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The last few years have witnessed the an increase in the importance of web‐based call service centers, which can effectively manage the consumer communications necessary for consumer satisfaction and loyalty. Many small firms lacking the financial and manpower resources to establish a wholly owned call center outsource these activities to independent call centers. However, managers are generally hesitant to outsource their communication management tasks to call centers which also service their competitors, fearing leakage of sensitive information. Independent call centers can counter this fear by having exclusive contracts with retailers in each product category. This will require independent call centers to have clients in different product categories, even though it is preferable to pick products to maintain synergies in their operations. It is hypothesized that managers can obtain these synergies by using the product classification scheme of search‐experience goods to pick products. The hypothesis is validated through empirical testing.

This research aims to examine how credence, search and experience attributes compete with suggestive brand names that are incongruent with the attributes they cue (e.g. expensive EconoLodge Motel, short-lasting Duracell battery and joint-stiffening JointFlex pill).

This study relies on experimental studies, together with analyses of variance, t-tests and logistic regressions.

Incongruent suggestive brand names can distort product evaluations and alter perceptions of product performance in joint product judgments involving contradictory credence attributes; they can misdirect product evaluations even if the search attributes conflict with competitor brands. Furthermore, they are more likely to backfire if contradictory experience attributes are readily available to consumers.

This test of the role of incongruence between suggestive brand names and actual product features includes key concepts that can inform continued studies, such as search attributes that consumers can readily observe, experience attributes that can be observed only after product use and credence attributes that might not be observed even after use.

This study provides applicable guidelines for managers, consumers and policymakers.

The findings expand beyond prior literature that focuses on memory-based, separate evaluations of advertised benefits and inferences or expectations of unavailable attributes. Specifically, this study details the implications of congruence between the suggestive brand names and different types of attributes observable at different consumption stages.

Investigates empirically the importance of buyer characteristics as well as product and service classifications on the informational content of advertising supply by sellers utilizing Yellow Pages advertisements from six US cities. The analysis and tests extend the categories used in previous tests by including so‐called “credence goods” by analysing the impact of alternative buyer characteristics as proxies for time and information costs. The intra‐city and, to a lesser extent, inter‐city comparisons lend support to the contemporary theory of advertising as information.

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 investigate if consumer online patronage is influenced by product category and online store type.

Building on the prior work in this area by the authors and other researchers the study collected data in two phases to investigate the study hypotheses.

The study results suggest that consumers' online patronage is differed based on product type. Interaction effects of the online stores and product type were significant too. Additionally, the rank order of importance of the Internet attribute varied among the three types of online retailers.

The study results should be replicated in other markets. Future studies may also include a variety of different types of online outlets to improve the conclusiveness of the findings reported in this study.

The results should be of interest to the online retailers in choosing the types of merchandise and services to emphasis in the retailers marketing program.

The paper should be of interest to academicians as well as practitioners as it contributes to the small but growing literature in the area of online retailing. It adds to the literature on the product classification paradigm as well as offers practical guidelines for managers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the presence of nostalgic advertising in Indian television and its execution with reference to extent of information disclosure, level of involvement, type of products and stages in product life cycle (PLC).

This research uses a content analysis of 700 TV advertisements aired between January-December 2013 from top five Indian TV channels based on their rank according to Gross Viewership in Thousands.

Humour/happiness was the most commonly used emotional appeal and nostalgic ads constituted 12 per cent of the emotional ads in Indian television. “References to past family experiences” was the most commonly used nostalgic element. As hypothesised, nostalgic ads use low information disclosure strategy (vis-à-vis high/medium information disclosure strategy) and are more commonly used for low involvement products (vis-à-vis high involvement products), experience products (vis-à-vis search products), and non-durables (vis-à-vis durables). Also, nostalgic appeals are more commonly used at maturity stage of PLC (vis-à-vis introduction stage).

This is the first research to analyse the content and execution of nostalgic advertising in India. This study is also one of the first to provide a comprehensive framework on nostalgic advertising. The interrelationships among variables such as product category, process of emotional appeal, degree of information disclosure and stage in PLC has not been investigated earlier, in the context of nostalgic advertising. Moreover, this study is the first attempt to present a snapshot of TV ads in India.

In early 2013, Mr. Deepak Kumar, Chairman and Group CEO of MakeMyTrip1 (MMT), summoned a meeting to discuss about redesigning the MMT Homepage2. It was a three-hour meeting at the Hindustan Conference Room at the company's head office in Gurgaon, India. Theis meeting was attended by key members of the homepage website redesign team comprising the CBO, Analytics head, User Experience (UX) head, Product head and the Tech head (CTO). As a pre-read for the meeting, Ajay Singh, Product Head, shared his findings3 that could help in defining the issues faced by visitors to the homepage of MMT.

This paper aims to review the literature on “E-fulfillment” with respect to marketing and operations issues in the current dynamic and complex e-tailing environment and thereby generate significant insights.

This paper is based on a systematic literature review on e-fulfillment focusing on marketing and operations issues therein. This systematic literature review consists of a critical review on e-fulfillment under planning (review question initialisation), searching (literature search), screening (literature evaluation), extraction and synthesis and reporting phases to conceptualise e-fulfillment. A total of 122 research articles have been reviewed to explore e-fulfillment and to develop key constructs and propositions.

This review provides the following three outcomes. First, the varied-fulfillment definitions have been critically reviewed, leading to synthesis, and thereby, an e-fulfillment definition is provided. Further, the variations for e-fulfillment across product types, which have been identified as a key variable for e-fulfillment, have been explored. Second, authors find five e-fulfillment components at the marketing and operations interface: website quality, customisation strategy, distribution strategy, last mile delivery and return management. Continuing with the e-fulfillment interface with marketing, the linkages between e-fulfillment and select post-purchase consumer behaviours measures across different product types have been reviewed. The paper thus with a focus on synthesising e-fulfillment literature from a process perspective emphasises the consumer behaviour metric for measuring e-fulfillment performance.

This study would help academicians, researchers, e-tailers and practitioners to understand e-fulfillment from a process perspective. For the researcher, it presents areas for future research by giving possible research directions in this emerging area. This study also brings out the impact of e-fulfillment according to product type on the post-purchase consumer behaviour measures, which will help e-tailers to link e-fulfillment to consumer behaviour metrics.

The paper classifies the fragmented literature to develop constructs and propositions for e-fulfillment. This is the first kind of study on e-fulfillment process and its impact on select post-purchase consumer behaviour measures across product types.

The purpose of this paper is to identify attention, cognitive and affective responses towards a fashion retailer's website and the behavioural outcomes when shopping online.

52 eye-tracking tests and 52 qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted.

Consumer attention and behaviour differ across web pages throughout the shopping journey depending on its content, function and consumers' goal. Top-down attention is more dominant than bottom-up attention when consumers are shopping online for fashion items. The product listings page was the most frequented and had the most time spent on it. Consumers enjoy browsing for products and adding them to their basket to evaluate them together later. Customisation and personalisation features are the most valued due to their ability to make the experience more convenient and enjoyable.

This article contributes novel findings that the content and design of the website affects attention in different ways. It demonstrates that research cannot simplify viewing patterns for fashion shopping online. The study extends the SOR framework, showing that top-down attention, when provided with personalisation and customisation features, results in approach behaviour. A lack of personalisation or customisation features results in avoidance behaviour. The complex nature of consumer attention and behaviour during their holistic shopping journey advocates the need for eye-tracking research to be conducted on a live website for ecological validity, providing a methodological contribution which can be used for future research.

The purpose is to understand the fundamental mechanism of the consumer decision-making process and how perceived financial risk of search and experience goods influences electronic word-of-mouth adoption (e-WOMA) on social networking sites (SNSs), which will lead to purchase intention.

Drawing on information processing theory, the study conceptualizes a moderated mediation model to investigate the underlying influence of perceived financial risk and online social ties on e-WOMA and the subsequent effect on online purchase intention. Survey data from 275 individuals were analyzed through statistical tools using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS).

The results revealed that e-WOMA mediates the effect of perceived financial risk of search and experience goods on online purchase intention. Strength of online social ties on SNSs positively moderates the electric word of mouth adoption for both the experience and search goods.

The limitation of this study was about the researcher's restrictions related to the length of the survey. Moreover, causal explanations can't be deduced as this is a cross-sectional study.

This research offers insight into the consumers that allow marketers to dive into the target market. Marketers should focus on social ties importance while selling products/services of markets online.

The study is novel in the context of an emerging economy to educate marketers on the product categorization of search goods and experience goods based on financial risk.