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1 – 10 of 262Shengliang Zhang, Guanyu Tang, Xiaodong Li and Ai Ren
The COVID-19 pandemic has made contactless services such as those provided by robots increasingly pervasive. Some stores are gradually adopting service robots to sell products…
Abstract
Purpose
The COVID-19 pandemic has made contactless services such as those provided by robots increasingly pervasive. Some stores are gradually adopting service robots to sell products, which has not been explored in previous research. This study aims to explore how appearance personification of service robots affects customer decision-making in the product recommendation context.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on authentic in-store product recommendation service interactions, an experiment for three simulated scenarios was conducted and data was collected from 338 valid samples.
Findings
The results show appearance personification has a positive impact on customer purchase behavior while it has negative impacts on customer decision time and degree of hesitation.
Originality/value
This study not only enriches the literature on application scenarios of service robots but also supplements the literature on various customer decision-making variables in the field of service robots. It provides important practical guidance for designing robots to optimize their impact on customer decision-making.
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Stephen Brown and Christopher Hackley
Simon Cowell, the impresario behind The X Factor, a popular television talent show, has often been compared to P.T. Barnum, the legendary nineteenth century showman. This paper…
Abstract
Purpose
Simon Cowell, the impresario behind The X Factor, a popular television talent show, has often been compared to P.T. Barnum, the legendary nineteenth century showman. This paper aims to examine the alleged parallels in detail and attempts to assess this “Barnum reborn” argument.
Design/methodology/approach
Putative parallels between the impresarios are considered under the aegis of two long‐standing, if contentious, historical “theories”: time's cycle and the great man thesis.
Findings
Seven broad similarities between the showmen are identified: vulgarity, hyperbole, rivalry, publicity, duplicity, liminality and history. In each case, the arguments pro and con are explored, as is humanity's propensity to personify.
Originality/value
In accordance with the iconic literary critic Harold Bloom, who “strikes texts together to seek if they spark”, this paper strikes two celebrated showmen together to generate historical sparks.
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Dominique Braxton and Loraine Lau-Gesk
Frontline service providers are a key touchpoint in a customer’s overall experience with a brand. Though they are recognized as important contributors to brand experiences…
Abstract
Purpose
Frontline service providers are a key touchpoint in a customer’s overall experience with a brand. Though they are recognized as important contributors to brand experiences, service providers have received relatively little attention in both experienced marketing and branding research. This paper aims to illuminate the importance of understanding factors that contribute to the role services providers play within the environmental context of the customer’s brand journey.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses two experimental studies to show that greater customer happiness and customer loyalty could be achieved through collective brand personification whereby the frontline service provider’s identity and core values align with those of the brand persona and store environment.
Findings
Specifically, findings reveal that customer happiness increases because of feelings of belongingness and greater brand authenticity when the service provider aligns with the retailer’s brand persona and store environment.
Research limitations/implications
While this study gets us closer to understanding how managers can leverage human capital in the retail service environment, there are opportunities to further explore issues such as the impact of collective brand personification on the employee.
Practical implications
Given the strong desire companies have to bolster customer happiness to increase brand loyalty, the findings bolster the importance of understanding the influential factors associated with frontline service providers. Their role in creating optimal customer experiences should not be underestimated.
Social implications
As an important cautionary note, firms should take care when creating the appearance and personality-based occupational qualifications by considering social norms and the impact on societal well-being (e.g. self-consciousness and exclusion can lead to serious illnesses and including depression). Study shows that people have an inherent need to feel accepted and belong to social groups that help to construct and affirm their self-concept, and appreciate opportunities that empower them to seize control against exclusion. Therefore, appearance and personality-based occupational qualifications should be strategically aligned with the image and goals of the firm, and not subject to management bias from an unconscious reaction to an applicant’s physical and interpersonal presentation.
Originality/value
The present study builds on both customer experience and branding literature by examining the relationship between customer happiness and collective brand personification – where the frontline service provider’s identity and core values align with those of the brand. Two experiments test the hypotheses that customer happiness increases because of feelings of belongingness with the brand and the consumer’s perception of the brand’s authenticity when the customer service provider aligns with the brand’s identity and core values.
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Ebenezer Nana Banyin Harrison and Wi-Suk Kwon
This study aims to explore how brands use brand personification techniques in real-time marketing on social media, particularly Twitter, and examine how these techniques impact…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to explore how brands use brand personification techniques in real-time marketing on social media, particularly Twitter, and examine how these techniques impact consumer engagement, moderated by brand-event congruence levels.
Design/methodology/approach
Data included 464 tweets posted by 95 brands around three large events in 2019. The types of brand personification techniques and the level of brand-event congruence applied by the tweets were content-analyzed, and regression analyses were conducted to examine their linkages to consumer engagement metrics.
Findings
Results confirmed the use of diverse personification techniques in brands’ real-time marketing tweets as in the previous literature. The study also revealed a new personification technique, tacit expression, not reported in previous literature. The study also showed that the overall effectiveness of multimedia-based (vs caption-based) personification techniques in increasing consumer engagement on social media was greater, but their relative effectiveness varied depending on whether or not the event was functionally congruent with the brand.
Practical implications
The findings offer valuable suggestions to brand managers regarding prioritizing brand personification techniques and aligning brands’ social media marketing with real-time events to maximize the effectiveness of real-time marketing in boosting consumer engagement.
Originality/value
This research offers insights into the dynamic effects of different brand personification techniques in the new context of real-time marketing, extending the scope of literature on brand personification and anthropomorphism. The revelation of a new type of brand personification not captured in the extant literature is also a significant contribution.
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– The purpose of this paper is an examination of the role of brand personification in the development of the concepts of brand personality and brand relationships.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is an examination of the role of brand personification in the development of the concepts of brand personality and brand relationships.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is a critical evaluation of literature from the 1950s and onwards, examining the evolution and development of brand personality and brand relationship theory and the role of brand personification.
Findings
The major finding is that brand personification was developed as a research “gimmick” and that this “gimmick” provided the foundations for the development of the brand personality and brand relationship concepts. Further, the paper traces the evolution of the brand personality concept and identifies the ways in which it has been adapted from its original meaning.
Originality/value
The paper contributes to the branding literature by providing a critical evaluation of the history of marketing concepts and by providing insights into the role that motivation research played in the development of modern brand theory.
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Franck Bailly and Alexandre Léné
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the consequences of the increasing prominence of soft skills, focusing specifically on the production of these skills and their recognition…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the consequences of the increasing prominence of soft skills, focusing specifically on the production of these skills and their recognition and recruitment.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on interviews conducted with managers in the service sector in France. Two types of services are covered: large‐scale retailing and hotel and catering services.
Findings
The paper shows that the demand for soft skills has caused the service labour process to become highly personified and underline the risks this entails.
Practical implications
The personification of the service labour process encourages the development of specific human resource management practices in the spheres of recruitment, pay and training.
Social implications
The results underline the need for institutional mediation in the regulation of the labour market. The personification of skills has many social implications in terms of discrimination and policies on training and skill recognition.
Originality/value
The originality of the paper lies, first, in the fact that the results relate to France, whereas most of the literature on soft skills has focused on the UK, the US and other English‐speaking countries. Furthermore, the article emphasises that managers’ practices are shaped by their attitudes towards soft skills, and in particular whether they believe them to be acquired or innate.
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Kuan-Ju Chen and Jhih-Syuan Lin
Given the thriving attention paid to brand personification in marketing, this paper aims to delve into consumers’ psychological traits that may moderate the positive…
Abstract
Purpose
Given the thriving attention paid to brand personification in marketing, this paper aims to delve into consumers’ psychological traits that may moderate the positive anthropomorphic effects on brand outcomes specific to relationship marketing.
Design/methodology/approach
A theoretical model was proposed based on a review of the extant literature. Study 1 conducted an online survey and used confirmatory factor analysis to validate the constructs significantly correlated with anthropomorphic processing. Two follow-up studies (Study 2a and 2b) using experimental designs were performed to provide evidence substantiating the moderated mediation in the process.
Findings
Based on the results across the three studies, motivational, rather than cognitive, disposition significantly correlates with perceived anthropomorphism and brand relationship outcomes. Need for belonging serves as a sociality moderator in strengthening the mediating effects of perceived anthropomorphism on brand attachment and brand experience, respectively. Parasocial interaction serves as an effectance moderator in augmenting the mediating effects of perceived anthropomorphism on brand attachment.
Research limitations/implications
This research extends and contrasts the theoretical grounding for anthropomorphism as a set of situational consumer perceptions by integrating its boosting factors in social psychology with emerging brand constructs in marketing and consumer behavior research. More studies are encouraged to probe into the complex anthropomorphic phenomenon.
Practical implications
This research sheds light on marketers’ strategic management efforts in implementing brand personification to target a wide range of market segments with diverse psychological disposition.
Originality/value
Conceiving anthropomorphism as an in-process situational output in information processing, this research provides further understanding of the psychological traits that facilitate the construction of consumer-brand relationships through anthropomorphic perceptions in the context of brand personification.
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Tianling Xie, Iryna Pentina and Tyler Hancock
The purpose of this study is to explore customer-artificial intelligence (AI) service technology engagement and relationship development drivers, as well as potential negative…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to explore customer-artificial intelligence (AI) service technology engagement and relationship development drivers, as well as potential negative consequences in the context of social chatbots.
Design/methodology/approach
A sequential mixed-method approach combined exploratory qualitative and confirmatory quantitative analyses. A conceptual model developed from Study 1 qualitative content analysis of in-depth interviews with active users of the AI social chatbot Replika was tested in Study 2 by analyzing survey data obtained from current Replika users.
Findings
Loneliness, trust and chatbot personification drive consumer engagement with social chatbots, which fosters relationship development and has the potential to cause chatbot psychological dependence. Attachment to a social chatbot intensifies the positive role of engagement in relationship development with the chatbot.
Originality/value
This study was the first to combine qualitative and quantitative approaches to explore drivers, boundary conditions and consequences of relationship and dependence formation with social chatbots. The authors proposed and empirically tested a novel theoretical model that revealed an engagement-based mechanism of relationship and dependence formation with social chatbots.
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Although marketer-generated brand anthropomorphism impacts on positive company returns is studied broadly, consumer-generated brand anthropomorphisms that focus on demonizing and…
Abstract
Purpose
Although marketer-generated brand anthropomorphism impacts on positive company returns is studied broadly, consumer-generated brand anthropomorphisms that focus on demonizing and hitlerizing brands is not extensively studied. This study aims to examine these consumer interpretations of the evil, its symbols and personifications of brands as evil, with a new concept: “reverse brand anthropomorphism.”
Design/methodology/approach
This paper provides a literature review of brand anthropomorphism and the application of the concept of evil. This paper also uses a qualitative analysis with consumer interviews to explore the proposed reverse brand anthropomorphism concept.
Findings
This study’s findings reveal that consumers see corporations as consciously evil, loosely as an embodiment of Adolf Hitler. Consumer interviews points out that corporate brand power aimed at controlling consumer value systems is associated with “evil,” an evil that secretly aims at possessing consumers and controlling their consumption practices. The findings of this study indicate that consumers also develop their own alternative moral market value systems, ones parallel to religious morality. Although “evil” imagery is often found distractive and disrespectful by consumers, the younger generation accept it as a new and alternative form of market speech.
Originality/value
This is the first study to introduces and conceptualize a “reverse brand anthropomorphism” concept with examples of consumer brand hitlerization semiotics. Further, this study is also the first study to discuss evil in a consumption context.
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J.T. Luo, Peter McGoldrick, Susan Beatty and Kathleen A. Keeling
Previous research has focused on how trustworthiness can be evoked by the physical design of on‐screen characters (OSCs) within the e‐commerce interface. The purpose of this study…
Abstract
Purpose
Previous research has focused on how trustworthiness can be evoked by the physical design of on‐screen characters (OSCs) within the e‐commerce interface. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether or not the OSCs representation, along with user differences, influence, how likeable, appropriate and trustworthy they are.
Design/methodology/approach
A web site was created for a simulated online bookseller and 183 people from various countries participated in the experiments. OSC representations were tested under four conditions in the main experiment: facial appearance (human‐like vs cartoon‐like) and gender (male vs female).
Findings
The results suggest that the human‐like characters are more likeable, appropriate and trustworthy in general terms. However, when perceived capabilities of OSCs are measured, a mismatch can occur between expectations and capabilities of the human‐like OSCs. In fact, cartoon‐like OSCs, especially female, had more positive effects on the web site interface.
Research limitations/implications
This study was limited to simulations of on‐screen scenarios. Future work, with access to the huge database required, could investigate the effects of truly interactive OSCs. Larger national sub‐samples would permit generalisations about cross‐cultural differences.
Practical implications
For e‐tailers and web designers, this study suggests critical design variables and response‐moderating variables that mediate the effects of OSCs in e‐retailing. It helps to understand customers' interaction needs in establishing and maintaining para‐social relationships, potentially increasing purchase intentions and persuasion.
Originality/value
The efficacy of different representations of OSCs to retail situations has been little investigated previously; this study measured how likeable, appropriate and trustworthy different OSC design formats are to different customer types.
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