with different profiles of divides along education, age, and income lines (Fox, 2011). Many factors explain the growing numbers of ?-health information sites. The question arises as to what attributes affect consumers’ willingness to adopt ?-health information. The purpose of the study is to examine consumers’ prior knowledge of health information, online information search skills and perceptions of e-health information including relative advantages, complexity and compatibility as factors affecting the adopt e-health information.

The emergence of the World Wide Web initiated a new era of online consumerism. Though the Internet allows customers to order products conveniently and immediately, and to access information to make informed purchase decisions, it can also be an unknown realm for many. As the

Internet Retailer

(2009) reports in the United States, the 2007 total online retail sales and the total number of transactions for the top 500 websites rose by 21.8% and 8.8% respectively. Therefore, customers have readily adopted the Internet for various purposes, and properly used, it is a powerful tool for selling products and services. The most commonly used methods for conducting commerce on the Internet involves selling goods and services through a company’s website. However, developing a website is not without risk and businesses today face numerous challenges in their efforts to develop a website that is both functional and productive for both consumer and firm. Since customers often view this form of shopping as risky, they often rely on the information available from a firm’s website to determine the quality and performance of the product and thus if they are interested in purchasing from that website. Through such information gathering, firms are able to lower their customer’s perceived risk and simultaneously encourage them to make the purchase.

Internet marketing (IM) provides firms with an inexpensive, global reach, and in the context of international markets it is often called “international Internet marketing” (IIM) (e.g., Eid 2005; Eid and Trueman 2004; Eid, Trueman, and Ahmed 2006; Zugelder, Flaherty, and Johnson 2000). This paper involves the examination of IIM communications use and adaptation by firms to reach and communicate with international markets. Some researchers do not differentiate between IM and IIM because products and services marketed over the Internet can be purchased worldwide (e.g., Quelch and Klein 1996). However, it is suggested in this paper that IM and IIM should be treated separately due to the heterogeneity and diversity of different country markets, which may require some level of adaptation of IIM communications by firms. This paper also explores the impact of firms’ environmental scanning (ES) activities on the relationship between various internal and external characteristics and firms’ use and level of adaptation of IIM communications and IIM performance. Based on the review of the extant literature in the areas of marketing, IM, and strategic management, a conceptual model is proposed to explain the determinants of IIM communications use, strategy, and performance.

Across different treatments, people have low levels of compliance with medical regimen (Schuchler and Kivinicm 2006), which reach only about 50% for compliance with prescribed medication, and much lower for compliance with other behavioral requirements such as eating or smoking habits (Dellande, Gilly, and Graham 2004). It is crucial to understand the factors that affect health behaviors and particularly compliance with medical recommendations pertaining to prescribed medication, exercise, diet, and other health improvement behaviors. It is also important to understand the factors that lead to higher treatment satisfaction, as satisfaction is an important indicator of patients’ overall evaluation of the medical service and the treatment recommendations provided by their physician. Social cognition models have often been used in trying to predict health behaviors. Yet, these models have emphasized the rationality of human behavior and although they provide a strong theoretical basis with a “good selection” of variables to consider, they have fallen short on predicting behavior in many situations where other variables come into play, such as emotions or interpersonal relationships (Conner and Norman 1996). Since perceptions of control is a central component of most social cognition models (Conner and Norman 1996), and because health behaviors such as adherence to a prescribed health regimen, and satisfaction with health treatments are potential outcomes of hope (Farran, Herth, and Popovich 1995; MacInnis and De Mello 2005; De Mello, MacInnis and Stewart 2007; Winetrich and Haws 2011), there is a need to study the dynamic between these two constructs and their joint effects on health behaviors. This study advances a model that incorporates perceptions of control and the emotion of hope for the purpose of reaching a better understanding of compliance and satisfaction with health treatments. The proposed model is identified in the context of a lifestyle changing chronic illness: Diabetes Type II, because the life adaptations required have a major impact on the patients’ emotional state.

This research describes the development and validation of a consumer locus of control (CLOC). CLOC is presumed to reflect the degree to which the individual consumer holds an Internal (i.e., an agentic, personally-responsible), rather than an External (i.e., a passive, dependent) expectation toward the marketing exchange. Rotter (1966) originally formulated the Locus of Control (LOC) construct as a generalized expectancy that indicates the extent to which a person attributes life outcomes to internal causes (e.g., one’s personal effort, skills, and abilities), rather than to external causes (e.g., luck, chance, powerful others).

For many years, marketing professors and others have debated whether or not the field of marketing is a science (with its own unifying theoretical framework and body of research), a skill an “art, ” or a set of technological tools and knowledge for use in understanding exchange. Often, marketing professors were either viewed as more akin to scientists attempting to develop theory or as craftsmen and artists attempting to hone their craft This debate continued for several decades, but few scholars attempted to answer “why” the argument was important To that end, the purpose of this article is to examine the historical motivations for the debate and draw conclusions about whether the debate was important, if debate should continue, and what benefit, if any, the debate has had upon the field of marketing.

Any disciplines, to some degree can bring human beings inspiration or even lead the direction of other disciplines to advance within a certain period (according to the research finding of B.M. Kedlov, a Russian philosopher, early 70s). To resume such great social and academic responsibility, marketing discipline must establish its own general theory and systematically connected theories system. However, until now: 1, except of criteria of a general theory (Hunt, 1973; Bartels, 1970), no more clear clue is suggested on how to develop a marketing general theory; the criteria of a general theory itself is questionable; 2, we still don’t clearly know what an overall system of marketing theories looks like and what the relationship among them is; 3, no general summary is developed to inspire marketers that what we can learn from the existing divergences in marketing academics and how we synthesize them into a more advanced theory, and what the strategic planning for marketing theory development is.

The development of strategic literature on how firms gain and maintain competitive advantage has come a long way (Cavusgil et al., 2007). One of the most extensively used frameworks in this research stream is dynamic capabilities (Wang and Ahmed, 2007; Barreto, 2010). Conner (1991) suggests that the strong connection between dynamic capabilities and strategy is at least reasonable, since both are somewhat rooted in economics. However, the dynamic capabilities framework is not relevant exclusively to the strategic management field (Barreto, 2010). Furthermore, this recently developed concept is pertinent to marketing research, as the ability to create and deliver superior customer value through efficient and fast-responding marketing processes tends to be one of the most critical factors that contribute to a company’s financial performance and sustainable competitive advantage (Day, 1994). This paper attempts to trace the evolution of marketing thought on the sources of firm-specific advantages given the conditions of market uncertainty and dynamism. The focus of this review is on the dynamic capabilities perspective advanced a little less than two decades ago by Day (1994), Teece et al. (1997), Shuen (1997), Eisenhardt and Martin (2000), and others.

Marketing strategy has a wide variety of meanings. While some definitions of marketing strategy stress on a broader philosophical approach, the others stress on a narrower functional view. In terms of the former, marketing strategy has a broad impact on the business by instilling marketing orientation approach throughout the entire organization, and thus it becomes the business philosophy (Webster 1992). In terms of the latter, marketing strategy is simply the endeavor of marketing function in developing a competitive advantage. Therefore, the firm ought to have the appropriate and unique capabilities, core competencies and resources in order to envision, predict, and respond to the current and changing nature of customer tastes and demand better than its competitors (Wensley 2000). Marketing strategy involves selecting and analyzing target markets and creating and maintaining an appropriate marketing program to satisfy the needs of target markets (Winer 2007) mainly through building long-term successful relational exchanges (Morgan and Hunt 1994). Since marketing strategy decides the goal of the firm and how to get there, endeavors such as deciding which segments to target, understanding of customers’ needs as well as the industry environment, and analyzing the competitors are crucial for the firm. However, developing a thorough marketing strategy is challenging in today’s dynamic environment. Therefore, the purpose of this conceptual paper is to present the main factors firms need to take into consideration in developing a marketing strategy such as macro-environmental factors, organizational factors, consumer-oriented factors, competition-oriented factors (market and industry), and innovation factors.

Marketing strategy has a wide variety of meanings. While some definitions of marketing strategy stress on a broader philosophical approach, the others stress on a narrower functional view. In terms of the former, marketing strategy has a broad impact on the business by instilling marketing orientation approach throughout the entire organization, and thus it becomes the business philosophy (Webster 1992). In terms of the latter, marketing strategy is simply the endeavor of marketing function in developing a competitive advantage. Therefore, the firm ought to have the appropriate and unique capabilities, core competencies and resources in order to envision, predict, and respond to the current and changing nature of customer tastes and demand better than its competitors (Wensley 2000). Marketing strategy involves selecting and analyzing target markets and creating and maintaining an appropriate marketing program to satisfy the needs of target markets (Winer 2007) mainly through building long-term successful relational exchanges (Morgan and Hunt 1994). Since marketing strategy decides the goal of the firm and how to get there, endeavors such as deciding which segments to target, understanding of customers’ needs as well as the industry environment, and analyzing the competitors are crucial for the firm. However, developing a thorough marketing strategy is challenging in today’s dynamic environment. Therefore, the purpose of this conceptual paper is to present the main factors firms need to take into consideration in developing a marketing strategy such as macro-environmental factors, organizational factors, consumer-oriented factors, competition-oriented factors (market and industry), and innovation factors.

As supply chain globalization accelerates, assessing and managing supply chain risk to secure global supply networks is a pressing concern for many firms. Previous literature provides typologies of supply chain risk mitigation strategy. However, relatively little is known about how firms can most effectively alleviate the negative impacts of supply chain risk occurrence for particular risk contexts. The purpose of this research is to propose a conceptual model that matches mitigation strategies with particular risk situations. Based on the extant literature supply chain risk characteristics that determine particular risk situations are synthesized and the two primary alternative supply chain mitigation strategies are articulated. Then, drawing on contingency theory, propositions that suggest optimal mitigation strategies for particular risk situations are provided.

Growing product and service complexity, outsourcing, and globalization have led to increasingly complex supply networks. As a consequence, perceived risk has increased its role as a focal factor affecting all decision making in supply networks (Harland et al. 2003) and especially the adoption of new technology products. Dowling and Staelin (1994) define purchasing risk as “a buyer’s perception of the uncertainty and adverse consequences of buying a product/service”. According to Moriarty and Kosnik (1989), risk attitude is especially relevant issue in a new technology context. For, new technology is often accompanied with a high level of market and technology uncertainty and competitive volatility. Therefore, the adoption of a new technology product in a supply network context is significantly influenced by the members’ attitudes about the uncertainties related to the realized value of the product and the reactions of other members of the supply network. Further, as each member perceives the risks and gains differently, the supplier must be able to identify these perceived risks to provide the means for decreasing or accommodating the risks.

This research was undertaken to expand our understanding of how parents extend their perception and presentation of themselves through their young children’s appearance. The study is rooted in Belk’s theory of possessions as extensions of the self (1988), which suggests that others, as well as objects, can serve in this capacity. Fourteen parents of young children were interviewed via a series of semi-structured questions and a photo elicitation technique to gather information about their children’s appearance and grooming. We found that mothers generally serve as the gatekeepers of children’s appearance, both mothers and fathers view their children’s appearance as being extensions of themselves, and both parents utilize their children to create and maintain their own identities. This research contributes to the study of the symbolic relationship between our possessions and ourselves by providing insights into an under-studied object of the extended self: the other.

In 2000, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) identified overweight and obesity as a leading health indicator and called for a reduction in the proportion of children and adolescents who are overweight or obese to 15% by 2010 (DHHS 2001). Unfortunately, little progress has been made towards this goal and the 2007 – 08 data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) indicate that approximately 32% of children and adolescents, ages 2 – 19, are overweight or obese.

1

Many theorists agree that a major determinant of self-construction is dependent upon significant others, which leads to a critical self-evaluation (Mead 1934; Sullivan 1953; Chen, Boucher et al. 2006). Additionally, Belk’s (1988) notion of the extended self indicates our possessions are a key contributor to and reflection of our sense of self. Thus ‘the self’ is fundamentally relational to both specific others, e.g. XX, and objects, e.g., cosmetics use. Sense of self, including thoughts, feelings, motives and self-regulatory strategies, alters in response to relations with significant others (Chen, Boucher et al. 2006). Romantic partners are one of the closest adult relationships and play a crucial part in most adults’ lives (Berscheid and Reis 1998). Past literature focused primarily on the destructive impact of breakup on human emotional well-being (Davis, Shaver et al. 2003; Sbarra 2006). However, less research has focused on examining changes in the self during an ongoing romantic relationship and strategies individuals use to regulate their states of affect and subsequent goals (such as relationships with objects, e.g. cosmetics as a means of XX). Given the importance of a romantic relationship on sense of self (Monroe, Rohde et al. 1999; Sbarra 2006), studying ways that individuals’ selves change over the course of a romantic relationship and the strategies exploited to facilitate/underpin these changes will yield an enhanced appreciation of the dynamics of self within a relational context (Slotter, Gardner et al. 2010). This research aims to provide a holistic understanding of changes in the self in relation to a significant or potential other partnership and how cosmetics are used strategically to reflect or protect varying aspects of the self.

This article attempts to contribute to better understand the postmodern consumer, by trying to identify one of its main characteristics: an identity constructor. Indeed, after studying the postmodern conditions, we have noticed that every condition favors the creation of identities voluntarily and consciously assumed by the consumer. The consumer is always looking to be socially desired by changing his identity every time he wishes. An empirical study was, therefore, conducted to confirm this postmodern consumer trend. The results found shows that the postmodern consumer is not seeking to manage his impression in front of others through changing identities but rather he seeks to live deeply himself in all identities which he built.

Social network sites (SNS) have become increasingly prevalent, ingrained deeply in the daily practices of many Internet users. With regards to the human endeavor to self-present on these sites ‘things are the same’, but in relation to whom we present ‘things have changed’. Three dimensions of online self-presentation have emerged from the literature proposing users either present ‘ideal’, ‘hoped- for’ or ‘real’ selves. This paper argues for an additional dimension the ‘ought self’, whereby users show who they think they ‘ought’ to be rather than who they ideally are, hope to be or really are. This argument is developed from self-presentational literature concerned with the social anxiety that may arise when presenting simultaneously on Facebook to multiple audiences (e.g. employers, family, relational, university friends, acquaintances) with heterogeneous expectations. Under these circumstances, where there is an increased likelihood of social disapproval, this paper predicts that users are likely to adopt ‘preventative’, rather than ‘promotional’ based presentation strategies, as they wish to defend their image instead of promote it. 30 in-depth interviews were used to explore user-presentation with reference to diverse audiences. Strong evidence was found for of preventative presentation and a multiple audience constraint. Subsequently this research contributes a new dimension to existing literature the ‘ought self’; a construct which is predicted to increase in primacy with widening demographics that lead to diversification in online audiences.

The present research examines how personal and social identities moderate the impact of values on green consumption decisions. Prior consumer research has demonstrated that self-transcendence (self-enhancement) values have a greater influence green consumption decisions, so called values-behavior congruence. The authors divert from the conventional perspective of values-behavior congruence to propose that opposite values can also influence green consumption decisions, depending on whether a personal or social identity is activated. Specifically, contrary to conventional wisdom, the authors find that self-transcendence (self-enhancement) values do not always have a greater impact on green consumption decisions. Instead, our findings demonstrate that people can behave in opposite direction from their values, depending on the activated identity. When social identity is activated, results are incongruent with values: self-transcendence and self-enhancement values have similar impact on green consumption decisions. Research and managerial implications are discussed.

We investigate how haptic properties of a food influence consumer’s perceptions of the food’s nutritional content. The results of two laboratory studies and one field study show that consumers perceive foods with smooth textures as higher in calories, fat, and overall less healthy than foods with rough textures, and that satiation moderates these effects. Based on these findings we discuss implications for consumers and marketers.

This study investigates the influence of bilingual product packaging descriptions on product evaluation. In an experimental study, the evaluation of a product with an English-only package is compared to the evaluation of the same product in English-Spanish and English-Spanish-French packaging. Study 1 compared product evaluations of the same product in English-only (English), English-Spanish (bilingual), and English-Spanish-French (trilingual) packaging. The bilingual product received the lowest evaluation. Adding French mitigated this effect as did attributing a relatively high price (versus a low price) to the product. Study 2 compared Country of Origin effect to Culture of Targeting and found that the effect of Culture of Targeting is bigger.

This article aims to study the factors that contribute to increasing the naturalness of non-natural products. An experimental survey investigates the influence of product process and content modifications. Our results support the process dominance hypothesis by showing that process modification increase more naturalness ratings than content modification. In addition, changes in process (but not changes in content) induce a positive halo that alters how other product attributes are assessed (e.g., health perceived risk, expected effectiveness). The relationship between process modification and naturalness judgments is mediated by the perceived transformation, origin and appearance of the product.

The market for online shopping is becoming more important as there are more than two billion internet users worldwide. In Europe the online sales is forecast to grow at the rate of ten percent per year. In response to this trend, e-tailers are going global and they are tailoring their marketing efforts in various countries as per the local cultures. This research investigates the varying impact of three important drivers (E-business design, satisfaction, and trust) of E-Loyalty in three countries (Germany, France, and the Netherlands.) We find that satisfaction has a significant and positive impact on both trust, and E-Loyalty in all the three countries. This unvarying impact of satisfaction across the three countries is powerful and emphasizes the need for organizations to commit to customer satisfaction in all the countries where they operate. However, the impact of trust on E-Loyalty is stronger for German customers than for French and Dutch customers. E-business design (information design, navigation design, and visual design) also has a positive and unvarying impact on E-Loyalty across all the three countries. Limitations of this research and directions for future research are provided.

Consumers in the US continue to spend more of their shopping dollars online; online retail spending grew by 13% from the third quarter of 2010 to the third quarter of 2011 and the number of online shoppers grew by 22% during the same period (Comscore 2011). Marketers who wish to take advantage of consumers’ increased desire to shop online need to understand the factors that influence their decisions to purchase products online. This paper seeks to contribute to this understanding by i) examining how product type (i.e. hedonic versus utilitarian) interacts with gender to influence online purchase attitudes and intentions, and by ii) exploring the effects of risk perceptions in these relationships.

Online shopping has been the fastest growing channel of shopping for more than a decade with sales growing an annual rate of 25 percent (Brohan 2007). With approximately 221 million users which are about 71 percent of the total population in the U.S. (Phillips 2010), the Internet has become a popular shopping medium for consumers who have more shopping choices than ever before. According to Forrester Research (2009), it is estimated that online retail will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 10 percent to reach $229 billion in 2013 and account for 15 to 20 percent of total retail sales in the U. S. Given the rapid growth of online shopping, impulse buying has become a prevalent feature of consumer shopping behavior and it accounts for a significant percentage of the products sold across a broad range of product categories (Madhavaram and Laverie 2004). As consumer’s buying behavior is vital to success of e-commerce practitioners, it becomes important to understand the nature of online impulse buying in response to consumers (Dawson and Kim 2009). While there has been substantial research on impulse buying in traditional stores, a limited amount of impulse buying research has been conducted in the context of online transactions. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate various factors that may influence online impulse buying (

e

-impulse buying).

The purpose of this study is to investigate the importance of motivation factors and the moderator for consumers’ adoption of SSTs and specifically within the apparel retail environment. Results indicate that individuals who perceive SSTs to be personally enjoyable are likely to display a favorable attitude toward using SSTs in the apparel retail environment. Findings indicate a significant moderating effect of familiarity with using SSTs on the relationship between technology anxiety and attitudes In other words, the influence of technology anxiety was weaker in high levels of familiarity toward technology usage conditions than in low levels of familiarity. Findings also reveal a significant relationship between attitude and intention to make purchases using SSTs in an apparel retail store. This study contributes to the growing knowledge base about consumers’ shopping behaviors in relation to SSTs, and fills a gap in the literature about the potential for SST use in the apparel retail shopping environment. Findings can aid apparel retailers that are looking to enhance their service offerings by offering an additional means for customers to purchase merchandise in the store, particularly important during busy shopping periods, such as Christmas and Black Friday.

Over the past decade, online communities have been discussed in terms of their utility to facilitate new product development (e.g., Füller et al., 2004) and word of mouth marketing (Kozinets et al., 2010) and as a marketing research tool (Pitta and Fowler, 2005). However, only a very limited amount of research has been conducted that attempts to segment users of online communities. Instead, it has been commonly assumed that a community is comprised of individuals that share a large degree of homogeneity in their attitudes and preferences (e.g., Muiniz and O’Guinn, 2001). However, evidence from studies of the broader construct of brand communities has highlighted that there is a greater amount of heterogeneity between members than some conceptualizations permit (Ouwersloot and Odekerken-Schröder, 2008). However very few of papers exist that identify the structure and implications of this heterogeneity in the more specific context of online brand communities.

It has been widely confirmed that emotion elicited by products, services, and store atmosphere positively impact subsequent consumer responses such as satisfaction (e.g., Hume and Mort 2010) and purchase intention (e.g., Kang et al. 2010). Prior studies have treated emotions as a multidimensional structure (i.e., joy and pleasure for positive emotion) or as several specific emotions at the same level (i.e., excitement). In studies measuring emotion with multiple dimensions, contents of emotions have been greatly divergent (Laros and Steenkamp 2005). To understand consumer emotional responses clearly, consumer emotion structure must be identified.

Thailand is one of the fastest growing retail markets in the world, increasing from $25.5B USD in 2000 to $63.3B USD in 2010 and accounting for 5.2% of the country’s total employment and 20% of the country’s GDP (Eurornonitor 2010). Thailand's retail sector is seeing the level of transformative growth in the past two decades that took 50 to 80 years in the U.S. and Europe (Reardon 2006). Beyond these direct economic contributions, retail trade plays a critical role in determining consumer behavior as well as fostering productivity, growth, and innovation in the country (Eurornonitor 2010). Although retail is clearly important to Thailand’s economy, very little academic research has examined its evolution in terms of market change and opportunities for future growth.

This study examines how social influence affects consumer regret. As prior research suggests that uniformity leads to less regret, this study proposes that consumer regret is based on decision justifiability rather than uniformity. In other words, people conforming without a justifiable basis will still experience regret despite of uniformity. Furthermore, as prior research argues that the goal of regret minimization is sacrificed for the sake of information gathering and the goal of self-presentation, this paper proposes that regret minimization is not necessarily sacrificed and may play an important role in consumers’ purchasing decisions in a social context. Overall, this study proposes that when consumers conform due to informational influence, the regret level will be low even if the outcome is negative. The moderating effect of product type (search product and experiential product) is also proposed: individuals purchasing search product will perceive lower regret if they conform to informational influence while individuals purchasing experiential products will perceive lower regret if they conform to normative influence.

This study examines the influence of an operatic flash mob on consumer behavior and consumer experience in a public market. A field experiment was conducted to assess the impact of operatic music on consumers’ emotions and connectedness in three conditions: spontaneous live music (flash mob), recorded music, and no music. We analyze audience responses to the shopping experience in all three conditions with particular focus on temporary group formation and felt emotion. Results show that the flash mob enhanced consumer arousal, connectedness and positive emotions, as well as consumer-to-consumer interaction.

Historically, women’s financial contribution to the household was often considered vital to the family’s economic stability. However, women were seldom in charge of funds (Silverstein and Sayre 2009). Many socio-economic changes during the past decades have transformed the dynamics of the gendered marketplace and put women in control of $4.3 trillion every year (Silverstein and Sayre 2009). Females’ enormous purchasing power has affected their decisions to enter the housing market and more women than ever are buying homes. The share of single female home buyers has also increased and makes up 20% of homes purchased (Joint Center of Housing Studies 2005). The role of women as home owners and heads of households has changed the dynamics in which women engage in do-it-yourself (DIY) behavior. Although limited research has addressed women’s engagement in DIY activities, one recent survey reports that women are taking a greater share in home improvement, upkeep, and maintenance activities (MedeliaMonitor 2009). Also, home improvement giant, Lowe’s, discovered that women initiate 80 percent of all home improvement projects (Lowe’s 2003).This recent shift in female consumers DIY practices lead us to investigate the way women engage in DIY activities and the meanings they experience through their consumption practices. Initial informal dialogues with female DIY consumers lead us to the empowerment literature. The marketing literature addresses consumer empowerment in two ways. First, consumer empowerment is defined as giving consumers power through resources such as greater information or better understanding of processes involved in the creation of offerings (Harrison et al. 2006). Second, consumer empowerment is defined as a subjective experience caused by perceptions of increased control through choices (Wathieu et al. 2002). A central and interesting feature of empowerment is the close association with resistance to cultural norms. According to Shaw (2001) empowerment is a central characteristic of resistance that enables women to create new opportunities and identities, which are not automatically assigned by traditional gender norms. The concept of female empowerment has received little attention in marketing. The current study intends to fill this gap and explores the concept of female empowerment in the light of women practicing DIY behavior.

Power as the ability to determine action is critical to any organizational player in order to achieve goals and set strategic directions. For marketing departments power perspectives have only been scarcely applied with analyses focusing on structural and contingency determinants, thus lacking a thorough understanding of the drivers of marketing power. Particularly personal power sources have gone unmentioned or been explicitly excluded in marketing power research (Homburg et al. 1999). However, insight on the underlying mechanisms is needed to shed light on the effectiveness of power sources and to design empowering means that counter marketing’s strategic decline and enable marketing to reflect its attributed organizational importance. Acknowledging the shortcomings in previous research, this study proposes a combination of person- and position-based power sources to explore the marketing department’s power. The study applies a framework by Kenny and Wilson (1984) that includes a) expertise and charisma as personal power sources to reveal the role of individual characteristics, b) access to resources, access to information, and relational capital to account for hierarchical or position-related derivation of power, and c) additionally incorporates asset specificity as a context specific moderator. In doing so, the study picks up on research of micro-foundations by investigating the contributions that individuals make to departmental power beyond unit-level or firm-level factors and accounts for the relevance of contextual factors, as they influence the function of power sources. The research propositions are derived from Resource Dependence Theory (RDT) and follow the understanding that a department acquires power by providing resources to the firm that top management depends on in order to achieve its goals. By providing necessary information, business relationships, and expertise, the marketing department’s person-based and position-based factors function as sources of power. The less substitutable and more critical these factors are to overall organizational success, the more power the marketing department gains.

For a long-term survival, companies must master new product creation ambidextrously. Here, ambidexterity refers to the new product development team’s ability to successfully create both really new products and incrementally new products simultaneously. Yet, we lack insights on how ambidexterity can be practically achieved in new product creation. By conducting in-depth interviews with firms in the sport industry with innovation and technology managers who are highly engaged in the new product development processes, we shed light on this yet unexplored interface. Our empirical findings verify that optimized utilization of near and far analogies in new product creation processes facilitates parallel development of the two opposites, really and incrementally new products. Analogical thinking rests upon the idea that individuals use information from a familiar domain (base) to construct new ideas (target), by transferring their base knowledge to the target domain. An analogy is near if the base domain is located in the same use context as the target problem. By contrast, a far analogy implies that the transferred problem solution (base) is situated in another use context than the target. For instance, one of the interviewed ambidextrous companies invented a backpack with an adjustable mesh back (incrementally new product) by looking at their competitors offerings within the same product category (backpacks). In opposition, in order to innovate new climbing pants with an integrated climbing harness (radically new product) the new product creation team of the same company seeked for ideas from other fields such as kite surfing and fire fighting. Also other interviewees, in a similar vein, validate our proposition that by implementing and fostering analogical thinking within the new product creation team ambidexterity in new product creation can be achieved.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze and explore different aspects influencing the employer brand perception of prospective employees. Exclusively focusing on the organization’s external target group of prospective employees, measurement items from the traditional branding literature are adopted to measure the employer brand. The second-order, three-factor model called the ‘external perception of the employer brand’ is used to explore the dual role of prospective employees as organizational consumers. Specifically this paper examines the relationship between product/service evaluation, industry sectors and consumer groups on the one hand and employer brand evaluation on the other hand. All constructs are expected to influence the employer brand evaluation either directly or indirectly. The hypotheses are tested using a sample of 347 prospective employees who were asked to evaluate two international operating organizations from different industry sectors. The model was partially supported and theoretical and managerial implications are explored.

An exploratory study examined the influence of need for cognition (NFC) on individuals’ responses toward different consumer catalogs. The study investigated shopping for clothing using print- and online-catalogs and affiliated- and unaffiliated-catalogs, and used a between subjects experimental design with different sets of up-to-date authentic catalogs. Prior to the main analysis, preliminary results showed differential effects of catalogs on measures of responsiveness (e.g., attitudes toward using a particular catalog to shop). Key findings suggested moderating effects of NFC and revealed strong patterns of interactions between NFC and print- and online-catalogs and between NFC and affiliated- and unaffiliated-catalogs. Other findings indicated that high-NFC individuals processed catalog information more carefully, hunted for additional related information more frequently, and were willing to use the Internet more often to search for comparative products than low-NFC individuals.

International marketing research, in most cases, involves at least two levels (e.g. firms within countries) that make the Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) a suitable data analysis technique. Due to its robustness, the use of HLM in the International Business (IB) research has increased substantially over the last decade. However there is still a lack of standardization in the fundamental issues that hinders the wide spread use of HLM. This study provides unified approach to HLM use in IB research by providing standards for appropriate use of HLM. To achieve this goal, a detailed analysis of the method’s use in 42 IB studies is provided and these studies are compared with 104 non-international studies to determine where IB research stands in terms of HLM use. Finally this study focuses on the good HLM practices and offers suggestions designed to maximize the effective use of HLM and potential in international business studies.

Unlike previous studies, where the emphasis is to predict the export behavior and export performance of firms, this study is focused on understanding the factors that impact firms’ intent to export in the future. Based on the logic of the RBV theory, a firm’s internal resources such as management knowledge and experience, unique product offering and managerial knowledge of international business are key determinants of the firm’s export intention. The importance of management’s commitment to understanding the export behavior of firms is illuminated in Leonidou, Katsikeas and Piercy’s (1998) found that the extent of planning and objective setting for export activities is more intense in firms with committed management than in firms that lack management commitment to export. Given this evidence, we propose: Hla: There is a positive relationship between management’s commitment to export and firms' export intention. The results from Barker and Kaynak (1992) suggest that the most important export barriers for non-exporters are high start-up costs, insufficient information about exporting, and lack of foreign contact. Given this evidence, we propose: H2: There is a significant difference between exporters’ and non-exporters’ perception of risk associated with starting new export ventures. A study by Dichtl, Koglmayr and Mueller (1990) found that the most significant barriers to trade for exporters are price related, while market development costs were found to be the most important barrier to export for non-exporters. Given this evidence, we propose: H3: There is a significant difference between exporters’ and non-exporters’ perception of operational and procedural risk of exporting.

Distinctive from other retailers, fast fashion retailers design, produce, and deliver high fashion goods to consumers in significantly less time. Because of their unique use of their supply chain (Jin, Chang, Matthews & Grupta, 2011), fast fashion retailers, such as Zara and H&M are generating successful financial results when compared to non-fast fashion retailers. For example, profit margins for typical apparel specialty stores are 7 % whereas, fast fashion retailers are 16%, more than double that of comparable stores (Sull & Turconi, 2008). Growth rate is also much higher for fast fashion retailers. While Gap was experiencing negative growth (−1.7%) between 2003–2008, fast fashion retailer’s Zara (Inditex) and H’M experienced a 19.2% and 8.4% growth, respectively (Datamonitor, 2008; Gap Inc., 2009; Hoover’s, 2009; H&M, 2009; Inditex, 2009). Another important aspect of fast fashion retailers’ competitive advantage is their successful management of international operations. H&M sells the majority of their merchandise internationally, selling 84% of their merchandise outside of Nordic countries (H&M, 2010), whereas non-fast fashion retailer Gap only has aspirations to have 30% of its sales outside of North America by 2013 (Gap, 2010), less than half that of H&M’s international sales. Fast fashion retailers also operate in a greater number of countries. Zara has a presence in twice the amount of operating countries (i.e., 77 countries) than Gap (i.e., 31 countries), even though it was established six years later (1975) than Gap (1969).

Social-media marketing is growing rapidly. Social media tools such as blogs, wikis and networks like Facebook and Twitter are quite common in the business-to-consumer context. However the adoption of social media in business-to-business companies is still in an early stage due to privacy, security and content ownership concerns. The aim of our paper is to investigate the current use of social media tools in B2B companies and to analyze potentials and challenges of social media activities in the capital goods industry. We aim to develop managerial implications for B2B companies of how to implement social media activities and how to use social networks effectively for communication and customer retention.

Despite the rapid growth and potential for remote services from a technology and productivity perspective, the biggest challenges that managers often face are gaining customer acceptance and increasing usage of these new innovative services. Recent studies show that customers perceive technology-mediated services as very risky. Risk has been researched most intensely in the context of consumer behavior. Only few studies focused on risk perceptions of B2B services customers.

The global wine industry has undergone considerable change in the last decade. Worldwide competition in the sale of wine has intensified — producers are dealing with an oversupply of wine (Pretorius, 2007), and the old world producers of Europe are under assault by the new world producers of Australia, California, and Chile (Echikson, 2004; Mora, 2006). While the proportion of wine production under the control of large multinational companies has increased significantly, a majority of wineries remain small or medium in size (Dorozynski, 2010; Story et al., 2005). Since most wine SMEs exist in locations remote from their consumer base, both distribution of wine to, and communication with wine consumers is challenging. Wine tourism has become a significant driver of economies dominated by the wine sector. One of the best possible alternative strategies to ensure growth is to focus on direct marketing, using for example traditional direct channels such as wine clubs and cellar door sales, but also newer digital technologies and online channels.

The use of these social media has grown rapidly over the last decade. For example, the social media site LinkedIn was founded in 2003 and now connects over 100 million business people including director level or higher employees at 499 of the fortune 500. Using communication and relationship marketing theory, we develop a framework to examine social media’s impact on business-to-business relationships. The framework will be used to examine the channel of communication, the content of messages, the level of interactivity, and the number of contacts within and between firms and how these dimensions of interactive communication influence the relational outcomes.

With the rapid diffusion of the Internet, social networking is receiving greater attention from both scholars and e-retailers worldwide. Though the different influences of national culture and the role of social networking on customer online shopping behavior have been highlighted by recent research (Dennis, Morgan, Wright and Jayawardhena, 2010; Goodrich and de Mooij, 2011; Pookulangara and Koesler, 2011), relatively few studies have empirically investigated developing markets (Cheolho, 2009). In particular, the great potential effects of national culture on customer social networking in e-commerce have been sparingly investigated (Gefen and Heart, 2006; Ji et al. 2010; Pookulangara and Koesler, 2011). No study to date, has empirically examined these effects both at the country level and the individual level.

Technology acceptance model, or TAM, (Davis 1989) explained consumer behavior in adopting new technology and identified crucial factors, which affect users’ acceptance. The model was later extended and incorporated social influence factors, such as subjective norms, voluntariness and image (Venkatesh and Davis 2000). Both TAM and extended TAM (TAM2) have been used extensively in informatics and marketing research (Ma and Liu 2004; Schepers and Wetzel 2007). The technology in focus ranges from electronic and voice mail to online learning (Roca, Chui Martínez 2006). The recent trend is the application of these models in the study of the smartphone usage (e.g.,Verkasalo, López-Nicolás, Molina-Castillo, and Bouwman 2010).

The rapid expansion of m-commerce has brought much convenience and pleasure to users, as well as huge profits to mobile business companies. In many situations, to provide successful mobile service, companies must collect users’ personal information. For example, a kind of promising mobile service, context-aware service (CAS), need to use consumer profiles, real-time context and consumption records before providing personalized service. In these instances, consumer privacy has emerged as a prominent concern to the detriment of both individuals and companies. This paper focuses on the impact of the privacy concerns on consumer intention in contemporary complex m-commerce. A comprehensive theoretical model argues that individuals’ intention to disclose information depends on privacy calculus, which is determined by benefits and risks beliefs. The findings support the hypothesis that privacy concerns have significant negative impact on consumer intentions. Also this study provides potential tactics to alleviate the obstacle.

Technology is one of the most effective marketing strategies for providing companies with sustainable growth and increasing the profitability by differentiating products and services. For example, optical disc technology has successfully differentiated the Blue-Ray DVD market without cannibalizing the traditional DVD market. Recent innovations in 3D technology have rapidly expanded its application areas from movie theaters to computers, HD television, and recently to a projector product category. These technology products are often highly innovative and offer great product differentiation.

Online trust has become an important and emerging topic for marketers. Trust is crucial in order to build long-term relationships with customers and has shown to have a direct link on behavioral intent (Morgan and Hunt, 1994, Doney and Cannon, 1997). Building trust is especially difficult online since this medium does not offer the look, feel and interaction of a more traditional medium, thereby creating an uncertain environment for the shopper (Yoon, 2002). Bart et al. (2005) found that the factors that influence online trust “are significantly different for different Web site categories and customer groups.” Despite these findings, very little research has examined the potential variances in the drivers of online trust between generational cohorts. This lack of research is surprising considering the existence of literature that has established that generational cohorts value different variables when shopping (Schewe and Meredith, 2004). Therefore, a need remains to analyze the drivers of online trust across generational cohorts.

Representations of the “proper meal” have been studied as a symbol of the idealized family and as a means to define the roles and power distribution among family members. In the context of China’s rapidly changing urban environment, this study examines how family members depict “proper meals” to understand the role of the family in perpetuating Chinese values. Chinese culture is uniquely underpinned by Confucian tenets of order, harmony, and relationships that are embodied by a complex system of relating to others called Guanxi. We conclude that Jia Ren Guanxi which is specific to family relationships perpetuates five aspects of the Chinese proper meal: (1) tasty and nutritious food, (2) warm and pleasant atmosphere, (3) relaxed and cheerful mood, (4) light and happy conversation, and (5) all family members present. We conclude that the Chinese proper meal propagates three types of social capital: identity, emotional, and social norms. Social capital, in turn, reinforces Jia Ren Guanxi. We point out that diminished observance of the Chinese proper meal may reduce Chinese social capital with important implications for the relational nature of Chinese society.

Excessive alcohol consumption among young people remains one of the most important social problems in most developed countries (Szmigin

et al

, 2008), and in Poland, where the research reported in this paper was carried out, binge drinking among college students is on the rise (Makara-Studzinska & Urbańska, 2007). Further, changing drinking culture among young female consumers and the convergence of male and female alcohol consumption have been of particular interest to researchers in the recent years (Carpenter

et al

, 2007). Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate young female consumers’ drinking motives using consumer collages.

This study examines Kahle’s List of Values (LOV) as potential antecedents to ecologically conscious consumer behavior (ECCB) among Japanese and British seniors. Theory suggests older adults have a different value base to younger adults, and empirical studies have demonstrated LOV to be predicative of a wide range of consumer behaviors; yet there is a research gap in that LOV and ECCB have not been brought together. Results suggest that LOV is a useful instrument for gaining insights into the ECCB of senior adults, and that cultural differences emerge. These findings have implications for the marketing of ethical and environmentally friendly products to an important and growing global segment.

Marketers form segments and target these with products. However a segment, like any group, differs noticeably from an individual. Even within the best constructed segment heterogeneity remains so there exists a problem: What taste precisely do you target?

The combination of value, brand and relationship strategies to acquire and retain customers has been described as customer equity management. This study used a multinomial logistic model to investigate the economic utility gained by switching brands, as driven by the value offering, the brand and relationship building. A total of 1600 online questionnaires were emailed to an Australian consumer panel. Customers from four mobile telephony networks returned 409 eligible questionnaires. The results confirm larger logistic regression coefficients for value equity. As expected, value is more important to customers locked in by long-term airtime contracts.

An important phenomenon in the marketing of frequently purchased consumer products is brand proliferation. While developing, introducing, and marketing new brands or sub-brands within a product category costs money, how far can they influence the market for the product category as a whole? This question is especially important in a mature market in which there are already many brands and the perceived differences between a new brand and existing brands may be small. When a company already has one or more brands in the product category, a new brand introduction by the same company may also result in cannibalization of its existing brands. This paper contributes to the literature by developing a conceptual model and deriving some theoretical results on the effects of brand proliferation on category expansion and cannibalization.

In the advertising and marketing communications field, there has been a lengthy stream of research regarding the depictions of African Americans in advertising and other forms of marketing communications (Bailey 2006; Cox 1970; Dominick and Greenberg 1970; Kassarjian 1969; Shuey, King, and Griffith 1953; Taylor and Lee 1995). African-American representation in the media has improved over the years in terms of roles. However, there are still many examples where negative associations are often connected with Black Americans.

This study integrates the resource-based view and the equity theory in order to provide the theoretical background of store manager’s impact on contact employees’ beahviours. We employ a hierarchical research design and draw evidence from both store managers and front-line employees in order to investigate whether manager’s IMO accounts for front-line employees’ IMO, market orientation and organizational identification. Moreover, we investigate the moderating effect of organizational tenure on the aforementioned relationships.

This study integrates existing streams of literature in order to provide new academic insights regarding servicescapes’ and organizational climate’s perceptions impact on employees’ performance. Employee approach/avoidance behaviors towards their workplace are proposed to mediate these relationships and employee cognitive and emotional reactions to the tangible and intangible environment are suggested to be antecedents of these behaviors.

This study integrates the social identity, the social learning and the psychological contract perspective in order to explore branch manager’s role for diffusing internal market orientation philosophy across store employees in a retail banking context. As branch managers constitute the main linking pin between contact employees and top management, we stress some employee-related gains from their IMO adoption as well as some contact employees’ behaviours which enhance customers’ perceptions of service quality.

Businesses increasingly rely upon creative problem-solving from boundary spanning employees. For sales and service organizations implementing a value-added model, creative boundary spanners enhance customer experience and overall performance. Thus, defining and assessing creative performance and its antecedents and consequences is paramount. Using Amabile’s (1983) framework, we develop and test a creative performance model using salesperson and manager data matched with archival performance metrics. Our findings suggest that a) effort, emotional intelligence and technical knowledge predict boundary spanner creativity, b) creativity significantly impacts service ability and overall performance, and c) managerial feedback positively influences the relationship between employee creativity and performance.

As noted by Fournier & Yao (1997) loyalty is a relational phenomenon and dynamic; relational models are needed to understand how loyalty changes over time. If we apply the Persuasion Knowledge Model (Friestad & Wright 1994) to loyalty than we must consider that loyalty is dynamic as customers (and competitors) learn from marketer attempts. This paper demonstrates how the critical incident technique can be used to identify persuasion episodes (cases where loyalty has been increased or decreased).

As commitment is pivotal to keeping long-term business relationships, it is important to know its antecedents and consequents. This paper aims to assess a nomological network in which commitment is directly explained by relationship value, and two alternative theoretical models are proposed to portrait the influence of both dependence and customer's firm strategic orientation on relationship value and commitment. Though exploratory, results seem to give more support to a model where relationship value is a partial mediator of the influence of dependence and customer’s firm strategic orientation on commitment.

Mass media advertising is more complex and fragmented today than ever, contributing to the already difficult task of targeting and reaching consumers in an effective and efficient manner. Conventional marketing methods, such as television, print and radio, are not as effective as they were just 10 years ago (Smith, Coyle, Lightfoot and Scott 2007). Thus, marketers of goods and services continually search for more productive communication channels through which to advertise their messages to the relevant audiences. For example, in today’s environment, a myriad of people including public health officials and academicians are trying to promote positive attitudes and behaviors related to the environment and sustainability.

Researchers have extensively studied gambling motivations and behaviors, with most research focusing on one type of gambling activity or on one type of gambler (problem or recreational). Little research has focused on the differences in motivations between the various types of gambling activities or the various types of gamblers. Furthermore, no study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, conceptually attempts to understand the multiple control mechanisms that influence gambling motivations or the external experiences a gambler may encounter that impact and change these control mechanisms and motivations. This research seeks to address these gaps in the literature by conceptually developing a framework that examines the flow of gambling motivations and behavior through the perceived locus of control and self-control the gambler displays and examines the external events or experiences that impact this flow. Furthermore, this framework distinguishes and compares the differences in flow as affected by these two control mechanisms through various gaming activities.

Previous studies on consumer sales promotion have overlooked the effects of free toys offered with children’s meals. Recently, manufacturer and retailer spending on toys (i.e., tangible items usually offered as in-pack incentives at the time of promoted product purchase) as sales promotions have noticeably increased. Yet, little is known of consumer perceptions of the use of free toys, as sales promotions with fast food, The current research reports how free toys are responded to, by adults, and it also looks at the moderating effects of need for cognition.

From Native American burial grounds to present day corpse refrigeration, laying loved ones to rest has been a steadfast part of American culture. Nearly every American community has a cemetery filled with unique historical relics and memorials revealing insight into the lives of people of the past. Many people feel a sense of responsibility to keep the memory of their ancestors alive through celebrating their lives with respect and consideration (Thursby 2006). One way in which individuals memorialize their deceased loved ones is through continuing the ritual of gift-giving long after their loved ones have passed away. With online retail companies like Memorials.com, PersonalCreations.com, and BereavementStore.com, that offer personalized cemetery gifts, it appears that consumer spending on their deceased loved ones does not necessarily end with the funeral. Gift-giving to the deceased occurs at both small scale places (e.g., a loved one’s grave) and large scale places (e.g., public memorials). Post-death consumption practices allow the living an alternative and healthy way to deal with grief by continuing to live with their loved ones (Walter 1999) instead of letting go completely (O’Donohoe and Turley 2005). Since the exchange of gifts are a means of social communication among individuals (Mick and DeMoss 1990) and can be used to construct and reinforce social identities of both the giver and receiver (Grainger 1998), this practice allows the relationship to continue and offers the ability to create meaning after a death (O’Donohoe and Turley 2005). In contributing to the consumer culture literature, this study investigates the gift-giving system in the context of items left at cemeteries by gravesite visitors (i.e., friends of the deceased, surviving family members). The purpose of this study is threefold: 1) to develop a taxonomy of tangible gifts offered to the deceased, 2) to understand the symbolic meanings behind these items, and 3) to examine the scope of underlying motives in gift-giving to the deceased.

Peru is a country with the highest mortality rate from traffic accidents in Latin America, More than 42% of fatal accidents occur at times of lower traffic of cars and pedestrians, and 35% occur between Fridays and Saturdays, which can be correlated with the driving of vehicles by persons under conditions of drunkenness (Ministerio de Salud del PERU, 2009). Concomitantly, in recent years, there is an increasing variety of ads that companies use to influence alcohol consumption (Saffer, 2002).

Recent studies indicate that consumers perceive a benefit in buying products from companies that embrace Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). However, few studies have performed an analysis relating the company’s CSR with not only the consumer’s behavior but also their income. Therefore, the purpose of the article isto identify the influence of client income (low and high) on client perceptions of benefit, value, and price justice related to CSR practices, and on their ultimate purchase intentions. This study considered cases where the socially responsible company chargesa higher price than the competitor companies.

Influentials are individuals whose opinions and behaviors affect other people’s choices. Online influentials include bloggers. We performed exploratory research to understand how bloggers use their influence to support commercial interventions in their online space. We collected and analyzed longitudinal data from three blogs, and interviewed the author of each. In selecting the cases to study, we considered the diversity of the narratives and also the existence of communication related to products in the blog. Our results indicate that blogs are means for bloggers to disclose aspects of themselves through the blog narrative. Readers develop ties with both the blog and the blogger, and homophilic traits are relevant to explaining their choice of blog affiliation. Commercial intervention on blogs generates buzz when it is aligned to the blog’s language, when message content fits the blog’s narrative, and when the product is close to the blog’s subject of interest.

This article explores the effects that consumers’ anticipated emotions, attitudes, perception of loss, and subjective norms have on the extent in which a desire (not a must) for a product or service comes to be perceived as a necessity (a must). The findings indicate that emotions such as joy, interest or surprise, as well as viewing products and services as useful, practical, or suited for problem solving, tend to be more associated with the conversion from desires to necessities. In addition, a strong impact on consumers’ perceptions about desires becoming necessities was observed from the consideration of difficulty, pain or problems derived from the eventual loss or lack of access to products and services. Managerial implications and recommendations for future research are presented.

The proposed study examines the effect of individual proneness for guilt and shame on conspicuous consumption. Chaudhuri et al (2001) define conspicuous consumption as “a deliberate engagement in symbolic and visible purchase, possession and usage of products and services imbued with scarce economic and cultural capital with motivation to communicate a distinctive self-image to others”. Such consumption has been considered sinful, wasteful and of little or no utilitarian value. While most studies of consumption look at the positive aspects of a purchase (like brand loyalty’s) rarely are variables like guilt and shame factored into consumer research studies. Guilt is seen as a product of a person's behavior –“I did something awful”, whereas shame is the feelings brought on making public a particular behavior. Conspicuous consumption, as a construct, is related to two variables: 1) concern for appropriateness and 2) brand experience in addition to both shame and quilt proness, It is known that the brand experience to brand loyalty to willingness to buy relationships are well established in the literature. However, studying the relationships between a consumer's concern for appropriateness and both shame and guilt proness will provide new insights in the literature.

Traditionally, search is viewed as an expense or an effort that an individual may resist to waste. In this paper, the author argues that in product-return situations, where consumers are not compensated for the search effort they initially invested towards product acquisition, higher search effort will lower their product return intentions. However, viewing search as an experience or a pleasure activity may have reverse implications, since it is argued that it weakens the negative search -product return intention relationship. The author introduces product satisfaction as a partial mediator between search and product return intentions. Furthermore, the author develops and tests competing hypotheses regarding the interplay between the variables. Results show that search as an expense influences product return intentions positively. Product satisfaction was found to be a significant partial mediator. Furthermore, results show that search as an expense relates negatively to product satisfaction whereas search as an experience relates positively to product satisfaction.. However, the study did not support search as an experience to be a moderator. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

The study of impulse buying began in the early 1950’s. Applebaum (1950) focuses on “buying which presumably was not planned by the customer before entering a store, but which resulted from a stimulus created by a sales promotional device in the store”. This early definition does not differentiate impulse buying from unplanned purchasing. Here, any item purchased that was not planned is considered an impulse. As later research on the subject follows, impulse and unplanned purchasing can be viewed as two separate constructs each with its own individual trait characteristics. The above definition mentions the presence of an external stimulus prompting the consumer to act impulsively. Here the consumer acts in an impulsive manner due to external cues as opposed to internal feelings.

Manipulation is the act of cleverly or deviously influencing someone or something. When individuals perceive a loss of control in a situation, they feel manipulated. Feeling in control is an invaluable state of mind for consumers in general. In fact, the psychology literature supports the notion that individuals derive more satisfaction from interpersonal interactions when they feel in control (Shutz, 1966).

Eight year’s ago, the Department of Marketing at Miami University decided to offer all senior marketing students an experiential learning senior capstone to gradually replace our current case-oriented capstone.

The world of marketing provides a rich environment for analyzing interaction and exchange. Because the broader world in which we live and work is not divided into categories as precisely as academic topics, as professors we must attempt to teach marketing within the broader context of the real world and build a broad framework from which students can understand marketing.

Rapidly increasing tuition fees, intensifying competition and higher rankings have led to rising expectations from MBA students across Asia. These developments require a strong and continuing focus on improving the MBA teaching and student education experience in Asia’s up-and-coming business schools. I chaired a task force to recommend ways to enhance all teaching-related aspects of the MBA programs at the National University of Singapore (NUS). One of the surprising outcomes was that the teaching quality is not primarily dependent on the individual instructor but on the interplay of four key stakeholders: the instructor, the department, the MBA office and the deanery. While every school has its peculiarities, the review process can be applied to any MBA program.

Teens love spending time at the mall with all of its social and material attractions, and retailers certainly view teens as a lucrative market. Companies spend about $17 billion a year marketing to the millennial generation, which dwarfs spending targeting any previous generation (NDP Group 2010). The millennial kids that are in middle adolescence spend more time than any other age group shopping, and they typically shop without the presence of an adult decision maker (NDP Group 2010). The fact that they are bombarded with marketing messages coupled with the independence they have in decision making, has raised concerns about their ability to make considered decisions, to cope with persuasion and marketplace deception, and to shop with competence. Teens are able to express what they love and what they hate about shopping (e.g., Mallalieu 2001) but what do we really know about their interactions with retailers? The present research delves into the complex relationship between retailers and teens by exploring the thoughts and interactions of retailers and teens in a mall environment. Various aspects of retailer/teen interactions are explored, including shopping competence, persuasion detection, persuasion coping, and retailer and teen strategies for dealing with each other. Theoretical contributions are discussed and managerial strategies aimed at improving the quality of the interactions between retailers and teens are proposed.

The Editors have retracted this chapter [1] because it shows significant overlap with a previously published article [2]. The author has not responded to any correspondence from the Editors about this retraction.