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1 – 10 of over 5000Meihua Zuo, Hongwei Liu, Hui Zhu and Hongming Gao
The purpose of this paper is to identify potential competitive relationships among brands by analyzing the dynamic clicking behavior of consumers.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to identify potential competitive relationships among brands by analyzing the dynamic clicking behavior of consumers.
Design/methodology/approach
Consumer sequential online click data, collected from JD.com, is used to analyze the dynamic competitive relationship between brands. It is found that the competition intensity across categories of products can differ considerably. Consumers exhibit big differences in purchasing time of durable-like goods, that is, the purchasing probability of such products changes considerably over time. The local polynomial regression model (LPRM) is used to analyze the relationship between brand competition of durable-like goods and the purchasing probability of a particular brand.
Findings
The statistical results of collective behaviors show that there is a 90/10 rule for the category durable-like goods, implying that ten percent of the brands account for 90 percent market share in terms of both clicking and purchasing behavior. The dynamic brand cognitive process of impulsive consumers displays an inverted V shape, while cautious consumers display a double V shaped cognitive process. The dynamic consumers’ cognition illustrates that when the brands capture a half of the click volume, the brands’ competitiveness reaches to its peak and makes no significant different from brands accounting for 100 percent of the click volume in terms of the purchasing probability.
Research limitations/implications
There are some limitations to the research, including the limitations imposed by the data set. One of the most serious problems in the data set is that the collected click-stream is desensitized severely, restricting the richness of the conclusions of this study. Second, the data set consists of many other consumer behavioral data, but only the consumer’s clicking behavior is analyzed in this study. Therefore, in future research, the parameters brand browsing by consumers and the time of browsing in each brand should be added as indicators of brand competitive intensity.
Practical implications
The authors study brand competitiveness by analyzing the relationship between the click rate and the purchase likelihood of individual brands for durable-like products. When the brand competitiveness is less than 50 percent, consumers tend to seek a variety of new brands, and their purchase likelihood is positively correlated with the brand competitiveness. Once consumers learn about a particular brand excessively among all other brands at a period of time, the purchase likelihood of its products decreases due to the thinner consumer’s short-term loyalty the brand. Till the brand competitiveness runs up to 100 percent, consumers are most likely to purchase a brand and its product. That indicates brand competitiveness maintain 50 percent of the whole market is most efficient to be profitable, and the performance of costing more to improve the brand competitiveness might make no difference.
Originality/value
There are many studies on brand competition, but most of these research works analyze the brand’s marketing strategy from the perspective of the company. The limitation of this research is that the data are historical and failure to reflect time-variant competition. Some researchers have studied brand competition through consumer behavior, but the shortcoming of these studies is that it does not consider sequentiality of consumer behavior as this study does. Therefore, this study contributes to the literature by using consumers’ sequential clicking behavior and expands the perspective of brand competition research from the angle of consumers. Simultaneously, this paper uses the LPRM to analyze the relationship between consumer clicking behavior and brand competition for the first time, and expands the methodology accordingly.
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Zeya He, Laurie Wu and Xiang (Robert) Li
Photos are powerful tools to attract individuals’ attention and convey service experiences. Yet exactly how visual cues in a photo contribute to the perceptions of the staged…
Abstract
Purpose
Photos are powerful tools to attract individuals’ attention and convey service experiences. Yet exactly how visual cues in a photo contribute to the perceptions of the staged servicescape, and how these perceptions inspire online booking/reservation behaviors, remains underexplored. Addressing the gap, this study aims to uncover (1) how perceptual information mediated by an online photo contributes to the formation of consumers' holistic perceptions of the service environment and (2) how such consumers' holistic perceptions further influence customers' online purchasing behaviors.
Design/methodology/approach
This research adopts an innovative crowdsourcing approach and refers to field data on consumers' online hotel booking behaviors to examine relationships among inferred servicescape dimensions, consumers' holistic perceptions of the mediated servicescape and their actual online booking/reservation behaviors (e.g. page-view and meta-click behaviors).
Findings
Confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis indicated that five mediated servicescape dimensions (i.e. color, lighting, furnishings, layout and style) contribute significantly to consumers' perceptions of the mediated servicescape (CPMS) and exert different impacts on CPMS. Connecting the crowdsourced rating and consumer behavioral data, CPMS is found to influence consumers' aggregated page-view and meta-click behavior, especially in the US market.
Originality/value
Building upon servicescape theory, the medium theory and the online booking literature, this research proposes a novel conceptual framework of CPMS to theorize the process by which visual cues in online photos contribute to CPMS and subsequent online purchase behaviors. Findings from this research extend Bitner's servicescape framework to mediated service contexts and provide practical implications for promoting service businesses.
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Ruibin Geng, Xi Chen and Shichao Wang
Endorsement marketing has been widely used to generate consumer attention, interest and purchase decisions among targeted audiences. Internet celebrities who become famous on the…
Abstract
Purpose
Endorsement marketing has been widely used to generate consumer attention, interest and purchase decisions among targeted audiences. Internet celebrities who become famous on the Internet are dependent on strategic intimacy to appeal to their followers. Our study aims to examine how multiple exposures to Internet celebrity endorsements influence consumers’ click and purchase decisions in the context of influencer marketing.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on a unique and representative dataset, the authors first model consumers’ choices for clicks and purchases with two panel fixed-effect logit models linking clicks and purchases with the frequency of exposure to Internet celebrity endorsement. To further control the endogeneity produced by the intercorrelation between the click and purchase models, the authors also adopt the two-stage Heckman probit structure to jointly estimate the two models using Maximum Likelihood Estimation. Robustness checks confirm the effectiveness of the models.
Findings
The results suggest that Internet celebrity endorsement plays a significant role in bringing referral traffic to e-commerce sites but is less helpful in affecting conversion to sales. The impact of repetitive Internet celebrity endorsements on consumers’ click decisions is U-shaped, but the role of Internet celebrities as online retailers will “shape-flip” this relationship to a negative linear relation.
Originality/value
Our study is the first to investigate the repetitive exposure effect of Internet celebrity endorsement. The results show a contradictory pattern with a wear-out effect of repetition in the advertising literature. This is the first study to show how the endorsing self, which is a common business model in influencer marketing, moderates the effectiveness of influencer marketing.
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Elyse N. Mowle, Emily J. Georgia, Brian D. Doss and John A. Updegraff
The purpose of this paper is to test the utility of regulatory focus theory principles in a real-world setting; specifically, Internet hosted text advertisements. Effect of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to test the utility of regulatory focus theory principles in a real-world setting; specifically, Internet hosted text advertisements. Effect of compatibility of the ad text with the regulatory focus of the consumer was examined.
Design/methodology/approach
Advertisements were created using Google AdWords. Data were collected for the number of views and clicks each ad received. Effect of regulatory fit was measured using logistic regression.
Findings
Logistic regression analyses demonstrated that there was a strong main effect for keyword, such that users were almost six times as likely to click on a promotion advertisement as a prevention advertisement, as well as a main effect for compatibility, such that users were twice as likely to click on an advertisement with content that was consistent with their keyword. Finally, there was a strong interaction of these two variables, such that the effect of consistent advertisements was stronger for promotion searches than for prevention searches.
Research limitations/implications
The effect of ad compatibility had medium to large effect sizes, suggesting that individuals’ state may have more influence on advertising response than do individuals’ traits (e.g. personality traits). Measurement of regulatory fit was limited by the constraints of Google AdWords.
Practical implications
The results of this study provide a possible framework for ad creation for Internet advertisers.
Originality/value
This paper is the first study to demonstrate the utility of regulatory focus theory in online advertising.
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Stefano Bresciani, Alberto Ferraris, Marco Romano and Gabriele Santoro
Ming Cheng, Chris K. Anderson, Zhen Zhu and S. Chan Choi
This study aims to address the following research questions: Do the two types of service firms (individual or aggregator) have similar competitiveness on online search ads? How…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to address the following research questions: Do the two types of service firms (individual or aggregator) have similar competitiveness on online search ads? How should the two types of service firms select optimal branded keywords to improve search performance? In addition, how do consumers’ search queries influence the service search performance of the two types of service firms?
Design/methodology/approach
In this study, the authors conduct an empirical analysis by building a two-stage choice modeling on the process of search engine ranking and consumer click-through decisions. The authors estimate the parameter coefficients and test the hypotheses using maximum likelihood estimation in the logistic regression model.
Findings
The empirical findings suggest that consumer response rates are highly dependent upon three aspects (service types, branded keyword strategy and consumer search query). First, the authors found that service aggregators receive greater consumer responses than individual service providers. Second, depending upon the various branded keyword strategies (e.g. generic vs branded, “within-type” vs “cross-type”) implemented by service aggregators or individual firms, the expected consumer responses could be quite different. Finally, customer’s search query, being either generic or branded, also has direct effect and interactive effect with service type on how consumers would response to the sponsored ads in the service search process.
Research limitations/implications
The limitation of the research is twofold. First, conversion rate is not considered in the model estimation due to the nature of the data set. Second, the discussion about the keywords selection strategies is focusing on the hospitality industry. Future research shall further validate the generalizability into other industries.
Practical implications
First, given this competitive advantage, service aggregators should take an aggressive approach to adopting paid search strategy in acquiring new users and enhance its brand salience in the service ecosystem. Second, when considering other competitor’s brand names to include, if a firm is a service provider (e.g. hotel), a strategy that can help it receive higher consumer response would be to use “within-type” rather than “cross-type” branded keyword strategy. If a firm is a service aggregator, a better branded keyword strategy would be to use “across-type” instead of “within-type” approach. In addition, given that consumer’s brand awareness can influence the effectiveness of branded keyword strategy, online service search should target consumers in earlier stages of a decision journey.
Social implications
The authors believe their theoretical framework can provide actionable solutions to service firms to ease customer’s search process, increase customer’s stickiness using search engines and add value to the customer relationships with all services entities within the digital ecosystem.
Originality/value
This study is the first to expand online search marketing into granule examinations (main and interactive effects of three key factors) in the service search domain. First, the authors differentiate service firms into two categories – online travel aggregators and individual hotels in the model. Second, the authors introduce two sets of new classifications of branded keywords for online service search research (i.e. own versus other brand and “cross-type” versus “within-type” branded keywords). Third, this study integrates service consumers’ search word specificity into the conceptual framework which is often missing in previous online search research.
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Bernard J. Jansen and Theresa B. Clarke
This research is based on the premise that current metrics for search engine advertising (SEA) are misleading and do not sufficiently allow managers to evaluate traffic and…
Abstract
Purpose
This research is based on the premise that current metrics for search engine advertising (SEA) are misleading and do not sufficiently allow managers to evaluate traffic and conversions simultaneously. This study aimed to conceptually develop and assess conversion potential (CvP) as a unifying construct for both measuring and evaluating the performance of SEA campaigns.
Design/methodology/approach
A data set of nearly seven million records covering almost three years of a multi-million-dollar keyword marketing campaign from a major US retailer was used to validate the construct of CvP.
Findings
Results empirically validate how CvP measures both campaign traffic and sales in SEA, using the optimization factor of ad rank, which is one of many possible factors.
Research limitations/implications
Although the data set is large and covers a lengthy period of time, it is limited to one company in the retail sector.
Practical implications
The research instantiates CvP as a metric for overall SEA account performance while demonstrating that it is a practical tool for future campaign planning. The metric simultaneously incorporates a sales ratio and a traffic ratio.
Originality/value
This is the first study to formalize and provide a working definition of CvP in the academic literature. The contribution is a theoretical and practical managerial framework to mutually evaluate, measure and make decisions about SEA efforts.
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Yuan Sun, Yating Zhong and Qi Li
As an increasingly popular tool for product exploration, online communities have an important impact on consumers’ purchasing decisions. The purpose of this study is to gain a…
Abstract
Purpose
As an increasingly popular tool for product exploration, online communities have an important impact on consumers’ purchasing decisions. The purpose of this study is to gain a deeper understanding of how visiting behaviors in online communities affect consumers’ offline purchasing behavior. The moderating role of two dimensions of consumer visiting behaviors (visiting depth and visiting breadth) also receives attention. Moreover, the impact of consumer visiting behaviors on offline sales for different types of online communities is also the focus of this paper.
Design/methodology/approach
To test the empirical model, the authors collected data on consumers’ visits to an online real estate platform with local housing sales data. In addition to the baseline regression analysis of the data with the help of Stata 17.0, the study also analyzes the robustness of the results through several methods.
Findings
The authors focus on an online community for newly-built housing and find that consumer visits to the focal online community have a positive impact on offline sales. Visiting breadth has a negative moderating effect on this relationship, and no statistically significant moderating effect is found for visiting depth. Further, our empirical exploration finds that consumer visits to competitive online communities have a positive impact on offline focal product sales, but visits to complementary online communities have no statistically significant effect on offline sales.
Originality/value
Our findings contribute to the understanding of consumers’ cross-channel purchasing behavior and provide new insights into how visiting behaviors in online communities affect consumers’ purchasing decisions.
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Beyza Gultekin and Sabri Erdem
This study explores the importance of application search engine (ASE) technology in the omni-channel strategy. For this purpose, this chapter firstly explains the concepts of the…
Abstract
This study explores the importance of application search engine (ASE) technology in the omni-channel strategy. For this purpose, this chapter firstly explains the concepts of the omni-channel and the search engines and the importance of them. Then, omni-channel in the framework of ASEs is discussed. Finally, recommendations for further researches are presented.
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Xiaohong Mo, Enle Sun and Xian Yang
The purpose of this paper is to study online clothing consumers' behaviour and their visual attention mechanism to provide objective and quantitative evidences for the display and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to study online clothing consumers' behaviour and their visual attention mechanism to provide objective and quantitative evidences for the display and sales of online clothing.
Design/methodology/approach
Firstly, this paper conducted a Focus Group Methodology and questionnaire survey to obtain concern factors of online clothing. Secondly, the online clothing's bottom-up visual stimulation and consumer's top-down expectations were analysed, and proposed the hypotheses about significant stimulus of clothing and consumer's emotional experience. Thirdly, the online clothing consumer's visual attention rules and related qualitative results were discussed, and proposed visual attention law for online clothing. Finally, took the company's 84th quarter clothing design practices as research projects, all the hypotheses were demonstrated through eye movement physiology experiments, online clothing trial release and node sales data.
Findings
Online clothing has unique visual display ways compared with other online products such as online advertising, brands and food packaging. Clothing patterns of unfamiliar (fresh) font shapes are more attractive than the patterns of familiar fonts. The cause of the bottom-up visual attention bias is the contrast between clothing features, not the absolute stimulus intensity of the features themselves. Clothing factors can change their emotional experience from no difference to significant difference under the influence of other clothing factors.
Originality/value
Put forward hypotheses of online clothing consumer behaviour and its visual attention mechanism, provided objective and quantitative evidences through eye tracker.
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