Search results

Purpose – The marketing literature does not provide a satisfactory explanation for the role of consumer's attention in the process of how Country-of-Manufacture (COM) information influences consumer product evaluations. The research contributes to an improved understanding of this process by integrating the construct of “attention to Country-of-Manufacture” into the model and examining its relationship with the influence of COM.

Design/methodology/approach – Survey data are collected from American consumers aged 18 years and above. To test the research hypotheses, MANOVA and canonical correlation analysis are performed in analyzing the data.

Findings – COM has more influence on the attentive group (consumers consciously paying attention to the COM information on a product label), on their evaluations of abstract product attributes such as durability and reliability than it does on the inattentive group (consumers not paying conscious attention to such information). In contrast, COM's influences on evaluating concrete product attributes such as style, model, availability, and quality are all significantly related to involvement with COM, but not to attention.

Research limitations/implications – The product assessments sought from respondents are generally on “foreign” products. Future research needs to obtain product-specific evaluations within each product category in testing the model and see how the results may differ or not differ across product categories.

Practical implications – Marketers selling products with high performance in abstract attributes such as durability and reliability should increase consumers’ attention to the COM through effective product labeling.

Originality/value – This research identifies and empirically investigates the difference of COM effects on consumers’ product judgment between consumers who are attentive and the ones who are inattentive to COM information.

The Internet has enabled consumers to act as their own travel agents and to verify independently the accuracy of the information provided by airlines through the CRSs and travel agents. As a result, the relationships between consumers and the suppliers of air-travel information have been radically altered, and we document these changes. We identify the relevant market for air-travel information, which includes CRSs, online travel agencies, and the websites and call centers of individual carriers. We determine market concentration and market shares using the Herfindhal-Hirschman Index. Based on our analysis, we argue that there is no longer any need to regulate independent CRSs. However, airlines that own CRSs continue to have an incentive to withdraw their flight and fare information from rival CRSs and, to prevent this from happening, the mandatory participation rule adopted in 1992 should be maintained.

The impact of DTC advertising of prescription drugs on consumers has been the subject of considerable debate worldwide. Proponents of DTC advertising argue that it allows patients to make more informed decisions, helps address under-treatment of some medical conditions, and improves the economic value of health care, among other benefits. In contrast, critics of DTC advertising contend that it leads to consumers paying higher prices, patients potentially being misled about risks and benefits of drugs, and patients pressuring doctors to prescribe drugs. The authors examine this debate in the context of two leading theories on the effects of advertising – the Advertising=Information and Advertising=Market power schools of thought and review empirical studies that have examined the impacts of DTC advertising on consumers. It is found that the research evidence generally favors the Advertising=Information school, which is supportive of the idea that DTC helps patients become more informed and communicate more effectively with their doctors.

This research reviews numerous studies of the relationship between consumer knowledge and external search in conventional marketing channels to investigate differences among these studies that have produced conflicting results. The findings provide a benchmark for future researchers and practitioners seeking to gain insight into consumer information search processes unfolding in the new environment of online, mobile, and social networking channels.

A meta-analysis of an extensive array of empirical studies of the relationship between consumer knowledge and external information search was conducted. Regression analysis was used to test whether certain characteristics in the studies can explain variability in the effect sizes in which effect sizes are entered as dependent variables and moderators as independent variables.

Objective and subjective knowledge tend to increase search, while direct experience tends to reduce search. Consumers with higher objective knowledge search more when pursuing credence products. However, they search relatively less when pursuing search products. Consumers with higher subjective knowledge are much more likely to search in the context of experience products, but as is the case for objective knowledge having little effect on search for experience products, subjective knowledge has no significant effect on information seeking for search products. In addition, objective knowledge facilitates more information search in a complex decision-making context while higher subjective knowledge fosters more external information search in a simple decision-marketing context. Finally, the findings indicate that the knowledge search relationship reflects strong linkage in the pre-Internet era.

Relatively little is known about how the relationship between knowledge and information search varies across different types of products in simple or complex decision-making contexts. This study begins to fill this gap by providing insight into the relative importance of objective knowledge, subjective knowledge, and direct experience in influencing consumer information search activities for search, experience, and credence products in simple or complex decision-making contexts.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

Advances in information technology have enabled consumers to connect and communicate as they never have before. This chapter conceptualizes information and the digital machines that enable contemporary connection and communication as being part of a “Moveable Feast.” A brief historical review tracing the impact and evolution of information technology on consumers’ lives and the marketplace is first provided. Culminating the historical review is a metaphorical description of the current period as a “Moveable Feast” of information, whereby consumers and digital machines interact to create and share information “dishes” with other consumers worldwide. With this guiding metaphor in place, current marketing-relevant information phenomena are described within a framework of three important digital dyads proposed to exist between humans and machines. Deep discussion of machine–machine, human–machine, and human–human dyads points to the importance of information as a resource that consumers create and exchange in the contemporary marketplace. This chapter concludes by encouraging marketers and marketing researchers to consider the impact and importance of digital information and information technology on consumers’ ability to connect and communicate with digital machines and with one another.

The cognitive composition process of attribute information plays a critical role in heuristic aspects of consumers’ multiattribute preferential decisions. This study examines the effects of attribute information order and attribute information amount on consumers’ multiattribute preferential decisions under the premise of consumers’ limited information processing capacity. An experiment with two separate designs is conducted for testing the different hypotheses. The results support the hypothesis that consumers’ multiattribute preferential decisions are influenced by the amount of attribute information received/processed. The attribute information order is found to affect not only the outcomes of consumer decisions but also the amount of attribute information processed. These findings further suggest that consumers may be more inclined to adopt strategies of a noncompensatory heuristic nature when making multiattribute preferential decisions.

Independent travelers are those vacationers who have booked only a minimum of their transportation and accommodation arrangements prior to departure on the vacation. Independent travel is an important and growing sector of worldwide tourism. Choice of vacation itinerary for the independent vacation represents a complex series of decisions regarding purchase of multiple leisure and tourism services. This chapter builds and tests a model of independent traveler decision-making for choice of vacation itinerary. The research undertaken employs a two-phase, inductive–deductive case study design. In the deductive phase, the researcher interviewed 20 travel parties vacationing in New Zealand for the first time. The researcher interviewed respondents at both the beginning and the end of their New Zealand vacations. The study compares pre-vacation research and plans, and actual vacation behaviors, on a case-by-case basis. The study examines case study narratives and quantitative measures of crucial variables. The study tests two competing models of independent traveler decision-making, using a pattern-matching procedure. This embedded research design results in high multi-source, multi-method validity for the supported model. The model of the Independent Vacation as Evolving Itinerary suggests that much of the vacation itinerary experienced in independent travel is indeed unplanned, and that a desire to experience the unplanned is a key hedonic motive for independent travel. Rather than following a fixed itinerary, the itinerary of an independent vacation evolves as the vacation proceeds. The independent traveler takes advantage of serendipitous opportunities to experience a number of locations, attractions and activities that they had neither actively researched nor planned.