International Journal of Research in Marketing最新文献

Firms operating in non-contractual settings apply customer reactivation initiatives such as email messages to stimulate customers who have become inactive temporarily or permanently to resume their transaction activities. Thus, firms need to know which customers are inactive, and when a customer becomes inactive. Existing approaches struggle to distinguish active from inactive customers and do not provide time-scale estimates of when to send reactivation mails. To address these shortcomings, we develop an approach to target and time the sending of reactivation mails. Building on control chart methods, we introduce a gamma–gamma control chart, modelling the average customer interpurchase time and the variation therein to determine activity boundaries. Crossing these boundaries signals a potential change in a customer’s purchasing activity, providing a signal to initiate customer reactivation. A field experiment in the greetings and gifts industry, supported by several additional analyses, illustrates the improved performance of our approach when it comes to signaling customer activity against a wide range of competing models. The improved performance of our method occurs particularly in settings where customers vary strongly in purchase and inactivity patterns.

This research applies Cognitive Energetics Theory (CET) to explain when and why consumers engage in sustainable behavior. Across six studies, we find a positive interaction effect of arousal and openness-to-change on sustainable behaviors. In particular, openness-to-change (vs conservation) increases the likelihood of engaging in effortful sustainable behaviors in a high-arousal state rather than in a low-arousal state. Interestingly, our results reveal that this interactive effect is explained by the tendency of consumers to believe that the target sustainable behavior requires less effort, when they are in a high-arousal state and endorsing openness-to-change. Moreover, perceived effort is positively related to sustainable behavior for experienced consumers but negatively related to the behavior for less experienced consumers. In addition, the effect of value and arousal on perceived effort is stronger among less experienced consumers but attenuated among more experienced consumers. Thus, arousal can serve as a catalyst to enhance value-consistent sustainable behaviors and help the less experienced consumers form habits. These findings contribute to CET by highlighting the important roles that values and arousal play in the motivational forces that drive and restrain sustainable behaviors. The results improve our understanding of how to motivate value-consistent sustainable behaviors, with implications for both marketers and policy-makers.

We consider the internal validity of estimates of the effects of brand beliefs on brand evaluations when beliefs are measured with error. Consumer research suggests numerous errors that may impact belief measures. However, the literature has not determined precisely why and how myriad types of error matter for the evaluation-belief relationship. Furthermore, the literature has not explicitly considered what is necessary and sufficient to control for different types of belief error when using the latent general factor approach. We show that the important distinction for empirical research is not the origin of the error per se but its relationship to affective evaluation. Error related to brand evaluation has an inflationary effect on estimates of the evaluation-belief relationship while error unrelated to brand evaluation has an attenuating effect. We use a bifactor structural equations model to decompose belief measures into general and specific dimensions. The model uses bias free variation in specific beliefs to identify effects on brand evaluation while controlling for a general belief dimension correlated with evaluation. Compared to models that do not adjust for the bias, estimates of the bias corrected marginal effects are smaller but positive and significant.

Salespeople routinely sell to multiple members with influence over the purchasing decision in the customer organization. Given these buying center members’ varying needs, wants, perspectives, and motivations, dispositions toward a sales discussion can be heterogeneous. Salespeople may encounter situations in which members of the buying center react positively to the sales discussion, with the exception of a dissenter who exerts a negative impact on the salesperson in the interaction. Through a qualitative research design, this article provides insight into salespeople’s approaches in dealing with a dissenter in the buying center. The findings provide an integrated understanding of salespeople’s experiences of dissent encounters in business-to-business selling. In-meeting mitigation and post-meeting remediation strategies are advanced along with influencing situational factors. In illustrating how salespeople handle dissenters, the article contributes to scholarship, provides managerial guidance, and advances avenues for future research.

Product listing platforms commonly use generalized second-price auctions to select competing advertisers for limited ad positions. However, when advertisers are asymmetric, position auctions may confound the post-auction competition structure and thus endogenize the bidders’ values of the ad positions. We build an analytical model to examine the impact of position auctions on an asymmetric market structure, which consists of a mass marketer and two specialized advertisers of heterogeneous quality efficiencies. The advertisers bid for two ad slots and then compete for the market in price and quality. We find that the asymmetric market structure may increase the uncertainty of the auction outcomes, which then may induce the advertisers to underbid using a conservative strategy profile in the locally-envy free equilibrium. Consequently, the auction outcome may adversely include the less-efficient specialized advertiser. This result is stronger than the position paradox in the classic auction literature, as the advertiser with a competitive advantage may be driven out and obtain zero profit.

In the past few decades, the modern marketplace has offered consumers a proliferation of models for consumption based on sharing and access. Extant literature provides systematic examinations of motives for consuming products through the sharing economy on the demand side, but factors that affect consumers' asset-providing decisions on the supply side remain understudied. The current paper explores whether the socioeconomic environment one grew up in might produce a long-lasting impact on willingness to sharing one’s unused assets. Results from the analysis of a national-level field dataset and six preregistered studies (combined N = 45,289) reveal that lower childhood socioeconomic status can hinder consumers’ asset-providing behavior, an effect that holds beyond the influence of other factors such as current SES and asset availability. We identify greater territorial feelings towards one’s assets as a central mechanism driving the decreased asset-providing behavior of consumers with a lower childhood socioeconomic background, and we show that asset providers’ closeness to potential borrowers attenuates the negative impact of lower childhood SES.

This research examines the interdependencies in users’ sequential app adoptions within and across diverse app categories. We employ a Zero-inflated Negative Binomial (ZINB) model to analyze a unique, granular, and individual-level mobile app adoption dataset, revealing three main findings. First, users’ app adoption decisions are highly history-dependent and category-specific in a nonlinear fashion. Early adoption can enhance subsequent downloads within the same category for app categories with high needs evolvement and horizontal differentiation (e.g., Game and Education apps). However, it may crowd out subsequent downloads in other categories with low needs evolvement and horizontal differentiation (e.g., Communication and Social media apps). Second, these effects are further moderated by users’ individual characteristics such as app usage tenure and phone price. Third, there exist nontrivial app adoption spillovers across app categories. For example, users’ adoptions of apps with relatively high hedonic values (e.g., Game and Music apps) can suppress their subsequent need for apps with relatively high utilitarian values (e.g., Education and Online banking apps), and vice versa. Together, these results offer novel managerial implications for app developers and platforms to promote apps in different categories based on users’ adoption histories.

The advent of digitization has allowed firms to collect high-frequency data - subjective and objective - to monitor their service performance. This paper proposes a methodological framework to help firms understand the value of collecting these data. We apply the framework to novel high-frequency, individual-level, cross-sectional and time-series measures of subjective post-purchase perceptions (via surveys) and objective operational performance from a quick service restaurant and an auto rental company. Our approach allows for the quantification of the statistical and economic significance of collecting high-frequency subjective measures in the presence of their objective counterpart. In both settings, our results show that not collecting subjective service measures can lead to economically significant biases in resource allocation. We also find the presence of both within- and across-individual selection in survey responses, with the latter having a much bigger impact on the results. Our findings advance the literature on the measurement and management of service performance and provide insights to managers for forecasting and resource allocation in service settings.

Does the local presence of premium branded stores with strong associations to a product group help promote the relevant category as a whole? Based on the Starbucks example, this paper documents such a demand spillover effect for coffee across channels and firms: The firm’s stores stimulate coffee demand in mass-market grocery channels, benefiting rival firms that target consumption at home. I show the spillover at the household level, as well as with retail scanner data, employing a demand model to account for supply-side responses. To establish causality, I use a strict fixed effects specification with trend controls, and also validate the findings using instrumental variables based on the supply-side advantage to operating chain stores in proximate markets. In a representative market, the presence of a Starbucks stores boosts rival packaged coffee sales by 1.2%. The increase appears consistent a consumption stimulation effect of Starbucks stores acting as environmental cues for coffee, their main product. Evidence from other chains confirms the spillover, mainly from more premium brands with high demand-stimulating potential to lower-end mass products. The effect builds over time, and as cue theories predict, interacts positively with past consumption, suggesting a reinforcing effect on consumption habits.

Although donors may prefer contributing to causes that help those who are socially closer to them, we propose that donating to socially distant beneficiaries makes donors feel happier. This occurs because donating to distant (vs. close) others results in an experience of greater benevolence. We further identify regulatory focus as a boundary condition of these effects. In one choice study and four experiments featuring close to 2,500 respondents, we demonstrate this phenomenon across diverse samples and varying forms of beneficiaries. Our research extends prior work examining the impact of recognition from others on charitable behavior to examine donors’ self-evaluations, and how they impact happiness.