Search results

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.

To show that Chinese consumers are constantly redefining and revaluing goods along the axes of the real and the false, with little regard for legal definitions of brand authenticity or “fakeness.”

The data was collected through interviews, focus groups, observations, and casual conversations over 16 months of ethnographic research in Beijing, China.

In their everyday consumption practices and navigation of a complex and often dangerous marketplace, Chinese consumers categorize products based on their perceived “truth.” The paper introduces a typology that describes these local categories and explains their utility for consumers.

The data was primarily conducted in an urban capital with a highly educated and high-average-income populace, thus it does not represent all Chinese consumers or a statistical sample.

This paper explains how the same globalizing processes that helped brands establish themselves in the Chinese market now threaten the capability of all brands to gain and retain the trust of consumers

By explaining how new calculations of value are being produced under glocalized regimes of manufacture and distribution, this research makes an important contribution to our understandings of brands and their limits.

Social networking sites (SNS) are enjoying growing popularity and have triggered new ethical issues including risks of deception, social grooming, cyber-bullying and surveillance. This development along with the growing power of SNS providers calls for an investigation of the CSR engagement of SNS companies. The chapter examines to what extent three prominent providers – Google, Facebook and Twitter – fulfill their responsibilities.

The chapter draws heavily on a politicized concept of CSR, namely ‘corporate citizenship’ (Crane, Matten, & Moon, 2008a; Matten & Crane, 2005) and ‘political CSR’ (Scherer & Palazzo, 2007, 2011) and discusses the role SNS providers play in administering citizenship rights. The chapter takes a qualitative case study approach.

Facebook, Twitter and Google have not only made clear commitments to act responsibly, they actually enhance the citizenship status of their users in many ways, e.g. by offering a platform for democracy activists. Deficiencies and contradictions also become visible, e.g. SNS providers inhibit citizenship by failing to provide sufficient privacy protection.

The chapter is limited by its case study approach, but provides valuable insights to an industry with considerable influence. It contributes to CSR research by applying and testing the politicized concept of CSR in the context of SNS providers.

Although SNS have received appraisal as effective tools of CSR communication, there has been little attention to CSR policy and practice of the companies providing social networks. This is unfortunate since the activities of SNS providers directly impact on millions of users worldwide.

Prior research has documented that product failures can be among a firm's worst nightmares. In this research, we examine if retailers are also held accountable by consumers when products that they sold, but did not manufacture, fail. In two studies, we show that consumers not only blame multiple parties when product failures occur – including the retailer – but also that manufacturer brand equity and retailer store image serve as important contextual cues in the blame assignment process. Specifically, building on congruity theory, we show that retailers are especially susceptible to being held responsible for failure if the equity of the failed product and the retailer store image are incongruent. Our findings also indicate that value-oriented retailers are particularly vulnerable to being blamed when high-equity products fail. Our findings suggest measuring attribution of blame between the manufacturer and retailer involved in a product failure event – instead of only the manufacturer as has been the norm in extant research – facilitates our understanding of consumer responses when product failures occur.

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.

This chapter addresses one aspect of the broad issue of the psychological foundations of the dimensions of multidimensional scaling (MDS) solutions. Using empirical data from three independent studies, it is shown that the dimensionality of MDS solutions is negatively related to individual differences in the level of cognitive differentiation and integrative complexity of individuals and positively related to the individual's ability to discriminate within dimensions. MDS dimensionality is also shown to be affected by a variety of task-related variables such as perceived task difficulty, consistency in providing similarity judgments, confidence, familiarity, and importance attached to the stimuli. The chapter concludes by raising the issue of whether MDS can be validly used to describe complex cognitive processes.