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This article analyses the role of information in the marketing processes associated with a digital world. The distinctions between information products and goods and services are explored. The unique characteristics of information products may demand a new approach to marketing, defined as information marketing. An analysis of the different levels of product demonstrates that information is often used to augment services or goods, and that it may be difficult to delineate the category “information products”. In marketing communications, digital information can be a rich resource for organisations, consumers and communities. The multi‐faceted role of information in the virtual world has consequences for information producers, consumers and marketers. These groups need to understand the unique features of information marketing.

Information products are analysed in terms of their linguistic, artistic, technological, pragmatic and contextual components and characteristics, and illustrated with examples of how the components are combined in real‐life information products. The conclusion is that the malleability and versatility of the components, and the technological possibilities of combining them provide seemingly unlimited scope for designing and marketing value‐added information products in our increasingly competitive and information technology‐based societies.

The purpose of this paper is to test if the order in which potential customers receive company related information and product related information about a new brand can influence their trust and purchase intentions towards that brand. The empirical context is when both product and company are new to a market and share a brand name.

Two experiments, each involving a different product type, are used to test whether higher trust and purchase intentions towards a new brand are likely when company related information is provided first compared to when product related information is provided first.

Company related information is more diagnostic than product related information and carries more weight in initial consumer trust judgements particularly when it is evaluated first. There is a similar primacy effect on purchase intentions but one mediated by initial trust. The effect is more pronounced for product types that involve a higher perceived risk when buying.

This paper adds to our understanding of the respective roles of corporate and product communication in the process of brand trust formation for newly launched brands by evidencing and explaining primacy effects related to the greater diagnosticity of corporate brand information.

Market entrants should communicate information about their company before promoting their products.

While prior work has shown that both company and product related information can influence customers’ trust towards a new brand, there has been no assessment of the benefits from ordering these communications. The focus here is then on the processes involved in brand trust formation, rather than on identifying specific antecedents of brand trust.

As an increasingly popular tool for product exploration, online communities have an important impact on consumers’ purchasing decisions. The purpose of this study is to gain a deeper understanding of how visiting behaviors in online communities affect consumers’ offline purchasing behavior. The moderating role of two dimensions of consumer visiting behaviors (visiting depth and visiting breadth) also receives attention. Moreover, the impact of consumer visiting behaviors on offline sales for different types of online communities is also the focus of this paper.

To test the empirical model, the authors collected data on consumers’ visits to an online real estate platform with local housing sales data. In addition to the baseline regression analysis of the data with the help of Stata 17.0, the study also analyzes the robustness of the results through several methods.

The authors focus on an online community for newly-built housing and find that consumer visits to the focal online community have a positive impact on offline sales. Visiting breadth has a negative moderating effect on this relationship, and no statistically significant moderating effect is found for visiting depth. Further, our empirical exploration finds that consumer visits to competitive online communities have a positive impact on offline focal product sales, but visits to complementary online communities have no statistically significant effect on offline sales.

Our findings contribute to the understanding of consumers’ cross-channel purchasing behavior and provide new insights into how visiting behaviors in online communities affect consumers’ purchasing decisions.

The chapter focused on quality assurance and marketing of library services and products at the Midlands State University (MSU). The chapter's main objective was to identify the quality assurance mechanisms at the MSU Library. The major findings of the research were; the MSU library was practising quality assurance, staff was trained on the latest trends in the profession, the collection was multidisciplinary and in different forms, and that there were Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) used in enhancing service provision. The researcher recommended that the library needed to continuously train librarians on issues to do with quality, improve the infrastructure, introduce Research Data Management to enhance the Research Support Services and improve on the Information Literacy Skills training programmes. The author identified some areas for further research and the major one was that there is need for clarification on the concept of the 4th Industrial Revolution.

This paper aims to analyze the effects of web communities vs company websites in providing tactile information considering different types of product in terms of touch diagnosticity (low- vs. high-touch products).

Three experimental studies were conducted to examine the effect of online information sources (i.e. web communities vs. company websites) in providing tactile information on consumer responses, considering the moderation role of product type in terms of touch diagnosticity (low- vs. high-touch products, Study 1), the moderating role of type of information (tactile vs. generic, Study 2a); and the moderating role of need for touch (NFT) (Study 2a and 2b).

While previous research converges on the idea that the provision of a written description of tactile properties deriving from the product usage is particularly effective for products for which tactile information is diagnostic and for individuals high in NFT, the results demonstrated that the presence (vs. the absence) of the description of the tactile properties provided by web communities (vs. company websites) matters for those products for which touch is not diagnostic and for individuals low in NFT.

The findings have particular relevance for emerging brands intending to commercialize their products in the digital environment. These companies should be present in web communities to describe a product’s tactile characteristics, especially if not diagnostic.

This paper significantly contributes to a better understanding of a little studied area, namely, consumer responses toward haptic compensational strategies providing haptic cues (e.g. written description of tactile information along with pictures of products) aiming at compensating for the absence of touch, underlining the differential influence of online sources of tactile information on consumer responses across different types of products.

Existing research on product design has found that a design’s complexity is an important antecedent of consumers’ aesthetic and behavioural responses. This paper aims to shed new light on the relationship between design complexity and perceptions of design quality by taking the effects of consumers’ naïve theories into account.

The hypotheses of this paper are tested in a series of three experiments.

The findings from three studies show that the extent to which consumers prefer more complex product designs to simpler ones depends on the extent to which they believe that the complexity of a design is indicative of the effort or of the talent of the designers involved in the design process. These competing naïve theories, in turn, are triggered by contextual information that consumers have at their disposal, such as the professional background of a designer or the brand that is associated with a particular design.

This research was limited to a design's complexity as the central design element and to the effects of two naïve theories. Future research may also take other design factors and consumer heuristics into account.

This research reveals that the extent to which managers may successfully introduce both complex and simple designs may depend on the reputation of a company’s designers and the prestige of a brand.

This research examines design complexity from a novel theoretical perspective and shows that the effect of design complexity on perceptions of design quality is contingent on two specific naïve theories of consumers.

This study developed a new interpretation of the attitude contagion theory, with the information adoption model (IAM) as the theoretical basis. A review of electronic word-of-mouth studies was conducted by using informational and individual determinants to develop an integrated empirical model that identified the antecedents and consequences of consumer attitude toward online reviews.

This study recruited 750 members of Facebook beauty fan pages in Taiwan and used the structural equation model to test research hypotheses.

Results revealed that perceived “ electronic word-of mouth (eWOM) credibility of online reviews” and “product involvement” could be used to explain the effects of attitude toward online reviews. Regarding the attitude contagion effect, the effect of “attitude toward online review” on both “attitude toward a product” and “attitude toward a brand” is stronger than that on “eWOM adoption.”

This paper provides valuable insights into the antecedents, consequences and mediating mechanisms that determine consumer attitude toward online reviews.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of consumers' shopping orientation on their satisfaction level with the product search and purchase behavior using multi‐channels.

A total of 181 students in a large US mid‐western university provided usable responses to the survey. Exploratory factor analysis and multiple regression analyses were employed to examine the research questions.

The results showed that more than three quarters of the respondents shopped via the internet and catalogs, and about 95 percent shopped at non‐local retailers. About 60 percent reported that they never shopped from TV shopping channels. Confident/fashion‐conscious shopping orientation and catalog/internet shopping orientation were found to be key predictors of customer satisfaction level with information search via multi‐channels. Both confident/fashion‐conscious consumers and mall shopping‐oriented shoppers were more satisfied with store‐based retail channels for apparel purchases, whereas non‐local store‐oriented shoppers and catalog/internet‐oriented shoppers were more satisfied with non‐store‐based retail channels for their apparel purchases.

The sample of this study was biased by gender and age. For the apparel retail industry, this paper offers practical knowledge about the relationships between shopping orientation and consumer search and purchase behavior in a multi‐channel retailing context.

No study has utilized the shopping orientation framework to explain consumer behavior in a multi‐channel environment. This study provides understanding of consumer product information search behavior on four dimensions (price, promotion, style/trends, and merchandise availability) via multi‐channels.

In electronic commerce, businesses require to integrate two kinds of activities – ones that are embedded into the physical value chains and the others that are built through information into the virtual chain. Although the relative importance of these two kinds of chain depends on the characteristics of the products and services, their integration, nevertheless, plays a critical role in the success of e‐commerce. In e‐commerce, more and more value chain activities are conducted electronically, therefore, businesses should understand the implication of the virtual value chain activities. The virtual chain offers a number of distinct advantages over the physical value chain. Some of these advantages lie in forging alliances between customers and manufacturers, advertising products and services selectively with effects of audio, video, and graphics, and saving time and money in efficiently processing customer orders and enquiries. Besides, e‐commerce offers flexibility in option pricing and customization of products and service, by reducing the constraints of time and space.