Search results

The purpose of this paper is to determine if the star power of an athletic endorser influenced consumers’ consumption of the advertised product. Specifically, does the amount of star power an athlete is thought to have impact consumers’ direct consumption of the advertised product and media consumption of the athlete? Moreover, the components of star power, along with congruency measures, were examined to determine which components of star power influenced both direct and media consumption.

Four advertisements were created that used an athlete with high star power and an athlete with low star power. Respondents viewed two of the advertisements, but did not know which athlete had high star power or low star power. They were asked to answer a questionnaire that contained questions pertaining to the components of star power (source attractiveness, source credibility, professional trustworthiness, likeable personality and character style), congruency of the athlete and product, direct consumption of the advertised product and media consumption of the athlete.

Results indicated that overall star power increased the direct consumption of the advertised product and the media consumption of the athlete, however not each component was found to be significant. Character style was the only component that was consistently significant across all four advertisements. The congruency between the athlete and product was also found to be significant across all four advertisements.

First, this study only looked at two athletes; others may generate different results. Second, the products used in the study were fashion related; other categories of products may also generate different relationships. Third, only two brands were used. It was also assumed that the respondents knew the athlete in the advertisement. Finally, the questions used to measure direct consumption did not distinguish between buying the brand in the store or online.

This study has the potential to contribute theoretically by analyzing how and which components of star power affect consumption of endorsed products, as well as which components influence consumers. Moreover, adding a congruency measure will aide in strengthening the measurement of endorser effectiveness. The justification of the present study lies in the need to determine how the dimensions of star power an athlete possesses contribute to the consumption behaviors of consumers.

The purpose of this study was to examine the dimensions of athletic star power associated with Generation Y sports consumption. Multivariate analyses revealed that athletic star power factors (Professional Trustworthiness, Likeable Personality, Athletic Expertise, Social Attractiveness and Characteristic Style) were positively (p < .05) predictive of the sport consumption factors (Event Consumption and Merchandise Consumption).

This study aims to examine the “external effect” of a migrated star player on their domestic sport industries. By exploring the new aspect of star power, this study provides important insight and critical implication to many relevant stakeholders in the professional sports league. Particularly, this is critical under the recent circumstance where the globalization of sports products becomes the central strategic issue of the world-class leagues.

In this paper, the external effect of star players migrated from three Asian leagues (Japan, Korea and Taiwan) to Major League Baseball in the USA, the world-class baseball league, on their domestic league attendance demand was empirically investigated. For the analysis, comprehensive historical data from various reliable sources from each league were collected.

The findings of the paper strongly support the external effect of migrated stars significantly existing in all the three leagues. The effect is consistent across various measurements of migrated star players. More interestingly, the effect was found to be mixed across different leagues; for example, migrated star players increases in domestic league attendance in Japan, while it decreases in Korea and Taiwan. This indicates that the external effect of migrated star players depends on the characteristics of the domestic leagues. In addition, it was found that the external effect was substantial enough to compare to the effect of major demand drivers such as team winning, competitive balance and star power. For managerial implications, this study also provides revenue projections induced by the impact of migrated star players.

This study opens a new chapter related to star power topic and immediately calls for future studies regarding this external effect, particularly, theoretical and behavioral approaches.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and empirically test a new framework that shows how different signals of movie quality along with key control variables affect consumers’ post-consumption evaluations, critics’ reviews (CR), and movie box office revenues.

The data set consists of a sample of 332 movies released between 2000 and 2008. Regression was used to test the study hypotheses.

The results suggest that the three signals of movie quality exhibit different effects on three movie performance measures. Of the three cues, the peripheral quality signal is positive related to movie box, moviegoers’ evaluations (ME), and CR. Furthermore, star performance quality is positive related to both ME and CR. Surprisingly, overall quality signal does not display any influence on movie performances.

The primary limitation is the use of cross-sectional study design and future research should apply for time-series technique to test the relationships between movie quality signals and movie performances.

The findings suggest that consumers and critics evaluate movie qualities based on various movie quality signals. Furthermore, the characteristics of movies also have mixed impacts on movie performances. Movie studios may take these findings into account to produce better movies.

This study proposes and empirically tests the impacts of three groups of movie signals – peripheral quality signal, star performance quality signal, and overall quality signal on motion picture performance. This study contributes to service quality literature and signal theory by categorizing different Academy Awards into three groups of quality signals and by empirically testing the proposed relationships.

Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) is very important for consumer decision making; previous international product diffusion studies have investigated eWOM and cultural factors that influence consumers’ acceptance of new products, but they have not adequately compared the differences in these factors between the USA and China. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to compare the impact of eWOM on consumer choices in China and the USA. The authors addressed the following questions: What are the cross-cultural differences in consumers’ eWOM behavior between the USA and China: Which genres of Hollywood movies have better cross-culture predictability in terms of box office performance; and What factors affect the success of Hollywood movies in entering the Chinese market?

Real eWOM data were collected from two online movie review websites, IMDb.com (the USA) and Douban.com (China), from January 2010 to December 2015. In addition, box office revenue information was collected from BoxOfficeMojo.com. The authors used an independent sample t-test to check whether the differences in consumers’ eWOM behavior between China and the USA and different types of movie lead to cultural discount differences. Furthermore, a log-linear regression model is used to examine which factors influence the commercial success of new movies.

There are specific similarities and differences between the American and Chinese movie markets. First, the results show that American consumers are more engaged in online review systems and tend to submit extreme reviews, but Chinese consumers tend to submit moderate reviews on movies, and the eWOM variance there is smaller than in the USA. Second, genres are useful variables as indicators of movie content; the genres of comedy and drama are not popular in the Chinese market. Finally, eWOM variance has a positive impact on box office in China, but eWOM variance has no impact on the US box office. In addition, the interactive effect of the average rating and eWOM variance on sales is positively significant in China. Importantly, the one-star reviews have a negative impact on the Chinese box office, but it has no impact on US box office.

Understanding how cultural factors influence consumer eWOM communication will help managers to better apply this new marketing communication tool to create more aggressive and targeted promotional plans. Marketers may use eWOM behavior to better respond to and target consumers to overcome barriers to the selection of their products by consumers. Therefore, more effective management of eWOM can improve the acceptance of and preference for products in different cultural consumer groups.

This study expands the existing body of knowledge on eWOM and international marketing literature. Clearly, culture is an important determinant of eWOM’s impact on sales. In addition, it provides strategic direction and practical implications for eWOM communication management in cross-cultural settings.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that casting actors with similar facial features in a movie can pose challenges in foreign markets, hindering the audience's ability to recognize and remember characters. Extending developments in the literature on the cross-race effect, we hypothesize that facial similarity – the extent to which the actors starring in a movie share similar facial features – will reduce the country-level box-office performance of US movies in East and South-East Asia (ESEA) countries.

We assembled data from various secondary data sources on US non-animation movies (2012–2021) and their releases in ESEA countries. Combining the data resulted in a cross-section of 2,616 movie-country observations.

Actors' facial similarity in a US movie's cast reduces its box-office performance in ESEA countries. This effect is weakened as immigration in the country, internet penetration in the country and star power increase and strengthened as cast size increases.

This first study on the effects of cast's facial similarity on box-office performance represents a novel extension to the growing literature on the antecedents of movies' box-office performance by being at the intersection of the two literature streams on (1) the box-office effects of cast characteristics and (2) the antecedents, in general, of box-office performance in the ESEA region.

This study aims to identify the factors that influence box office performance in the specific context of the adaptation of science fiction (SF) to film in Hollywood.

Fifty-one film adaptation cases were collected and empirically analyzed with two-stage least-squares (2SLS) regression.

Empirical analysis demonstrates that the adaptation of the title, the popularity of the original novel and the director's experience in film adaptation have significant impacts on box office performance.

The study contributes to the literature by bridging the gap between two separate streams of the research literature on film performance and film adaptation. Moreover, the study has extended the literature on the prediction of film performance by examining important factors in the special context of SF film adaptation.

In the case of film adaptation, recruiting an experienced director will be a good choice. Author power is also required for attracting more investment and increasing audience share in the short term. From a marketing perspective, pointing out in the title that the film is an adaptation of an original novel would be an advantageous approach.

This is among the pioneering research related to the effects of film adaptation on box office performance. The approach and results of this study direct future studies in many aspects.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a predictive model for box office performance based on the textual information in movie scripts in the green-lighting process of movie production.

The authors use Latent Dirichlet Allocation to determine the hidden textual structure in movie scripts by extracting topic probabilities as predictors for classification. The extracted topic probabilities are used as inputs for the predictive model for the box office performance. For the predictive model, the authors utilize a variety of classification algorithms such as logistic classification, decision trees, random forests, k-nearest neighbor algorithms, support vector machines and artificial neural networks, and compare their relative performances in predicting movies' market performance.

This approach for extracting textual information from movie scripts produces a valuable typology for movies. Moreover, our modeling approach has significant power to predict movie scripts' profitability. It provides a superior prediction performance compared to previous benchmarks, such as that of Eliashberg et al. (2007).

This work contributes to literature on predicting the box office performance in the green-lighting process and literature regarding suggesting models for the idea screening stage in the new product development process. Besides, this is one of the few studies that use movie script data to predict movies' financial performance by proposing an approach to integrate text mining models and machine learning algorithms with movie experts' intuition.

First, the authors’ approach can significantly reduce the financial risk associated with movie production decisions before the pre-production stage. Second, this paper proposes an approach that is applicable at a very early stage of new product development, such as the idea screening stage. The authors also introduce an online-based movie scenario database system that can help movie studios make more systematic and profitable decisions in the green-lighting process. Third, this approach can help movie studios estimate movie scripts' financial value.

This study is one of the few studies to forecast market performance in the green-lighting process.

This paper aims to intend to study the effect of movie production efficiency on eWOM and the moderating effect of efficiency on the relationship between eWOM and review helpfulness for movies.

Production efficiency is suggested by comparing the power of movie resources (e.g. the power of actors, directors, distributors, production companies) against box-office revenue through a data envelopment analysis (DEA).

The study results present that the number of reviews, the number of reviews by reviewers and review extremity are greater in an efficient subsample than in an inefficient subsample. For efficient movies, the review depth and the strength of the sentiments in the reviews are more positively related to review helpfulness. The prediction results for review helpfulness using the k-nearest neighbor method and automatic neural networks show that the efficient subsample provides a significantly lower prediction error rate than the inefficient subsample. The study results can support the effective facilitation of helpful online movie reviews.

As the numbers of online reviews are increasingly used to provide purchase decision support, it becomes crucial to understand which attributes represent average helpful reviews for movies. While previous studies have examined eWOM (online word-of-mouth) variables as predictors of helpfulness on movie websites, the role of the production efficiency of movies has not been examined considering the relationship between eWOM and review helpfulness for movies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the practice of celebrity athletes’ product endorsement in the context of social media, guided by meaning transfer model.

The study adopted a content analysis method based on data gathered from the official Twitter account of 17 of the highest-paid athletes over a period of five months.

Results outline the state, involvement level, roles, modes, preferred content types, discernible differences, shared features, and best practices employed in endorsement tweets. A framework of athletes’ product endorsement on Twitter is presented.

The study presented theoretical and practical implications, and limitations and impetus for future research.

The study investigated professional athletes’ use of their own media channel for the purpose of endorsement, presented a framework that illustrates the practice of celebrity athletes’ product endorsement on social media, and identified a best practice and an exemplary reference.