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This study aims to independently test the predictive validity of the Persuasion Principles Index (PPI) for video advertisements for low-involvement products with a measure of in-market sales effectiveness. This study follows the inaugural test conducted by Armstrong et al. (2016) for print advertisements for high-involvement utilitarian products with a measure of advertising recall.

The method was in line with that developed by Armstrong et al. (2016) for rating advertisements and assessing the reliability of ratings. Consensus PPI scores were calculated for a data set of 242 matched pairs of television advertisements. For each pair, the authors determined whether the advertisement that better adhered to the persuasion principles performed better in-market.

Consensus PPI scores predicted the more sales effective television advertisement for 55% (confidence interval (CI) = 49%, 61%) of the 242 pairs. This result is no better than chance and much weaker than the result from the initial validation study, which found that the consensus PPI scores predicted the more recalled print advertisement for 74.5% (CI = 66%, 83%) of 96 pairs.

This study replicated the application of the PPI as per Armstrong’s guidelines and extended validity testing to a different set of advertising conditions. Findings indicate that better adherence to the persuasion principles produces only a weak, positive effect for predicting the performance of television advertisements for low-involvement products. A research agenda that flows from the results is discussed.

The authors suggest that the PPI in its present form is best used to predict advertising performance under conditions as per the inaugural validation test (Armstrong et al., 2016).

Advertisers will require compelling evidence of the PPI’s predictive accuracy to adopt the tool for pre-testing advertising. This study is the first independent test of the predictive validity of the PPI and its generalisability across advertising conditions. Another contribution of this study is the assessment of Armstrong’s advice to remove unreliable ratings. The authors show that this procedure, surprisingly, does not improve the predictive accuracy of the PPI.

This paper aims to examine the impact of purchasing occasion on product value indicators for a selection of Australian and New Zealand branded wines, as evaluated by consumers. Value indicators were defined as conspicuous or inconspicuous. Conspicuous indicators include corporate advertising, such as the vineyard, region or brand, and are considered the same (or equal) for all recipients. Inconspicuous indicators are less visible and may differ from recipient to recipient, such as referrals. Purchasing occasions are either home (personal and private) or restaurant consumption (personal and public) or as a gift (impersonal and public).

An online survey was used to understand the changing importance of value indicators based on differing purchase goals. The snowball sample was comprised of marketing professionals, who are highly educated and likely to be of prime working age (25-55 years). Initial participants were then asked to forward the email invitation to their networks. The majority of the 298 survey respondents were Australian-born and described themselves as Anglo-Saxon.

Conspicuous indicators, such as advertising, are given more consideration for impersonal consumption experiences such as gifts or to drink in public. Less conspicuous, but more trustworthy, indicators, (personal recommendations), are more important for personal consumption experiences. These results offer insight into the indicators of product value that marketers could emphasise in their marketing mixes to target consumers buying with different purchase goals in mind and seek new markets.

This study was limited in geographical selection, and the methodology comprised an online survey. The nature of the purchase contexts was deliberately kept broad to highlight the overall impact of value indicators.

While there have been some studies centering on wine purchase and consumption in different situations, direct comparisons between contexts are rare. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by comparing consumer behaviour across wine purchase contexts. The value of this paper stems from deepening understanding of the role of context in purchase decision-making and the implications for marketing practitioners and clearly identified opportunities for future research.

The purpose of this article is to use an extended model of self to understand the consumption of music and similar entertainment products.

In-depth interviews using experts within the music field were used to penetrate the private worlds of musical theatre enthusiasts. Multiple qualitative analytic techniques were used to explore the different aspects of the self underlying music consumption.

Repeated exposure to musical theatre allowed subjects to refine their consumption of specific performances that reflect the preferred aspect of their extended self. It is found higher order consumption needs are an integral part of the extended self, and form an important basis for consumption decisions. Of particular importance is the reflection of the self that assists others in their consumption choices.

Present research widely recognises consumers are seeking more than just “entertainment” when they consume an entertainment product, but struggle to characterise what it is consumers are actually seeking. This research provides this insight through an elaboration of the extended self-model.

International brands are expanding their business into emerging markets seeking new consumers for their products. Multiple research studies suggest that there are two key differentiators between developed and emerging markets that managers must take into account. These are that consumers differentiate between local and international brands, and that consumer segments differ between emerging and developed markets. This paper refutes these myths. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors examine large-scale data of purchase behaviour across seven countries and six product categories through telephone or online data collection. Surveys conducted in conjunction with research consulting projects form the basis of data collection, with samples skewing towards middle-income population from urban areas within the emerging markets. The different survey methods used support the empirical generalisability of the findings.

The authors find that brand user profiles in emerging markets rarely differ between local and international brands across age, income and gender. Differences in segmentation are related to geography – which is likely a factor of infrastructure differences. When brand users are compared, their attitudes towards the brands are also very similar between local and international brands across several attitudinal measures: “high quality”, “value for money”, “meet/understand my needs”, “affordability” and “trustworthiness”.

The research highlights that consumers in emerging markets need not be segmented based on their brand purchasing behaviour when it comes to local and international brands. This is in line with a growing body of literature in consumer segmentation and in contrast to a considerable amount of traditional literature on emerging markets.

The purpose of this paper is to present a buying process for the multichannel consumer (MCC) that starts at online information search and ends at the offline retail channel and then seeks to determine the universality of such behavior across countries.

A structured questionnaire was administered to MCCs from Russia, Singapore and the USA. The model was estimated using partial least square and country comparisons were conducted with a multi-group analysis.

The empirical results validated the conceptual model. In country comparisons, there is both converging (online information search) and diverging (retail store) MCCs’ behavior exhibiting nuanced differences.

Future research should examine values of MCCs at the individual level so as to increase the generalizability of the findings.

The convergence of MCCs information search behavior suggests that there is an opportunity for companies to standardize their online information strategy to educate global MCCs prior to their visiting brick and mortar stores. In-store salesperson remains important and effective for MCCs in the USA and Singapore, but not Russia.

A new conceptual framework that integrates economic and psychology theories is presented to depict the shift of control tilting in favor of MCCs in the buying process and introduces the concept of “reversal” information asymmetry in which consumers perceive to have more knowledge than the vendors.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate cultural variations in the qualities that White Americans and Hispanic Americans believe power-holders should embody, and the situations in which these norms influence consumer satisfaction.

Two experimental studies (n1=130 and n2=121) and one field study (n=241) were conducted with White American and Hispanic participants. Results were analysed using ANOVA and regression.

White Americans are predisposed to apply to power-holders injunctive norms of treating others justly and equitably, whereas Hispanics are predisposed to apply injunctive norms of treating others compassionately. These cultural variations in the use of injunctive norms were more evident in business or service contexts in which power was made salient, and emerged in the norms more likely to be endorsed by White American and Hispanic participants (Study 1), their approval of hypothetical negotiators who treated suppliers equitably or compassionately (Study 2), and their evaluations of powerful service providers in a real-life, on-going and consequential interaction (Study 3).

This research suggests key implications for our theoretical understanding of the role of social norms in carrying cultural patterns, as well as for cross-cultural theories of consumer satisfaction with service providers.

Marketers should pay attention to signals of fairness (compassion) in their services, as perceptions of fairness (compassion) by White American (Hispanic) consumers can boost satisfaction ratings. This is particularly important in service encounters that might be characterized by power differentials, such as those in health care and financial services.

As consumer markets grow more culturally diverse, it is important for marketers to understand how distinct notions of power impact the attitudes and behaviors of consumers from different cultures. This research investigates the implications of distinct power concepts for multi-cultural consumers’ evaluations of service providers, an important and under-researched area with implications for global service management.

The extant literature highlights the significant role of brand perceptions in buying behavior and brand equity. Despite the importance of brand perceptions and the proliferation of online brands, research in an online context is still scarce. The purpose of this paper is to address this gap by investigating the effect of positive and negative comparative affective states (online vs offline) on online brand perceptions. Consistent with existing evidence, highlighting the role of culture on brand perceptions and affective states, this research is conducted in a cross-national setting to identify the stability of the hypothesized relationships among countries.

The study uses consumer survey data from five countries (UK, USA, Australia, Canada and China). After imposing metric and factor variance invariance, we used multi-group CFA to test the hypotheses regarding the impact of positive and negative comparative affective states on online brand perceptions across the five countries in the sample.

The results show that positive comparative affective states have a significant and positive impact on online brand perceptions across the countries studied, although the impact size varies by country. The findings also show that negative comparative affective states, which are context-specific and not induced by any particular brand, have no effect on online brand perceptions across the country samples.

Managers can use the findings reported in this research to inform their branding strategies. For instance, managers may focus on triggering feelings of comfort online as these lead to more favorable online brand perceptions rather than on supressing feelings of caution, as the latter do not directly impact online brand perceptions.

The study builds on and extends the recent work of Christodoulides et al. (2013) by focussing on online brand perceptions and looking into the role of affective states in a cross-national setting.

This study examined the antecedents and consequences of intensity of SNS use in a cross-cultural context. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of three IT-related consumer characteristics – privacy concern, consumer innovativeness and propensity to share information – on the use of social networking sites (SNS) and examine if there are cross-national differences in the relationships between consumer characteristics and SNS use.

The authors developed and tested a structural equation model including consumer characteristics related to SNS usage, by using survey data of 977 SNS users in Korea and the US.

Consumer innovativeness, propensity to share information and privacy concern affected intensity of SNS use and the usage of SNS enabled social capital. In addition, the effects of innovativeness and privacy concern on the intensity of SNS use were greater in the US sample than in the Korean sample. People in the culture of high peer pressure and herding behavior tend to expect more reciprocity in social surveillance, especially among in-group members because they are interested in tracking others in the group. This tendency might alleviate the negative impact of privacy concern on the intensity of SNS use. The positive impact of innovativeness on the intensity of SNS use was alleviated in the collectivism culture. This is maybe because the imitation factor predicts the adoption behavior better than the innovation factor in the collectivism culture.

Despite several notable contributions, this study has a few limitations, which may be overcome by further research. First, this study did not considered many other personality variables. Second, most measurements were retrospective, depending on the respondents’ memory of past shopping behavior. Third, an experimental study will be needed to obtain more accurate effects of the antecedents on the intensity of SNS use in the next stage. Fourth, there are sample limitations in the study. Although this study has some limitations, it also provides very meaningful implications. For example, both the positive impact of innovativeness and the negative impact of privacy concerns on the intensity of SNS use were alleviated in the collectivistic culture.

This finding implies that SNS in the collective culture should focus more on group behavior than individual behavior in order to promote SNS use. In addition, it is an effective strategy to emphasize the innovative function of SNS in individualism culture. As privacy concern is not big problem of SNS usage in collectivism culture, it is an effective strategy to stimulate the needs of in-group surveillance.

The study contributes to the literature examining cross-cultural influence on SNS use. The study presents how consumer characteristics interact with culture in order to explain the intensity of SNS use.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of volume and valence of online movie ratings on consumers’ risk perceptions and purchase intentions, as well as the moderating impact of cultural values, in four emerging Asian markets.

Using a survey questionnaire, data was collected from 204 respondents for Study 1 and 376 respondents for Study 2 in four emerging markets (China, India, Chinese Macau, and the Philippines). The analysis was conducted using analysis of variance.

Results indicate that moviegoers express higher risk perceptions and lower purchase intentions when the volume of online ratings is smaller and when the valence (average rating) is lower. These effects are enhanced for more conservative consumers, but are not influenced by consumers’ self-transcendence. Indian consumers were found to be more conservative than the other Asian consumers in the study.

Taken together, the findings make significant contributions to the literature on services marketing, online ratings, cultural values, risk perceptions, and emerging markets. In contrast to correlational studies, the experimental design controls for potential confounding factors and provides evidence of causality between online ratings and consumer responses. In addition, by using cultural values, the authors avoid the problems associated with using national culture scores to characterize individuals or sub-groups within countries.

The study suggests that despite the geographical proximity of these emerging markets, key discernible differences exist due to the moderating impact of cultural values on consumer responses. When targeting consumers in relatively conservative markets (e.g. India), a large volume of positive online ratings may lower consumers’ risk perceptions and increase their purchase intentions.

This study is one of the pioneering studies examining the impacts of volume and valence of online movie ratings on consumers’ risk perceptions and purchase intentions in emerging Asian markets.