Journal of Interactive Marketing最新文献

A carefully tailored tone in response to a complaint on social media can create positive emotions for an upset customer. However, very few studies have identified what response tones, based on an established theory, would be most effective for complaint management. This study conceptualizes a service agent's response tones based on Ballmer and Brennenstuhl's (1981) classification of speech acts and examines how an agent's use of speech acts elicit positive emotions for the complainant. Ballmer and Brennenstuhl classify speech acts within the dimensions of conventionality and dialogicality, and they suggest the two dimensions interact. Thus, we examine the impact of each dimension of speech acts and the interactions between the two dimensions on the elicitation of positive emotions for complainants. We collected over 100,000 tweets and classified firm agents' speech acts and complainants' emotions by designing deep learning architectures (i.e., bi-directional recurrent neural networks). Our fixed-effect regression results show that a low level of each speech act leads to the elicitation of customers' positive emotions but that the combination of the two erodes the individual advantages. This study expands Ballmer and Brennenstuhl's (1981) speech act classification from a speaker's perspectives to a listener's perspectives by contextualizing it in an analysis of service agents' tones and their roles in eliciting positive emotions among complainants.

Although marketers have been using various message tactics to breathe life into their brands, the concepts of animism and animistic cues, particularly in social media marketing, have received little theoretical and empirical attention. Therefore, we conducted two studies to uncover what drives animistic thinking on social media, how animism is linked to anthropomorphism, how animism can benefit brands online, and what the boundary conditions for this phenomenon are. The findings demonstrate that animistic (vs. non-animistic) cues elicit animistic thinking, which leads to more favorable brand evaluations. This effect is moderated by superstitious beliefs. The results provide new knowledge for both marketing researchers and practitioners, revealing that it is easier to activate animism than anthropomorphism on social media and that such activation can be done via easily devisable cues (such as simple movement), particularly when addressing highly superstitious consumers.

Product reviews are critical high-scope non-marketing cues for consumers to obtain useful product information from various perspectives. However, the effects of inconsistent reviews among multiple sources on new product sales are underexplored. Based on the cue-diagnosticity framework, this research investigates how multi-source review inconsistency (MSRI) affects purchase intention and new product sales in the context of the U.S. automobile industry when firms signal product quality through advertising as a low-scope cue. Using multi-methods of an experiment and secondary data analysis, the results show the negative effects of MSRI on purchase intention and new product sales and explain the mechanisms through information diagnosticity. Further, the findings show how advertising as a low-scope cue can mitigate the effect of multi-source inconsistency on new product sales.

Advergames are digital games through which advertisers promote their brands. While many studies have explored the influence of the gamification of advertising, little is known about the effects of important advergame attributes such as gaming platform (device used to play games) and game speed (overall pace of games) on consumers' immediate and delayed memory, delayed attitude, and delayed intention to purchase the advertised brands. We address these gaps by conducting two experiments with fictitious brands (Study 1) and real brands that vary in the degree of familiarity (Study 2). Results reveal that a PC-based advergame generates better delayed memory than a mobile-based advergame, while gaming platform does not affect immediate memory. Also, it interacts with game speed only in the delayed situation. Brand familiarity moderates the effects of gaming platform and game speed on brand attitude and purchase intention in such a way that unfamiliar brands are more effective than familiar ones.

The emergence of Location-Based Mobile Advertising (LBA) on mobile phones is a recent phenomenon that has profoundly changed consumers' shopping behavior. In this context, little is known about the influence of LBA on the purchasing intention of users. Based on the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) and the Privacy Calculus Theory (PCT), this study develops an impact model and empirically tests it using structural equation modeling (SEM) with data from 294 users in Germany of the PAYBACK mobile app. It was found that purchase intentions are influenced by the constructs “User Attitude towards LBA” and “Disclosure of Personal Information.” “User Attitude towards LBA” is dependent on how users perceive the various app functionalities. These effects are significantly enhanced by the app's “Location Context Quality.” The construct “Intention to disclose personal information” depends on the constructs “Perceived benefit” and “Perceived risks of disclosure of personal information,” while “Perceived benefit” is also enhanced by the “Location Context Quality” of the app.

While past research has extensively investigated how a specific product attracts attention, little is known about how the display of other products in the same visual field affects the consumer's attention. Drawing from the Biased Competition Model and the Gestalt Principles, the current research seeks to examine the effect of distracting products' similarity and proximity on a focal product in a goal-oriented online shopping episode. Specifically, in Study 1 (n = 38), using eye-tracking, we show that consumers allocate the most visual attention to distracting products when they are both categorically similar and spatially near the focal product. We replicate this finding in Study 2 (n = 211) and results additionally suggest that under such distraction, consumers are less likely to accurately identify the focal product. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.