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In recent years, service providers have identified the proactive postsales service (PPS) as a viable measure for preempting service failures and their negative consequences. Due to the high costs associated with PPSs, companies are looking for ways to increase their efficiency. To understand how companies can increase their revenues and lower their costs, this study investigates how cross-selling activities and different media types affect the impact of a PPS on inbound service calls and customer churn. Based on a large-scale field experiment in the telecommunications industry, as well as a controlled lab experiment, the results demonstrate the overall effectiveness of the PPS and indicate two mediating effects. While the effect of cross-selling on customer churn and service calls is mediated by the customers’ uncertainty regarding the company’s motives, it is the customers’ perception of privacy invasion that mediates the influence of the contact medium on the effectiveness of the PPS. Our finding that PPS contacts have to be clear in their message and should not be perceived as invasive is an indication of the importance of service-(post)sales ambidexterity.

Geographic proximity has become increasingly relevant due to the growing number of marketing services that use consumers’ geographic locations, thus increasing the importance of gaining insights from this information. In five studies (both field and experimental), the authors analyze the effect of geographic proximity on social influence and demonstrate that not only social proximity but also perceived homophily can trigger social influence. They find that this effect holds under alternative representations of geographic distance and is confirmed for a range of different services and even for physical goods. Furthermore, the authors show that geographic proximity has a relative effect because the social influence of a closer sender is stronger than that of a more distant sender, regardless of the absolute distances. They present managerially relevant conditions under which the influence of geographic proximity not only is comparable to other types of information such as age or gender but also prov...

Rewarding existing customers for the recruitment of new ones has become an increasingly popular acquisition tool for companies. However, when a company rewards the recruitment of a new customer, managers are unaware of whether the rewarded referral was actually necessary or whether “reward-scrounging” has occurred because the referral receiver would have converted anyway. As a consequence, companies risk overestimating the effectiveness of their referral programs, which is why gaining insights into how and when reward-scrounging occurs is crucial. In this study, we employ a large data set from the telecommunications industry to analyze the drivers of reward-scrounging. The results indicate that reward-scrounging reduces the effectiveness of referral reward programs over time and that its likelihood depends on both the referral sender's network position and the company's marketing activities. The findings are used to develop managerial means to alleviate the negative effects of reward-scrounging.

Ethical leadership has so far mainly been featured in the organizational behavior domain and, as such, treated as an intra-organizational phenomenon. The present study seeks to highlight the relevance of ethical leadership for extra-organizational phenomena by combining the organizational behavior perspective on ethical leadership with a classical marketing approach. In particular, we demonstrate that customers may use perceived ethical leadership cues as additional reference points when forming purchasing intentions. In two experimental studies (N = 601 and N = 336), we find that ethical leadership positively affects purchasing intentions because of customers’ concerns for moral self-congruence. We show this by means of both mediation and moderation analyses. Interestingly, the effect of perceived ethical leadership on purchasing intentions holds over and above the ethical advertising claims (e.g., cause-related marketing) that are commonly used in marketing. We conclude by discussing the possible ramifications of ethical leadership beyond its effects on immediate employees.

Referral programs have become a popular tool to use the customer base for new customer acquisition. We replicate the work of Schmitt et al. ( 2011 ) who find that referred customers are more loyal and valuable than customers acquired through other channels. While our results confirm that rewarded referrals indeed reduce the risk of customer churn, we do not find that referred customers are necessarily more valuable. Analysis of the relationship between senders and receivers of referrals demonstrates that demographic similarity drives the referred customer value.

Book pricing is problematic for two main reasons. First, because legal restrictions make pricing decisions irreversible. Second, because publishers must set prices for many books every year. Therefore, a sound knowledge of consumer reaction to price is essential for good pricing decisions. Our research examines consumer reactions to prices, provides price elasticities based on a large sample of fiction books, and creates a comprehensive set of quality measures and control variables. Our results show that once price endogeneity is considered, consumers are price elastic. Moreover, we find that the price elasticity for hardcover books is substantially smaller than for paperbacks.

Deckungsbeitrag; Entscheidungsmodell; Internet; Konversionsrate; Kundenakquisition. Previous research has shown that targeting has helped companies to significantly increase the conversion rate for customer acquisition and, hence, conversion rates have been used to assess the performance of targeting campaigns. Unfortunately, it is not possible to infer the economic success of the targeting campaigns from this metric. In this study, the authors introduce an approach to assess targeting campaigns based on the profit margin. With this approach, companies are able to assess the profitability of targeting campaigns beforehand. On the basis of an empirical example, the paper describes in detail how profit margin-based targeting can be applied in practice and provides insights on when it is profitable for companies to target customers.

Purpose – This study seeks to examine the effect of pricing as a marketing instrument to stimulate word‐of‐mouth (WOM) by comparing the influence of two pricing strategies (i.e. a low‐complexity vs a network‐effects tariff) on the referral behaviour.Design/methodology/approach – Using customer data from a German mobile network operator (including information on customer characteristics, referral behaviour, and service usage), the authors develop a logit model.Findings – Surprisingly, the results indicate that it is the low‐complexity tariff that increases the likelihood of referrals and leads to an overall higher referral activity. Despite the lower referral activity, however, the network‐effects tariff generates higher revenues.Research limitations/implications – The results show that companies can use pricing schemes to influence referral behaviour and strongly indicate the need of further research on manageable tools to stimulate word‐of‐mouth marketing.Practical implications – The findings show not on...

Seeding strategies have strong influences on the success of viral marketing campaigns, but previous studies using computer simulations and analytical models have produced conflicting recommendations about the optimal seeding strategy. This study compares four seeding strategies in two complementary small-scale field experiments, as well as in one real-life viral marketing campaign involving more than 200,000 customers of a mobile phone service provider. The empirical results show that the best seeding strategies can be up to eight times more successful than other seeding strategies. Seeding to well-connected people is the most successful approach because these attractive seeding points are more likely to participate in viral marketing campaigns. This finding contradicts a common assumption in other studies. Well-connected people also actively use their greater reach but do not have more influence on their peers than do less well-connected people.

Online-Netzwerke (z. B. Xing oder LinkedIn) werden zunehmend aus geschaftlichen Motiven genutzt, mitunter zur gezielten „Vermarktung“ der eigenen Person. So versuchen Fuhrungskrafte und Entrepreneure mit gezielten Informationen in Online-Business-Netzwerken ein Markenimage aufzubauen und nutzen ihr Profil als Marketing-Instrument, um Geschaftskontakte zu managen. Auf der theoretischen Basis des Customer-based-brand-equity-Modells nach Keller (1993) wird das Nutzungsverhalten von Entrepreneuren in geschaftlichen Online-Netzwerken untersucht. Auf der Grundlage eines groszahligen reprasentativen Samples von Mitgliedern einer fuhrenden kommerziellen Online-Plattform untersuchen wir empirisch, inwiefern Entrepreneure erfolgreich in Online-Netzwerken agieren und ob sich ihre Strategien von denen anderer Nutzer unterscheiden. Mit Hilfe von Seemingly-Unrelated-Regression-Schatzungen werden die Treiber der Seitenaufrufe bzw. der bestatigten Kontakte von Entrepreneuren ermittelt. Entrepreneure konzentrieren sich auf die Prasentation ihrer Nutzungsintention und Kompetenzen und sind wesentlich aktiver in der Community. Als zentrale Erfolgstreiber werden Gruppenmoderationen und Event-Teilnahmen identifiziert.

Knowledge of consumers' willingness-to-pay (WTP) is critical for marketing managers when designing optimal pricing policies. The large-scale applicability, reliability, and validity of Vickrey auctions as an incentive-compatible method for eliciting WTP in a real-world setting were tested empirically. The results of 6,548 sealed bids in 28 auctions of costly durables on a popular auction Web site show that regular on-line shoppers have little problem understanding and applying the Vickrey auction bidding strategy. As a result, Vickrey auctions can easily produce a reliable and valid distribution of WTP based on several thousand consumers. A comparison of Vickrey auctions with the more commonly used English or eBay auctions shows, both conceptually and empirically, that the latter formats do not fully reflect the complete range of potential customers' WTP and, therefore, lead to systematic overestimation of price-demand functions. In contrast, WTP information elicited through Vickrey auctions is undistorted by strategic behavior such as bid-sniping and incorporates the full range of WTP information, suggesting that it is better suited for estimating realistic price-demand functions for market research purposes.

Ethical leadership has so far mainly been featured in the organizational behavior domain and, as such, treated as an intra- organizational phenomenon. The present study seeks to highlight the relev...

As online video content becomes increasingly popular, online retailers try to follow this trend and incorporate product videos into their websites. By doing so, they hope to encourage revisit and purchase intention and, ultimately, increase sales. However, the actual effect of product videos has received little attention in marketing research. In particular, what type of video content should be matched to what type of product remains unclear. Thus, product video providers face the risk of expensively producing the wrong content and online retailers forgo potential sales increases because of poorly matched product-video content combinations. In our empirical study, we analyze the effects of product videos integrated into the product detail pages of online shops. We examine the impact of different video contents (emotional/informative) for different product types (low/high involvements). We find that emotional videos are superior for low involvement products, while informative video content should be used for high involvement products.

Eine Vielzahl von Studien konnte zeigen, dass sich die Konversionsraten in der Neukundenan- sprache durch Targeting steigern lassen. Konkrete Aussagen uber den okonomischen Erfolg von Targeting-Kampagnen konnen allerdings auf dieser Basis bisher nicht getroffen werden. Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt daher eine deckungsbeitragsorientierte Sichtweise zur Bewer- tung des Targeting vor, so dass eine Einschatzung zur Profitabilitat bereits vor der Durchfuh- rung von Targeting-Kampagnen moglich ist. Auf Basis dieser Uberlegungen wird erlautert, wie ein deckungsbeitragsorientiertes Targeting in der Unternehmenspraxis anzuwenden ist und wann sich die gezielte gegenuber der ungezielten Kundenansprache auszahlt.

The introduction of new products is a major challenge for marketing managers. Since a significant share of innovations fails to succeed, managers have to make stop/go-decisions soon after a product's launch. To support such decisions, Garber et al. (2004) propose an indicator based on cross-entropy using adopters' spatial distribution. While their approach is well-founded in theory and supported by simulation results, real-life applications face additional challenges due to potential systematic and random distortions in actual diffusion data. In our study, we extend the cross-entropy measure by accounting for random spatial clusters, and test the approach in large-scale empirical settings.

Social contagion processes such as word-of-mouth (WOM) are widely regarded as key success factors for innovation diffusion. Aspects of these processes have been thoroughly explored in empirical studies on the actor or dyad levels of analysis. While such studies offer valuable insight into the motivations and contents of WOM, they are not able to include social network structures in their analysis. Contagion processes, however, require an underlying social networks infrastructure to unfold their potential for innovation diffusion. Although marketing managers strongly believe in social contagion processes, and studies on both actor and dyad levels strongly suggest their existence, marketing scientists have been unable to find conclusive evidence of such effects in network-level studies, which are most appropriate for this purpose.To address this research gap, we propose a new approach for empirical research in this field: the quantitative determination of communication activity, reach, speed, and epidemicity of observed diffusion processes by using social network analysis. We apply this approach empirically by analyzing anonymized customer data from an innovative telecommunications provider. The resulting social network of adopters, consisting of 55,065 customers and 7.8 million individual phone calls, is analyzed and compared to simulated random networks of similar dimensions. We find strong support for significant social contagion influences on adoption decisions and an epidemic pattern of innovation diffusion.

We adopt a model-based approach to assess whether and to what extent spatial proximities between members of a target population influence the adoption of digital products. Our data come from a company that sells software that enables car dealers in Germany to list used cars in an online market. As compared to other studies in the diffusion literature, our data are unique because we have the exact date and time of adoption for every adopter, as well as the geo-coded location data and descriptors for every potential member of the target population. Further, because the product was digital, it was available for adoption instantaneously by everyone in the target population, which ensured there were no frictions because of unavailability in any specific region. Thus, if we find that spatial effects influence the diffusion process, we can ascribe those effects to local contagion (due to communication, observation, or competitive pressures). We estimate an "Accelerated Failure Time" hazard model with time-varying covariates and shared frailty. We find that spatial proximity matters in a significant way in the adoption of the software, even after accounting for the effects of a number of covariates (observed heterogeneity) and for frailty (unobserved heterogeneity) on the times to adoption. Specifically, adopters who were located closer to non-adopters had a significant effect on hastening adoption time of the non-adopters. Our results suggest that although Internet and other communication technologies may have greatly diminished the role of distance in the availability of information about a product as well as in the availability of the product itself (for digital products), they have not eliminated the importance of local contagion or trustworthy personal information.

Adoption processes are often heavily influenced by interpersonal communication. Marketing managers are increasingly trying to use these relationships to foster the market penetration of their products. In an empirical study of the US market for an innovative medical device, we survey the social network of (mostly chief) anesthetists from 151 hospitals. We confirm the influences from personal communication on individual adoption decisions through hazard regressions. We then use a multi-agent modeling framework trying to identify what seeding strategies would have been optimal to achieve a fast market penetration, i.e. which and how many anesthetists should be selected to initiate personal communication processes.