Search results

Rapid prototyping can potentially accelerate the entire process of new product development (NPD), enabling a high level of customer involvement and hence new product success (NPS). This study aims to examine the relationship between prototyping and NPS, and the moderating effect of customer involvement, as well as the influence of speed of information dissemination on customer involvement.

Data were collected using the survey method through structured questionnaires. The key participants were management and team leaders from technology-based companies.

The results indicate that prototyping positively correlates with NPS, particularly when customer involvement is high. The speed of information dissemination, both from customers and on competitive products, has a positive impact on customer involvement.

The study was limited by the undefined development stage of the prototype when offered for customer feedback. Future studies could focus on how customer involvement at each stage of prototype development affects NPS through a moderating effect.

The study confirms that investing in prototyping equipment for NPD increases the probability of NPS. Information capturing customers’ views and on competitive products in the market should be shared among the NPD teams. This could encourage better sharing of opinions and perceptions with customers about whether new products meet their wishes and expectations.

This study demonstrates that customer involvement moderates the relationship between prototyping and NPS. The degree of customer involvement depended on the speed of response of the customers themselves and on how well competitive product information was disseminated within the NPD team.

This study aims to analyze a backchannel account on news of the coronavirus at the beginning of the pandemic, with information not disseminated in official media due to the social alarm it might cause and the negative image of government management. Specifically, it examines acceptance and dissemination of this type of content in a period of lack of information, while reflecting on what would constitute proper management of this type of channel.

First, based on a literature review, this study classifies possible explanatory variables of online content dissemination into content richness and psychological content. Second, this study performs sentiment analysis of the Twitter backchannel account @COVID_19NEWS and use Qualitative Comparative Analysis to find causal configurations of variables that obtained a high rate of retweets.

The results reveal predominance of one combination of three factors in backchannel information diffusion: emotional, identifying and video content. Other interesting combinations of factors were shown to be attractive enough to contribute to success of the tweets.

Knowledge of the main configurations that attract information dissemination in backchannel accounts is useful for public management of a health crisis such as the Covid-19 outbreak. Rather than suppressing these channels, the authors discuss different solutions.

This study advances scholarship on backchannel communications in emergency situations, providing insights to understand and manage such channels.

Este estudio analiza una cuenta extraoficial sobre noticias del coronavirus al inicio de la pandemia, con información no difundida en los medios oficiales por su posible repercusión en la alarma social y la imagen negativa de la gestión gubernamental. Concretamente examina la aceptación y difusión de este contenido en un periodo de desinformación, así como reflexiona sobre la gestión de este tipo de canales.

En primer lugar, en base a la revisión de la literatura, clasificamos las variables explicativas según la riqueza de contenido y el contenido psicológico. En segundo lugar, sobre la cuenta extraoficial de @COVID_19NEWS en Twitter, realizamos análisis de sentimiento y utilizamos Análisis Comparativo Cualitativo (QCA) para encontrar configuraciones causales de variables que obtuvieron una alta tasa de retweets.

Los resultados revelan la importancia de una combinación de tres factores en la difusión de información del canal secundario: contenido emocional, identificativo y video. Otras combinaciones de factores también contribuyeron al éxito del tweet.

Estas configuraciones podrían ser útiles para la gestión pública ante una crisis sanitaria como la Covid-19, prestando atención a los factores cuya configuración atrae la difusión de información en las RRSS. En lugar de suprimir estos canales, se presentan soluciones para garantizar una colaboración eficaz.

Este estudio realiza una contribución académica a las comunicaciones extraoficiales en situaciones de emergencia, proporcionando información para comprender y gestionar este tipo de canales.

Covid-19, Coronavirus, Canal extraoficial, Twitter, Análisis cualitativo comparado

Trabajo de investigación

在新冠疫情初期, 由于可能引起社会恐慌和政府管理部门的负面形象, 官方媒体缺少相关的新闻报道。本文研究了在这种官方信息匮乏的危机时期, 非正式渠道（backchannel）对于新冠病毒内容的接受和传播情况, 本文同时反思了如何对这类非正式渠道进行正确的管理。

基于文献综述, 我们先将在线内容传播的可能解释变量分为内容丰富度和心理内容这两个方面。其次, 我们对推特上的非正式渠道账户@COVID_19NEWS发布的内容进行情感分析, 并使用定性比较分析法来寻找内容获得高转发率的原因。

结果显示, 对于非正式渠道信息的成功传播, 情绪化、具有辩认度和包含视频内容这三个要素的组合占主导地位。此外, 其他要素的组合也有来助于推文的成功传播和扩散。

了解非正式渠道吸引信息传播的主要原因, 将有利于应对健康危机（例如Covid-19爆发）和进行公共管理。文本讨论了不同的解决方案, 而不是简单地压制这些非正式渠道。

这项研究推进了危机背景下非正式渠道传播的学术研究, 为理解和管理这类非正式渠道提供了见解。

关键词 - Covid-19, 新冠病毒, 非正式渠道, 推特, 定性比较分析

Influencer marketing mediated by social media is prevalent in social commerce. Micro-, meso- and macro-influencers all play an irreplaceable role in marketing. The purpose of this paper is to explore how companies with limited budgets choose influencers according to products' various levels of brand familiarity.

This study constructs an evolutionary game model of influencer marketing based on evolutionary game theory on complex networks. This model initiates various networks to demonstrate how influencers disseminate information and constructs update mechanisms to depict how individuals react to this information based on individuals' information utility and friends' strategies.

Simulation results suggest that companies should invest more in macro-influencers than in meso-influencers, however investing all in macro-influencers is not a good choice. The investment in meso-influencers will increase as brand familiarity decreases, whereas it will not exceed investment in macro-influencers. Furthermore, the accumulation of micro-influencers can accelerate the marketing process.

This study examines the combined effects of micro-influencers, meso-influencers and macro-influencers in marketing by simulating the marketing process initiated by influencers on social media.

Market orientation (MO) (intelligence generation, intelligence dissemination and responsiveness) is known as one of the key concepts in marketing literature. Although prior research has widely focused on the meaning and application of MO, few attempts have been made to explore how market-oriented firms lead to innovation and market performance and what factors actually moderate this relationship. To fill this gap, the present study aims to explore the relationship between MO, innovation and market performance. This study also attempts to examine the intervening role of IT infrastructure, business analytics (BA) capabilities and market turbulence in the proposed model.

In this study, a questionnaire-based survey was undertaken to test the proposed hypotheses. To verify the proposed theoretical model, partial least squares (PLS)/structured equation modeling (SEM) was performed with 114 valid survey data.

Despite prior studies which postulated innovation performance as the final outcome of MO (Han et al., 1998; Song et al., 2015), this study focused on innovation performance as a mediating outcome which finally leads to market performance. The statistical results approve the putative relationship which means managers would be able to realize the paramount role of innovation as an integral part of achieving higher market performance. In addition, no support was found for the relationship between intelligence generation and responsiveness. This finding shows that not all obtained information can help managers in the decision-making process.

This study aims to enrich literature by developing a conceptual model to test the link between MO, innovation and market performance. The value of this study is to investigate the roles of flexible IT infrastructure, BA capabilities and market turbulence as the potential moderators in the proposed model. The results advance the understanding of the influence of BA capabilities on the link between intelligence dissemination and responsiveness. Findings also show innovation performance as remarkable and deemed valuable capability, leading to higher performance in marketing-related activities, particularly in highly turbulent markets.

There is limited understanding of how businesses, particularly in a global context, activate the marketing concept in order to become market‐driven. A study was conducted to delineate the activation process in an international setting, and some of the facilitating and impeding factors. In‐depth interviews were conducted with executives of 22 subsidiaries of a multinational firm. Activation appeared to consist of interpreting, adopting and implementing the marketing concept. Implementation is itself a sequence of market intelligence activities. Greater adoption and implementation, as well as higher quality intelligence work, are tied to stronger organizational performance. Facilitators (e.g. top management commitment) and inhibitors (e.g. over‐emphasis on profits) were identified. Other dimensions also surfaced including the slow, top‐down path of adoption, national culture, and market competitiveness. Recommendations were made on enhancing activation success.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how government affairs micro-blog (also referred to as GAM) are applied to the disclosure of government emergency information in China, to identify its existing problems and to provide solutions.

In this paper, online research, case analysis and other methods were used to analyze the application status of China’s Government micro-blog in emergency information disclosure in recent years. Based on the relevant data and cases, a systematic theoretical research is conducted according to the established research framework.

There are some problems in the application of GAM to crisis management, such as insufficient information dissemination, incomplete information disclosure, fragmentation of information and lack of dynamic updating and communication. So, it is necessary to strengthen the organization and management of GAM, establish a perfect emergency management mechanism of GAM, increase the positive influence of GAM on public opinions and establish an evaluation accountability system of administrative micro-blog management.

The analysis of the application of GAM to the disclosure of government emergency information and the proposed strategies for improving its performance are all original, and they are both meaningful to more effective usage of GAM and facilitation of government emergency information disclosure.

Social bots are prevalent on social media. Malicious bots can severely distort the true voices of customers. This paper aims to examine social bots in the context of big data of user-generated content. In particular, the author investigates the scope of information distortion for 24 brands across seven industries. Furthermore, the author studies the mechanisms that make social bots viral. Last, approaches to detecting and preventing malicious bots are recommended.

A Twitter data set of 29 million tweets was collected. Latent Dirichlet allocation and word cloud were used to visualize unstructured big data of textual content. Sentiment analysis was used to automatically classify 29 million tweets. A fixed-effects model was run on the final panel data.

The findings demonstrate that social bots significantly distort brand-related information across all industries and among all brands under study. Moreover, Twitter social bots are significantly more effective at spreading word of mouth. In addition, social bots use volumes and emotions as major effective mechanisms to influence and manipulate the spread of information about brands. Finally, the bot detection approaches are effective at identifying bots.

As brand companies use social networks to monitor brand reputation and engage customers, it is critical for them to distinguish true consumer opinions from fake ones which are artificially created by social bots.

This is the first big data examination of social bots in the context of brand-related user-generated content.

This paper examines whether and how customers' annual report tone affects suppliers' innovation decisions.

Using the data from disclosed information on top five customers and annual report tone by Chinese listed firms, this paper used a two-way fixed effect model and intermediary effect model tests to explore the impact of customers' annual report tone on suppliers' innovation decisions.

The results indicate that the more positive the tone of customer annual reports is, the higher the suppliers' technological innovation level. The customers' annual report tone affects suppliers' innovation decisions through alleviating financing constraints and reducing the bullwhip effect. In addition, the authors find that the worse the supplier's bargaining power and the higher the customer's media coverage, the more significant the impact of positive customer annual report tone on the level of corporate technological innovation.

For downstream customers, to improve the quality of their text information disclosure. For upstream suppliers, the tone of customers' annual reports has incremental information, so the attention to customers' text information should be strengthened. As far as the market is concerned, it is recommended that regulators should strictly require the quality of text information disclosure and introduce relevant penalty mechanisms better to regulate the quality of corporate text information disclosure.

To the best of the author's knowledge, this paper is the first to expand the research related to textual information from a supply chain innovation perspective. The textual information can provide incremental information, and spillover effects may occur among supply chains, affecting suppliers' innovation decisions. And it clarifies the specific mechanism by which the supply chain tone spillover effect affects corporate innovation, enriching the relevant research on supply chain influence mechanisms.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the voluntary financial and environmental disclosures through the internet can be explained by the same determinants as in conventional reporting. Specifically, this paper examines the relationship between the extent of financial and environmental disclosures on the internet and six variables, namely, ethnicity of chief executive officer (CEO), leverage, level of technology, existence of dominant personalities, profitability, and firm size.

Six hypotheses were tested using data collected from 201 Malaysian listed companies on the Bursa Malaysia's Main and Second Boards for the financial year 2005. A regression model is utilized to analyze the results of this paper and this is in tandem with the previous studies.

The results indicate that level of technology, ethnicity of CEO and firm size are determinants of both internet financial and environmental disclosures. However, the existence of a dominant personality is found to negatively affect the level of financial disclosures but not environmental disclosures. The other variables did not show any significant relationship with either financial or environmental disclosures.

This paper investigates whether internet financial and environmental disclosures can be explained by the same determinants used in other similar studies. The results indicate that only level of technology, ethnicity of CEO and firm size are found to be significant for both internet financial and environmental disclosures.

The focus of this paper is to study the influence of social media on scholarly communication. The aim is to provide an overview of researchers' use of Web 2.0 techniques, and discuss a possible change of information behaviors in the context of scholarly communication.

A web survey was distributed to a targeted sample of university staff (professors, teachers, researchers, and doctoral students). SPSS was utilized as a main tool to synthesize and analyze data, and present the results.

Web 2.0 tools are well‐known to researchers. Most researchers are familiar with blogs, wikis, social networks, multimedia sharing, and online document. Social media provide a convenient environment for scholarly communication. Depending on different aims within the scholarly communication process, researchers choose appropriate modes of communication in their research work.

A combination of content analysis with survey and/or interviews may highlight other aspects of Web 2.0, which is not possible using a single method of content analysis.

There are few studies on the changes of scholarly communication in the context of Web 2.0. This study provides new insights for exploring the effects of Web 2.0 tools on scholarly communication and the development of new information behavior to match the scholarly environment of social media. This understanding can aid the researchers to keep abreast of new characteristics of scholarly communication and help the librarians to develop the correlative services in the scholarly environment of social media.