Search results

This study aims to evaluate the significance of the corporate website favorability notion and examines its factors in developing competitive advantage in the context of retail and service settings in the UK and Russia.

Based on the attribution, social identity and signaling theories, this study adopted the qualitative exploratory approach by conducting 14 interviews with retail experts and eight focus groups with retail users in the UK and Russia, combined with experts in website design, communication and marketing.

The study findings indicated that it is crucial to build and maintain a favorable corporate website that reveals the corporate identity as part of the overall company strategy. The study suggests that navigation, visual, information, usability, customization, security, availability, website credibility, customer service, perceived corporate social responsibility and perceived corporate culture are the factors of corporate website favorability that contribute to the company’s competitive advantage. The findings show that consumers from Russia as well as from the UK found the significance of a favorable corporate website (i.e. corporate website favorability), as well as the factors affecting corporate website favorability. However, consumers in the UK are more critical and demanding in the level of expectation of the website overall and put more weight than consumers from Russia on the perceived corporate social responsibility, perceived corporate culture, customer service and website credibility.

Corporate website favorability should be adopted by the companies, as part of the overall corporate identity management. Furthermore, it is advised to take into consideration the variations in the level of importance of the factors of corporate website favorability in different countries. The findings of this study suggest that this investigation will make a considerable managerial contribution to the understanding of a company’s decision-makers, communication professionals and website specialists about the building of a favorable corporate website in line with corporate identity strategy of the company.

There has been little systematic study of the effect of corporate websites on consumer evaluations of the websites; also, there is a lack of research with regard to the factors that contribute to the development of a favorable corporate website (i.e. corporate website favorability). This is the first study of its kind to find the effect of corporate website favorability in Russia, representing a non-western country, and the UK, representing a western country. Therefore, it contributes to the corporate visual identity literature by presenting the corporate website favorability construct and demonstrating the factors that influence corporate website favorability.

Existing literature reveals a general lack of research on business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce showcasing how managers’ affect plays a role in enhancing their attitude toward the businesses they work with. The purpose of this study is to fill that void by ascertaining whether managers’ corporate website knowledge, corporate website expertise and affect toward a corporate site influence their attitude toward the corporate website. It also investigates whether managers’ attitude guides corporate website usage intention in the context of two culturally diverse countries.

Data were collected from managers from the USA and Kuwait using an online survey method. Structural equation modeling using EQS 6.2 software was used for analysis.

The results indicate that corporate Web knowledge influences Web expertise and affect in the US sample; in the Kuwaiti sample, Web knowledge influences Web expertise but does not influence affect. The findings in both studies reveal that managers’ knowledge about the Web has a positive effect on their attitude toward a business website. For Kuwaiti managers, Web expertise has a positive influence on affect. However, Web expertise does not influence managers’ affect in the US sample. The results further suggest that affect influences a manager’s attitude toward corporate websites in the US and Kuwaiti samples.

Self-efficacy and affect infusion theories serve as the foundation for this study. This research adds to these two theories in three ways. First, it examines the combined influence of affect and attitude on B2B managers’ intent to use a corporate website. Second, it proposes a single model that examines the combined relationships among managers’ knowledge and managers’ Web expertise that elicit managerial affect toward corporate websites. Third, the proposed model was tested using samples from two diverse countries (developed, the USA, and developing, Kuwait).

Evidence from previous literature indicates that adopting a new innovative technology has a positive impact on a company’s business performance. Much less work has been carried out into examining whether a technology adoption has impact on corporate reputation. This paper aims to examine the latter topic in a context where social media is the channel used to share news about the introduction of a new technology. The empirical setting of the study consists of five retail companies located in the USA that decided to include Bitcoin as a payment platform.

Twitter data were used to measure how sharing news about the adoption of new technology could affect the reputation of the companies selected, keeping a clear distinction between the volume of data relating to social media responses and the sentiment expressed in the tweets. A panel vector autoregression model was used to incorporate series of data relating to news items, volume and sentiment.

The results show that the news about the adoption of a new technology has a positive impact on both the volume of tech-related tweets and the sentiment expressed in the tweets themselves, although the patterns of these two effects are different. The resulting impact decreases after a few days, both in volume and in sentiment.

The analysis has limitations that future research could address by extending and diversifying the examined companies and the social media used as data sources. The research suggests that managers in medium-sized companies can leverage on the introduction of new technologies that have a direct impact on their customers and gain reputational benefits in terms of immediate visibility.

The research introduces an additional dimension of analysis to the current stream of corporate reputation. Although the literature has already covered the dynamics of response to events on Twitter, by focusing on the adoption of the new Bitcoin technology, the paper provides novel insights.

Finding an efficient way for enhancing brand reputation by using social media among customers and business partners has long been the main purpose of every business. However, due to micro and macro changes in the business field, strategies to find a way to improve brand reputation with business partners and customers have altered from transaction marketing to newer approaches such as employing a social media platform. However, not all brands make use of social media to enhance their reputation. The present study uses Apple as an example of the one of the best known brands which does not benefit from social media platforms as to the degree expected.

The purpose of this study is to develop a useful, effective and comprehensive approach to facilitate the evaluation of hotel websites.

The paper examines the literature evaluating e-commerce sites, particularly that is focused on hotel, tourism and travel. Moreover, 5 criteria and 19 sub-criteria are identified, and a two-step method is proposed for the assessment of hotel websites whereby the global weights of the proposed criteria are determined by the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process, and hotel websites are ranked through the fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal situation.

The results show that the leading criteria to effectively evaluate hotel websites are trust and information quality and that the most important sub-criteria are special discounts, assurance and reservation information.

This research offers practical advice to increase understanding of the determinants of an effective hotel website so that appropriate strategies can be developed to convert a website visitor into a customer.

The study aims to contribute to businesses operating in the tourism sector which seeks to increase the effectiveness of their websites by identifying criteria and proposing a methodology for hotel website evaluation.

Even though scholars have proposed multiple dimensions to measure corporate reputation, the relationship between these dimensions and service provider selection has received a dearth of research. Moreover, the moderating role of brand image on this relationship has hardly been considered. The purpose of this paper is to fill these gaps in the literature.

The study employed a quantitative approach, collecting data from 540 retail bank customers using surveys. Results were analyzed using structural equation modelling in AMOS.

The study found out that emotional engagement, corporate performance, customer centricism and service quality directly predicted customer selection of retail banks in Ghana. The results further indicated that brand image moderates the relationship between social and ethical engagement, which was not directly significant and bank selection.

The findings of the study indicate that some of the dimensions of corporate reputation have a direct impact on bank selection by customers, and that brand image could also be used to improve social and ethical dimension of corporate reputation to ensure bank selection by retail customers. The study thus provides practical guidelines for managing corporate reputation to achieve retail bank selection in Ghana.

The paper provides support to some of the prior studies on corporate reputation in the retail banking sector. Thus, the study provides useful insights into how corporate reputation can be managed to ensure service provider selection by retail bank customers.

Social media as a competitive marketing tool deliver online platforms for retailers to get closer to their consumers/visitors/shoppers through continued interaction. The purpose of this paper is to scrutinize how customer values (functional, social and experimental) enhance satisfaction, loyalty and identification, and how such relationships, in turn, impact users’ continuance interaction intention.

A mixed-method approach was designed to identify the consumers’ perception toward high-end retailers of worldwide brands. In all, 12 interviews with experts in retailing and a survey among 390 respondents were conducted. Structural equation modeling/AMOS was employed to gain insight into the various relationships and influences.

To augment users’ continuance interaction intention, the results indicate that retail managers should focus more on customer-based values when they design marketing strategies for brand pages on social media. The findings also provide guidelines for retail marketing and social media managers to generate consumer value in the retail environment via information quality, product-related learning and economic benefits (functional value); interaction, collaboration and social presence (social value); and experiential value (intellectual and effective value).

The paper offers critical managerial contributions by presenting a comprehensive picture of the condition in which a favorable brand social media page could be constructed within a brand to satisfy consumer value and achieve satisfaction, loyalty, identification and continuance interaction intention, all of which are critical objectives for every company. In other words, a clear knowledge of the dimensions of consumer value concepts can assist retail communication managers to improve consumers’/visitors’/shoppers’ intention to continue their interaction in a competitive market. The current study is one of the very few emerging research studies to have examined the relationships between consumers’/visitors’/shoppers’ functional values, social values and experimental values empirically, and to have further explored the relationships between the research constructs.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of innovation management capability on organisational performance. Based on the resource-advantage theory, this study addresses: “To what extent do intellectual and emotional assets influence marketing management capability which loads to the organisation’s performance?”

To understand the research objectives, the data was collected via 35 in-depth interviews with managers and academics from various multi-national companies and new empirical insights were offered.

This study recognised three components of intellectual and emotional assets (knowledge and competence; digital technology; and reputation) and their influences on business performance.

The focus on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) limits the generalisation of this study. To scrutinise the relations documented in this study, future research should be conducted in other country settings and different sector.

This study contributes to the sustainability literature by developing a conceptual model that explains the development and role of innovation management in a market context with its associated sustainability management outcomes. The results are of importance to both SMEs and policymakers. Clear need to investigate further how organisations can benefit from such capabilities for greater growth is identified.