Search results

The purpose of this study is to explore the role of co-playing as a moderator of the relation between parents’ and children’s play of violent video games.

The study uses dyadic parent/child survey data to estimate the conditional effects in the model, both direct and indirect.

The positive effect of parents’ violent video game play of children’s playing behaviors is attenuated by parent/child co-playing. Parents’ knowledge of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) ratings leads to higher levels of co-playing, thereby indirectly attenuating violent video game play in children as driven by parents’ play.

The paper extends the literature on consumer socialization and the impact of co-playing and identifies an antecedent for co-playing in this context.

The paper reveals that knowledge of the self-regulatory ESRB rules plays a valuable (indirect) role in mitigating violent video game play by children through an increase in co-playing, which attenuates the positive effect of parents’ play on children’s play.

The study incorporates data from both parents and children to investigate the relationship between parents and children’s violent video game play while empirically investigating the uncertainty in the literature concerning the moderating impact of co-playing.

This study aims to uncover in-depth examples of how emergent media affects parents’ views and socialization efforts. The study examines these views and efforts in the context of violent commercials.

The authors collected data for this paper using two studies. In Study 1, they collected data from the internet. Comments related to “violent ads” or “violent commercials” were collated and analyzed. For Study 2, they conducted in-depth interviews with mothers on their views on parental mediation and impact of media on their children.

The internet data helped develop a parental definition of violent ads and identify that parents lie on a continuum regarding their concerns about violent commercials. Further in-depth questioning of parents on the above finding led to the identification of four clusters of parents. “Media managers” attempt to control and restrict their child’s media environment while educating their child about the effects of violent commercials. “Enablers” spend abundant time co-viewing primetime TV while engaging their child in conversations on violence, but not on violent ads. To maintain harmony in the household, “Harmonizers” merely restrict viewing of violent commercials without educating their child about its effects. Finally, “Agent evaluators” are likely to co-view violent commercials, without discussing them with their child.

First, several of the parental segments (media managers, enablers and harmonizers) tend to note some concerns with violence in advertising. Importantly, this concern for violence appears to be limited to gore and use of physical weapon. Second, while parents do not have homogenous views on violent ads, those who are concerned also have differing roots of concern. This influences their mediation efforts. Third, socialization is bi-directional at times.

Many parents do not approve are the use of physical violence, use of weapons and depiction of blood/gore even in ads for movies or videogames. Advertisers might be wise to avoid such content in ads directed to children. Second, if media and marketing managers could plan to sponsor TV shows (vs placing violent ads) that offer ad-free program time, parents might respond positively. Third, as socialization is bi-directional, advertisers could consider using ad scenarios where parents and children engage with the pros and cons of a certain product or content, thus enabling parent-child conversations to make an informed decision.

Many parents notice violence in ads; policymakers could consider developing ratings for ads that consider the amount and type of violence while rating an ad. Second, a focus on increasing parental awareness on the harms of constantly exposing children to violent commercials might change the views of some parents who currently believe that a few or no violent commercials are being aired during children’s programs. Finally, parents envisage a greater role for media in their lives, and policymakers will have to suggest ways to effectively integrate media content in one’s lives rather than just suggest bans or restrictions.

The contributions of this paper include viewers’ (vs researchers’) definition of violent commercials, showcasing that parents are likely to manage media using new media options such as Netflix, and some parents are likely to co-create rules with their children.

Much of human behaviour is viewed as a process, which begins with early childhood experience, and develops into later life emotions, values, beliefs, and behaviours. Described below, considerable interdisciplinary attention has been given to the role of childhood, and more specifically, to the relevance of different types of parental influence on children as they later become adults. Within marketing, selected scholarly consideration has been devoted to the roles of parents on their children's existing consumer behaviour. The unique contribution of this article is to examine the role of different types of parental influence on later adulthood shopping behaviours.

This paper proposes a framework for connecting the involvement construct’s antecedents of Internet marketing, measured involvement degree, related constructs and consequences of consumer behavior. The research first determined the factors that influence the degree of Internet marketing involvement then established the different involvement degree clusters by measured involvement. Finally, the relationship among influence factors, Internet marketing involvement degree, and consequences of consumer behavior was analyzed. Based on the research findings, this paper discusses the possible Internet marketing strategies for a variety involvement degree clusters.

Social marketers set out to undertake interventions that benefit society. However, at times, there can be inadvertent, unintended consequences of these interventions that can be seen as unethical. Such ethical issues can arise from the context, process, method and outcomes of interventions and often bring to the fore the “social fairness” of social marketing. Given that social marketing is aimed at societal benefit, the authors believe that the issue of social fairness is an important one in the context of ethical social marketing. With that in mind, the purpose of this paper is to provide a discussion of the application of a normative ethical framework, labelled the integrative justice model (IJM) (Santos and Laczniak, 2009), to social marketing. This amounts to a macro-social marketing ethical framework.

Conceptual broadening of a normative ethical framework.

The authors hold that the IJM provides several helpful normative guidelines for improving the “social fairness” of social marketing. As such, the presented normative framework of macro-social marketing ethics provides useful guidelines for future development of social marketing codes of ethics.

The macro-social marketing ethics framework provides practical guidelines for social marketers to assess ethical issues in social marketing.

The macro-social marketing ethics framework answers the call of Carter, Mayes, Eagle and Dahl (2017) for development of ethical frameworks for social marketers. It provides a reconciliation of multiple normative frameworks to give a set of guidelines for social marketers that are clear and non-contradictory.

Profound economic, social, political and environmental problems are cascading across modern civilization in the 21st century. Many of these problems resulted from the prevailing effects of rational economics focused on profit maximization. The purpose of this paper is to reframe the mindsets of scholars, firms and public policy decision-makers through enabling Service Thinking practices.

Marketing, service and allied discipline literature are synthesized, and Raworth's (2018) Doughnut Economics model is adapted to conceptualize and construct the Service Thinking framework.

Service Thinking is defined as a just, mutualistic and human-centered mindset for creating and regenerating service systems that meet the needs of people and the living planet. Service Thinking is enabled by five practices (service empathy, service inclusion, service respect, service integrity and service courage).

Actionable implications are presented for service ecosystem entities to uplift well-being, enhance sustainability and increase prosperity.

Service Thinking practices are shaped by influencing forces (marketing, education and law/policy) and operant service ecosystem resources (motivation–opportunity–ability or MOA), which makes Service Thinking applicable to four economic entities in the service ecosystem: the household, the market, the state and the commons.

Reports on the ethical beliefs of retail salespeople, managers and executives in South Africa. Little is known about the ethical perceptions of retailers despite the fact that retailing plays a vital role in the economy. A review of the ethics literature regarding retailing and sales is presented. A survey of 579 retailing employees was undertaken. Findings indicate differences in the ethical beliefs of salespeople when compared to managers. The specific differences are discussed, as well as implications and recommendations for retailers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how psychological empowerment affects individuals’ likelihood of publicly punishing a company with whom they had unsatisfactory experiences through online complaining behaviors.

A 3 (intrapersonal empowerment: high/low/control) by 3 (interactional empowerment: high/low/control) online experiment was designed using the priming technique. Following the priming tasks, participants were given a scenario in which a restaurant failed their expectations followed by dependent and control measures.

Results revealed a significant main effect of interactional empowerment: participants in the low interactional empowerment condition reported being less likely to engage in the revenge-motivated online public complaining behaviors than participants in the control condition. The study also found a significant interaction effect between interactional and intrapersonal empowerment.

The study findings yield practical application for crisis management and relationship management. Understanding the linkage between power and online complaining behaviors should help corporate communication professionals to better perform risk assessment, environmental scanning and crisis communication and management.

Limited empirical studies have investigated the linkage between empowerment and online complaining behaviors in the consumer context. The present study fills this gap by conceptualizing online public complaining as a revenge-motivated behavior. The study yields both theoretical and practical implications.

Consumers may enjoy the information sharing and social support made available when a social media platform is used for pre-purchase research; however, do consumers reevaluate the privacy and security of the platform differently when ordering and payment capabilities are added? As social media systems have evolved into social commerce platforms (SCPs), individuals are often faced with whether to complete a purchase they have been researching or switch to a traditional e-commerce platform to complete the transaction. This research examines consumer trust formation in the SCP channel and how consumer interest and engagement in the channel are maintained and influence consumer decisions to purchase via the SCP.

Based on trust and involvement literature, a research model was conceptualized to capture consumer beliefs about SCP privacy and security and whether the SCP can be trusted, using these inputs into subsequent consumer interest, engagement and decisions on whether to use the SCP for purchasing. The research model was empirically tested using the panel data's structural equation modeling (AMOS) (n = 405). The data showed acceptable reliability and convergent validity, while the original research model provides predictive validity and theory-confirming insights.

Results confirm that consumer perceptions of privacy and security play a crucial role as decision criteria, informing their judgments of whether a new social commerce channel can be trusted enough to conduct purchases. Further, consumer trust supports their interest in the SCP, resulting in enduring and enhanced behavioral use and, to a lesser extent, purchase intent. Still, a majority of this sample declined to purchase using the SCP and rather preferred to transact on tried and trusted traditional e-commerce sites.

This study is among the first to examine trust formation in new SCPs, where consumers are deciding to expand their engagement level from social and informational to commercial.

This paper aims to explore the power of appeals based on fear mixed with challenge co-designed with vulnerable consumers in motivating the use of credence services.

A qualitative phase (Study 1), comprising focus groups of self-identified at-risk gamblers, revealed a series of conceptual themes for advertising stimuli that were then tested empirically (Study 2) on the likelihood to use credence services in a gambling context. Individual characteristics such as tolerance of ambiguity were also tested for their potential moderating influence.

In comparison to appeals based on single emotions, fear mixed with the challenge has a significantly stronger impact on intentions to use credence services in at-risk gamblers. Findings confirm the indirect positive impact of fear mixed with the challenge via sequential mediators of involvement with advertising and attitude towards credence service advertising. The moderating role of tolerance of ambiguity on credence service use intentions was confirmed.

The potential of a fear mixed with challenge appeal to motivate vulnerable consumers to seek credence services has not been investigated to date. The findings contribute to both the transformative service research and advertising literature streams by providing valuable insights into promotional campaigns aimed at vulnerable consumers such as at-risk gamblers.