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In the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers increasingly opt for, or are forced to, use home delivery services. The authors study retailers' decisions regarding “delivery mode”, which is about outsourcing (vs. insourcing) the delivery service to a traditional delivery company or an unbranded carrier and its effects on consumers' perceived overall quality, perceived hygienic quality, and subsequently, willingness to stay with the firm beyond the pandemic.

A pre-test, an experiment and a post-test were conducted with participants from the UK (Total N = 380).

The results of this study show that (1) in a pandemic, perceived hygienic quality overshadows perceived service quality as a key determinant of consumers' choices, and (2) while consumers have a relatively negative view of the hygienic level of unbranded carriers, they do not differentiate between traditional delivery carriers and retailer-branded carriers. Thus, they are equally interested in using the services of the latter ones.

This study shows that during a health crisis, consumers change their hierarchy of motivations to reflect the new protection motivations. The authors usher perceived hygienic quality as a variable that should be seriously considered as both a tactical and a strategic variable affecting the attractiveness of alternative home delivery methods and consumers' intentions to continue using them after the pandemic.

While most marketing research on organic products refers to the premium price levels of organic products, little research exists on consumers’ behavioural responses to price promotions or discounts of organic products. The present study aims to fill this research gap.

To develop alternative hypotheses about consumers’ behavioural responses to price promotions of organic fast-moving consumer good (FMCG) products, the authors used the researcher-introspection method in a pre-study. To test the hypotheses developed based on the pre-study, the authors conducted a field experiment on online advertising of an FMCG sold in drugstores. In the field experiment, the authors exposed consumers to an online ad featuring either a price promotion (−20%) or the regular price of the product. The ads also varied in terms of whether they contained explicit organic claims or not, and whether they included implicit organic cues or not.

The price promotion increased the clickthrough rate of the ad both when combined with an explicit organic claim and when combined with the implicit cue of green product pack. The results suggest that consumers do not have significant suspicions about price promotions of organic products, but rather presume that the price promotion of an organic FMCG product is a periodical promotional action, similar to the price promotions for conventional, non-organic products. Also, consumers seem to assume that the regular prices of organic FMCG products are so high that the retailer/manufacturer can well afford periodic price discounts.

The present research shifts the focus of organic marketing research from the premium price levels to the effectiveness of price promotions and discounts. Further, the present results contrast with certain earlier studies that have questioned the effectiveness of price promotions for organic products.

The results have different implications for marketing managers of brands not yet providing organic product versions in the market, of brands producing non-organic products, which cannot easily be rendered organic, and of brands offering organic products in the market.

This is, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the first empirical study and field experiment on price promotions of organic products, including explicit organic claims.

In the age of digital media, customers have access to vast digital information sources, within and outside a company's direct control. Yet managers lack a metric to capture customers' cross-media exposure and its ramifications for individual customer journeys. To solve this issue, this article introduces media entropy as a new metric for assessing cross-media exposure on the individual customer level and illustrates its effect on consumers' purchase decisions.

Building on information and signalling theory, this study proposes the entropy of company-controlled and peer-driven media sources as a measure of cross-media exposure. A probit model analyses individual-level customer journey data across more than 25,000 digital and traditional media touchpoints.

Cross-media exposure, measured as the entropy of information sources in a customer journey, drives purchase decisions. The positive effect is particularly pronounced for (1) digital (online) versus traditional (offline) media environments, (2) customers who currently do not own the brand and (3) brands that customers perceive as weak.

The proposed metric of cross-media exposure can help managers understand customers' information structures in pre-purchase phases. Assessing the consequences of customers' cross-media exposure is especially relevant for service companies that seek to support customers' information search efforts. Marketing agencies, consultancies and platform providers also need actionable customer journey metrics, particularly in early stages of the journey.

Service managers and marketers can integrate the media entropy metric into their marketing dashboards and use it to steer their investments in different media types. Researchers can include the metric in empirical models to explore customers' omni-channel journeys.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the corporate marketing literature by examining how an individual's identification with a company influences their willingness to invest in the company's shares.

A set of hypotheses was developed, based on theory, and survey data were obtained from 440 individuals in order to test the hypotheses. The data pertained to the individuals' recent decisions to invest in particular companies' shares, and to the degree of their identification with the companies' identities. The analysis method was PLS path modelling.

First, an individual's identification with a company was found to have a positive effect on their determination to invest in the company's shares rather than in other companies' shares that have approximately similar expected financial returns/risks. Second, company identification was found to elicit preparedness to invest in the company's shares with lower financial returns expected from the shares than from other shares. Both influences were partly mediated by the individual's willingness to give support to a company with which they identify.

The study pertains to company identification of individual investors; institutional (and professional) investors are beyond the scope of the paper. Also, the sample focuses on investors in a single country (Finland), and the data may involve some self‐reporting and retrospection biases.

Considering corporate marketing in the stock markets, individuals who identify with the company are identified as worthwhile targets when the company seeks to attract new investors.

The paper provides theoretical grounding for and empirical evidence of the positive influence of company identification on individuals' willingness to invest in companies' shares. It is a novel finding for corporate marketing literature that individuals express their identification with a corporate brand also through investing in its shares.

The purpose of this paper is to explicate the psychological motivations underlying this influence as well as to provide empirical evidence of it. Individuals' consumption psychology and investment psychology have been traditionally viewed as rather separate realms. However, researchers have recently begun to imply that an individual's stock ownership in a company may positively influence his/her brand loyalty towards the company.

A survey study of 293 individual stockowners of three companies is presented.

The analysis shows that, for a large proportion of individuals, becoming a stockowner of a company leads to positive, increased motivation to exhibit brand loyalty towards the company, in terms of his/her personal purchases of the company's products. Second, the analysis shows how stock ownership often leads to increased motivation to engage in other brand‐supporting behaviors, such as positive word‐of‐mouth.

The self‐reported data used on individuals' motivations somewhat restrict the results, which can be dealt with in further research.

The findings imply opportunities for managers to benefit from the tendency of individual stockowners to engage in repeat purchasing of the company's products and word‐of‐mouth, so as to increase the sales of the company.

The paper explicates the individual psychology motivations underlying the influence of a consumer's stock ownership in a company on his/her brand loyalty towards the company – and provides empirical evidence of the motivations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the links between individual investors' subjective evaluations of certain companies' products and brands, on one hand, and their willingness and decisions to invest in those companies' stocks, on the other. The authors aim to challenge the traditional assumption that individuals would make stock investment decisions purely on the basis of expected financial returns and risks.

Survey data were collected from 293 individuals who invest in the stock market of a European country and analyzed with PLS path modeling.

In the clear majority of the consumers' stock investment decisions that were analyzed, the consumers exhibited some willingness to invest in a chosen stock beyond its expected financial returns/risk. Two variables are found to elicit willingness to invest in a company's stock beyond its financial returns: the personal relevance that the individual attaches to domains (activities or areas of interest; ideas or ideals) supported or represented by the company's products; and the individual's affective evaluation of the company's product brand.

Replicating the study with different companies from different industries and with consumers from different countries will be important. Overcoming a potential retrospection bias in the reported study is also a task for further research.

The findings provide insights that can serve segmentation, targeting, and positioning when it comes to marketing a company in the stock market so as to attract investors.

The paper provides new evidence on the influence of product and brand evaluations in consumers' stock investment decisions – suggesting that positive product evaluations elicit extra willingness to invest in a company's stock, over and beyond its financial returns.

This article aims to focus on product-featuring advertising targeted to stock investors – that is, ads that provide investors with impressions about the company’s products, over and above financial information. The purpose is to explicate and test the psychological mechanisms by which such ads may exert influence on investors.

An experiment is conducted with a representative sample of real investors, to test the effect and explore the underlying mechanisms. Two additional laboratory experiments reveal moderating factors of this effect.

The results show that highlighting the company’s product features in an investor ad increases investors’ interest in investing in the company’s stock, by enhancing investors’ subjective evaluations of the company’s products. This effect emerges independent of factors related to preexisting brand perceptions (e.g. brand recognizability and likeability) and is mediated by dual causal channels: by increasing expectations about the company’s financial returns and by increasing affective attachment with the company’s products.

The findings identify and confirm different mechanisms of the effect of investor ads, but the relative magnitude of the effects is not generalizable.

The results provide corporate marketing, corporate communications and investor relations professionals insights into how investors may be attracted by product-featuring advertisements.

The study is the first to explicate the different channels of influence through which product-featuring ads may affect investors’ willingness to invest in companies.

This study aims to examine the interplay between focal and background goals in consumer financial decision-making and identify conditions that lead individuals to trade-off financial returns for background goals.

The current research reviews the relevant literature on consumer financial decision-making and goal systems theory to develop a set of hypotheses that is tested using three experiments.

The experiments show that individuals who have been subtly primed with self-expressive background goals, or experienced progress toward the focal goal of financial returns, accept lower financial returns for the opportunity to invest in stocks that allow for increased self-expression. Further, while subtly primed background goals exert a non-normative influence on investment decisions, explicit cues about an investment’s background goal-instrumentality create a backlash effect, and decrease individuals’ willingness to trade-off financial returns.

Future research could confirm the robustness of the findings of the present research by using different priming tasks and alternative ways of making the background goal explicit to individuals.

To achieve greater attraction among individual investors, it helps to frame a financial product or stock in communications materials in a way that sends subtle signals with which investors can identify. Such signals could include stressing the product/company’s home country (addressing individuals’ patriotism) or a particular product domain (addressing individual investors’ desire for interesting/exciting current/future products).

While previous research suggests that investment choices may be influenced by self-expressive motivations, to date, it remains unclear whether and when individual investors are actually willing to trade-off the focal goal of maximizing financial returns for the opportunity to satisfy alternative background goals.

Long‐run corporate success requires engagement in two types of innovative activities: exploitation and exploration. However, earlier research has focused on exploration and exploitation concerning a firm's technologies. The purpose of the present article is to explicitly examine exploration and exploitation related to customers and markets.

The article is conceptual in nature, based on marketing, strategic management, and organization literatures.

The article explains the logic of exploration‐exploitation with respect to two market‐related resource classes – the firm's knowledge of markets and customers (market/customer intelligence) and market actors' knowledge of and bonds to the firm (brands/bonds) – as viewed in combination with the resource class of technologies, processes, and products (technologies/processes). The distinction of these three resource classes enables a three‐dimensional conceptualization of the ideal types of a firm's business development projects, which are seen as combinations of exploration and exploitation of resources across the three classes. The article also introduces the notions of multidimensionality of exploration‐exploitation within the resource classes and relativity of resource newness.

The article explicates how firms can orient their exploration and exploitation strategies not only on the technology dimension but also on the dimensions of market/customer intelligence and brands/bonds.