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This chapter examines the affordances of social media to understand how groups are experienced through social media. Specifically, the chapter presents a theoretical model to understand how affordances of social media promote or suppress entitativity.

Participants (N=265) were recruited through snowball sampling to answer questions about their recent Facebook status updates. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to examine the goodness of fit for our model.

We validate a model of entitativity as it occurs through the affordances offered by social media. Participant’s knowledge that status update responders were an interacting group outside of Facebook affected their perceptions of interactivity in the responses. Interactivity and history of interactions were the strongest predictors of status update entitativity. Further, status update entitativity had positive relationships with overall Facebook entitativity as well as group identity.

To encourage group identity through social media, managers need to increase employees’ perceptions of entitativity, primarily by enabling employees to see the interactions of others and to contribute content in social media platforms.

This is the only study we know of that empirically examines how groups are experienced through social media. Additionally, we draw from an affordance perspective, which helps to generalize our findings beyond the site of our study.

Meetings are ubiquitous at work. Therefore, understanding what makes meetings effective (or not) is important. Entitativity (i.e., the “group-ness” of a meeting) may theoretically explain when some meetings are effective. That is, when meeting participants perceive a high enough level of group-ness in their meeting, then they begin to enact the processes to create a successful meeting and experience the outcomes of a successful meeting. The authors propose a model connecting the characteristics of successful face-to-face (FtF) meetings to entitativity and extrapolate this model to online meetings. Specifically, the authors interpret well-researched characteristics and practices of meetings (e.g., using an agenda and meeting punctuality) to be examples of well-established entitativity antecedents (e.g., creating similarity of goals and establishing meeting boundaries). That is, using an agenda creates effective meetings because it focuses members’ attention on common goals. Therefore, entitativity may be an explanatory mechanism for successful meetings. The authors examine the unique challenges of online meetings, which are growing in number. The authors note that entitativity may be harder to establish in online meetings making successful online meetings more difficult. Characteristics of online meetings (e.g., focusing on the few shared documents which may focus members on goals) that may promote success. The authors propose further theoretical work as well as suggest strategies that can be used to increase entitativity in FtF and online meetings.

Perceived brand entitativity, or the extent to which a collection of brands signifies a group to consumers, differentiates luxury vs non-luxury brands such that luxury brands are perceived to be more entitative than non-luxury brands. Framed by the concept of brand entitativity and the implicit theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine whether this difference in the perceived brand entitativity of luxury and non-luxury brands impacts how consumers respond to sweatshop allegations in context to these brands.

Two separate experimental studies employing between-subjects designs were conducted among a total of 162 and 276 student consumers from a Southern university of the USA. The authors operationalized sweatshop allegations at two levels, brand-specific allegations (the stimulus brand itself is accused) and industry-specific allegations (other brands of the same industry are accused) to examine the role that brand entitativity plays in these two types of allegations.

Experiment 1 demonstrated that industry-specific allegations hurt consumer attitudes for luxury brands to a greater extent than non-luxury brands, whereas brand-specific allegations hurt non-luxury brands more so than luxury ones. In experiment 2, the authors find that the above results hold true only for consumers who are more prone to social perceptions of entitativity (entity theorists), but not those who represent an incremental mindset (incremental theorists).

The results can help brand managers understand the negative downstream consequences of brand- and industry-specific allegations for their brand type (luxury vs non-luxury).

This study fills an important gap in understanding consumer reaction to brands’ sweatshop allegations by addressing the role of consumers’ perceived brand entitativity and how it differs for consumers holding different implicit beliefs.

A social identity analysis, based on Hogg's (2000) uncertainty reduction theory, of the emergence and maintenance of ideological belief systems is presented. Uncertainty, particularly self-uncertainty, motivates identification with high-entitativity groups and behaviors that promote entitativity. Under more extreme uncertainty, identification is more pronounced and entitativity can be associated with orthodoxy, hierarchy and extremism, and with ideological belief systems. I develop and describe a social identity and uncertainty reduction analysis of ideology, and contextualize this in a brief discussion of the concept of ideology and in coverage of other contemporary social psychological treatments of ideology, such as social dominance theory, system justification theory, right-wing authoritarianism, belief in a just world, and the protestant work ethic.

The advancements of mobile technologies and devices have greatly facilitated the extension of online services from web to mobile environments. Drawing on the categorization theory, the purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of perceived entitativity on users’ web-mobile service extension behavior. The research model considers how perceived entitativity serves as a category cue to link the category- and piecemeal-based processing and shape users’ adoption of extended mobile services.

An online survey (n=552) was conducted to empirically test the model. The data were analyzed by structural equation modeling approach.

The results offer two major findings. First, performance expectancy, perceived controllability and subjective norm are important antecedents of users’ usage intention. Second, perceived entitativity has three types of effects on usage intention: it exerts a direct and positive influence on usage intention; it indirectly facilitates usage intention through increasing PE and perceived controllability; and it moderates the relationship between subjective norm and usage intention.

This study contributes to the literature by taking into account the interplay of category- and piecemeal-based processing to understand consumers’ web-mobile service extension behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how varying degrees of media-constructed associations between organizations and their home countries affect audience perceptions of such associations and, subsequently, how recipients attribute crisis responsibility and reputational damage to the home country. Additionally, the paper investigates if pre-crisis country image can buffer negative effects of the crisis for the country.

The authors hypothesize that the strength of actor associations in media reports about crises affects recipients’ cognitive processes of crisis responsibility attribution and, thus, the “direction” of reputational damage (corporation vs country). Empirically, the authors analyze the effects of different levels of actor association in crisis reports (strong actor association vs weak actor association) regarding a Chinese corporation in a one-factorial (between-subjects) experimental design; and the intervening effect of China’s country image prior to the crisis. Participants for the study lived in Switzerland and the USA.

The effect of different actor associations presented in the media on perceived association between a corporation and its home country is confirmed. Furthermore, these varying perceptions lead to significantly different tendencies in people’s ascriptions of crisis responsibility (corporation vs country), and different degrees of reputational fallout for the home countries. Finally, the data did not confirm a moderating effect of pre-crisis country image on the reputational damage caused by the crisis.

The study contributes to the understanding of key factors in the formation of crisis attributions as well as insights for the study of country image and public diplomacy.

It provides a new approach for corporate communication and public diplomacy to analyze the complex interdependencies between countries and internationally visible and globally known corporations, which potentially affect the country’s perception abroad.

Particularly for smaller countries that cannot rely on political and economic power to defend national interests in a global context, their “soft power” in terms of reputation and country image can play a central role in their political, economic, and cultural success.

The paper applies a new conceptual framework and methodology to analyze how both mediated and cognitive associations between different actors influence attribution of responsibility in crises, and how these associations ultimately bear on reputation spillover for the different actors.

Social media brand pages have become instrumental in enabling customers to voluntarily participate in providing feedback/ideas for improvement and collaboration with others that contribute to the innovation effort of brands. However, research on mechanisms which harness these specific customer engagement behaviours (CEB) in branded social media platforms is limited. Based on the stimulus–organism–response paradigm, this study investigates how specific online-service design characteristics in social media brand pages induce customer-perceived value perceptions, which in turn, stimulate feedback and collaboration intentions with customers.

Data collected from 654 US consumers of brand pages on Facebook were used to empirically test the proposed framework via structural equation modelling.

The theoretical framework found support for most hypothesized relationships showing how online-service design characteristics induce an identified set of customer value perceptions that influence customer feedback and collaboration intentions.

The sample is restricted to customer evaluations of brand pages on Facebook in the USA. Practitioners are advised to maximize online-service design characteristics of content quality, brand page interactivity, sociability and customer contact quality as stimulants that induce brand learning value, entitativity value and hedonic value. This then translates to customer feedback and collaboration intentions towards the brand page.

The findings have important implications for the design and optimization of online services in the customer engagement-innovation interface to harness CEBs for innovation performance.

Drawing from the entitativity theory, the purpose of this paper is to focus on the European Union (EU) as a superordinate entity and investigate the extent to which a “Made-in-EU” designation leads to superior/inferior brand evaluations and through them to higher/lower purchase intentions than different country-specific designations.

Prior literature and qualitative interviews with consumers are used to generate several propositions regarding the role of the EU as a brand origin. These are subsequently tested in a series of four experimental studies using a common design but different country-specific origins as stimuli.

While a “Made-in-EU” designation is interpreted as a quality signal, linking a brand to the EU fails to generate positive affective associations. Furthermore, the exact impact of a “Made-in-EU” brand designation very much depends on the standard of comparison, that is, the specific country against which the EU is evaluated.

Superordinate designations such as the EU can indeed represent distinct entities in consumers’ minds which strongly impact their perceptions and intended behavior.

Moving from a “home country” label to a “Made-in-EU” label is not advisable for owners of domestic brands. For foreign brands from EU countries with an unfavorable country image, adopting a “Made-in-EU” label is worth considering since it can strengthen quality perceptions. However, any quality advantage might be offset by weaker brand affect perceptions.

The concept of entitativity introduces a new conceptual lens in the context of origin research which – almost exclusively – has previously focused on the individual country as the unit of analysis.

This paper aims to examine a core member-customer threat in co-operatives (co-ops) by drawing from ostracism research, assessing co-op ostracism’s impact on critical membership and relational exchange outcomes and discussing why relationship marketing research needs to pay more attention to the overlooked role of implicit mistreatment forms in customer harm-doing.

Three studies were conducted. In Study 1, ostracism in co-ops was explored, and a measurement scale for co-op ostracism was developed. In Study 2, the core conceptual model was empirically tested with data from members of three different co-ops. In Study 3, a coping strategy was integrated into an extended model and empirically tested with a new sample of co-op members.

Ostracism is present in co-ops and “poisons” crucial relational (and membership) outcomes, despite the presence of other relationship-building or relationship-destroying accounts. Coupling entitativity with cognitive capital attenuates ostracism’s impact.

Inspired by co-ops’ membership model and inherent relational advantage, this research is the first to adopt a co-op member-customer perspective and shed light on an implicit relationship-destroying factor.

Co-op decision makers might use the diagnostic tool developed in the paper to detect ostracism and fight it. Moreover, a novel coping strategy for how co-ops (or other firms) might fend off ostracism threats is offered in the article.

The present study illuminates a dark side of a relationally profuse customer context, painting a more complete picture of relationship marketing determinants. Little attention has been given to ostracism as a distinct and important social behaviour in marketing research and to co-ops as a research context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether customer-company identification (CCI) can transfer from one organization to the next within the context of service alliances.

A between-subjects experiment using a fictitious alliance and a field study focused on a real alliance tests identification transfer at the time of a service alliance announcement and while the service alliance is in operation.

Identification transfer is enabled by an exclusive service alliance but not an inclusive one. For identification transfer to be maintained, customers must perceive the companies as a coherent group (i.e. high entitativity) and have close physical proximity to the alliance.

By drawing heavily on self-categorization theory for the proposed effects, the current research provides a new theoretical framework to the service and brand alliance literature that contrasts with the attitude-based theories commonly used. Furthermore, the current research explores how company-company relationships influence CCI whereas most research has focused on characteristics of the customer-company relationship. These two differences suggest service alliances provide more value to the companies and customers than currently realized.