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Employee engagement on social media presents challenges and opportunities for managers as there is limited control over what individual employees post on social media platforms. This research uncov...

Purpose This paper aims to examine how modern, digital era customers in a business-to-consumer (B2C) setting prioritize salesperson-customer orientation attributes when evaluating their expectations regarding interactions with salespeople, as well as their impact on positive and negative word-of-mouth. In addition, the research further investigates which negative salesperson attributes have an impact on overall customer experience and satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach Role theory and expectancy-disconfirmation theory form the theoretical foundation for two mixed-method studies. Study 1 is an exploratory content analysis of online consumer reviews and social media word-of-mouth related to consumer experiences with salespeople. Study 2 is a three-round Delphi study investigating which salesperson orientation attributes are most important to the customer in B2C interactions. Findings The results uncover which salesperson customer orientation attributes are essential for modern consumers and how they differ as a function of context (retail, direct-selling and follow-up) and how they contribute to the generation of digital word-of-mouth. Originality/value This paper expands B2C sales interaction literature by exploring the need for differing sales attributes based on the differential function of the shopping environment.

International audience; In recent years, the marketing literature has expended considerable effort to understand and theorize consumer misbehavior. However, scant research theoretically explores shoplifting. This is surprising, as currently, the annual cost of shoplifting is close to $50 billion in the United States. Utilizing a mixed‐methods approach, we conduct two studies. Study 1 is a qualitative content analysis of online consumer discussions with regard to shoplifting. Study 2 is an empirical examination that uses a US national sample of n = 1,001 consumers; it is designed to test specific hypotheses regarding antecedents to consumers’ intentions to shoplift using an interdisciplinary theoretical framework from criminology, psychology, and marketing. The model integrates research from these different disciplines to improve our understanding of shoplifting by offering avenues to tackle it that supersede traditional security measures in retail. The integrated conceptual framework extends the theory of planned behavior and routine activity theory in understanding the behavioral intentions behind shoplifting. The results show that the suitability of shoplifting targets, offender motivation, and the absence of capable guardians affect potential offenders’ attitudes, subjective norms, and confidence in their ability to shoplift, which, in turn, all influence the intention to shoplift. The results contribute to our understanding of shoplifting and provide implications for retail practitioners over and above merely augmenting store security.

This study demonstrates how digital content, engagement strategies, and influence tactics inspire social media communities to embrace B2B marketers seeking their advocacy. Using grounded theory in ...

Why do mainstream consumers who would not typically engage in illegal behaviour routinely resort to online piracy of copyrighted software? This paper provides answers to this research query by appl...

Online piracy is one of the most challenging problems faced by the software and entertainment industries today. Tens of billions of dollars of copyrighted commercial material is exchanged illegally annually due to peer-to-peer networking sites and other downloadable methods, while it is also estimated that digital theft of copyrighted content makes up over 20% of the Internet traffic worldwide (Envisional, 2011; RIAA, 2014). The objective of this study is the analysis of the key country level factors that influence the national piracy rate, which can help practitioners, academics and policy makers. We use a mixed-method approach, with a qualitative study to identify the key online piracy legal issues and macro level antecedents in online consumer discussions. Further, we use the Hunt-Vitell General Theory of Marketing Ethics as a theoretical basis and empirically analyze the importance of cultural, legal and policy variables that are part of different national institutions and systems. Overall, the significance found for our model underlines the fact that numerous factors that are related to a country’s cultural values, ethical system and legal system can contribute or deter individuals from illegally sharing and downloading copyrighted electronic content and information.

Purpose “Prosumers” (combining “producer” and “consumers”) describes consumers’ ability to openly share their product/service experiences and thereby drive sales and digital marketing. Understanding what motivates active prosumers to engage in electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) and share or review their hotel experiences online can help organizations empathize with consumers and use their messages to co-create value. Identifying prosumers’ motivators can enable companies to properly target them as resources for review or consumer feedback studies. This paper aims to investigate the influence of motivators (intrinsic and extrinsic), service quality and age on consumers’ eWOM communication behaviors. Design/methodology/approach A panel of 204 travelers was surveyed regarding their hotel travel experiences, propensity to write online reviews, preferred review-writing platform, motivations for writing reviews and impressions of service quality. To test the hypotheses, a multivariate regression analysis was performed with eWOM as the dependent variable. Differences in eWOM as a function of preferred review platform were also tested using ANOVA, with a multiple comparison analysis that underlines the differences between prosumers who prefer different types of review platforms and their eWOM behaviors. Findings Both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, as well as service reliability, had a significant influence on eWOM behavior, while service tangibility had a negative relationship. Additionally, prosumers’ engagement in eWOM about their hospitality experience differed according to their preferred review platform. Research limitations/implications The findings of the analysis underline the importance of consumer motivations and of satisfaction with service quality in the context of digital review behavior. For marketing and hospitality research, this shows the benefits of including not only individual characteristics and demographics when analyzing review behavior but also elements such as perceptions of service quality. Given the differences in how the dimensions of service quality affect consumers’ engagement in online review behavior, this represents a very important topic for research and can be included in future studies that analyze the consumer review behavior model. Practical implications Regarding the implications for practitioners, this study highlights the important role played by consumer satisfaction with service in the hospitality industry and its effect on their involvement in online reviews. Managers should be focused constantly on offering great service to their guests, while, at the same time, offering them motivations to engage in posting positive reviews about their vacation. Moreover, as the results of this study imply that various dimensions of service quality have a different impact, managers should focus especially on the aspects that consumers consider important and constantly include in their reviews, such as the tangibles dimension. The results of this study also have the potential to provide to businesses more information to improve the social aspects of vacationing, which can not only improve perceptions about service quality but can also have a positive influence on consumers’ motivations. Originality/value This paper develops a better understanding of what motivates people to engage in the eWOM communication behavior of writing online hotel reviews, by showing the effect of consumer motivations and service quality variables on prosumers’ engagement in online review behavior.

This study conducts an investigation of viral advertising by developing and testing a model to integrate the influence of three types of video ad appeals (humor, sex, or information), ad sources (known or unknown), attitude toward the ad, attitude toward the brand, and demographics on intentions to forward an ad and purchase a brand. The model is tested by collecting data from a sample of national online consumers. The findings demonstrate the importance of ad appeals for both attitude toward the ad and viral intentions. Attitude toward the ad is also found to be a significant influencer of viral intentions, and mediator of the relationship between ad appeals and viral intentions. The study also found support for a positive relationship between viral intentions and purchase intentions.

The purpose of this research is to examine consumer motivations to use social networking sites (SNSs) for three distinct activities: (1) general SNS usage, (2) the joining of a business’s SNS page and (3) clicking on an advertisement on a SNS. To assist with this exploration we draw upon the decomposed theory of planned behaviour as a theoretical lens and conduct a mixed-method study that utilises both an empirical investigation as well as qualitative focus group interviews in order to delve deeper into specific reasons why individuals engage in SNS activities. Results show that a number of antecedents such as attitude, compatibility, relative advantage, complexity, normative influences and self-efficacy come into play when determining SNS usage activities. However, specific antecedents may vary according to the explicit activity under investigation. This study’s main contribution involves advancing our understanding of consumer behaviour as it relates to SNS activities by examining not only antec...

Online piracy of digital content including that of music, movies, software, games, and other products continues to be a huge issue for businesses and public policy makers for a number of reasons. First, online piracy takes up significant amounts of Internet bandwidth—24 % globally, and 17.5 % in the USA. Additionally, a study from the Institute for Policy Innovation concluded that global music piracy causes $12.5 billion of economic losses every year, 71,060 lost American jobs, and a loss of $422 million in tax revenues (RIAA 2014). Given the economic and social impact of digital piracy, it is important to study what factors influence the piracy rate and especially whether key marketing mix elements, such as price, affect consumers’ decisions to engage in online piracy. This study uses equity theory as a framework in order to analyze the impact of price-, product-, and purchase-related experiences, as well as word of mouth, on digital piracy rates. Equity theory was created and popularized by Adams (1963) and is especially used in social exchange within organizations. We use equity theory in order to analyze how perceived inputs, such as price and information search, as well as outputs, including product quality and popularity, affect the rate of piracy for copyrighted products. This represents a different perspective compared to studies that focus only on the ethical side of consumers’ decisions and brings attention to product-related factors such as price and product quality. In order to measure the piracy rate for digital content, we downloaded the number of “leechers” (users downloading pirated content at a certain time) for the top 120 most downloaded games from Pirate Bay during a 10-day period. In order to test our model, we also downloaded data regarding the price for each game from Amazon, as well as the quality rating assigned in its reviews from Metacritic. We measured consumer interest in the digital product by using Google Insights and the search index provided for the exact name of the product. We performed a multiple regression procedure using SPSS, with piracy rate on a proxy showing the content from Pirate Bay as the dependent variable, with product price, review rating, search rating, and popularity index as independent variables.

Personalized advertising represents a new and emerging trend in the field of online advertising. Through the use of enhanced online data collection techniques, marketers can now craft seemingly made to order advertisements tailored to a specific individual. Numerous websites and services are hosting personalized banner and/or text ads, such as YouTube, Facebook, Hotmail, and Gmail. In addition, the technique is being used by more and more firms such as Amazon, MetLife, Dollar-Thrifty, Staples, Joseph A. Bank, Orbitz, Zappos, and T-Mobile.

The potential benefits of dynamic pricing – charging different prices to different consumers for essentially the same offering – have been widely documented (e.g. Garbarino and Lee 2003; Iyer et al. 2002; Sahay 2007; Truffelli 2006; Weisstein et al. 2013), some of which include enhanced segmentation, improved inventory and supply chain management, capacity optimization, improved demand management, increased sales volume, and increased profitability. Furthermore firms are able to implement dynamic pricing practices much more easily than ever before due to the advent of online technologies that allow for enhanced data collection, instant and low cost changes to price menus and increased buyer identification (Gelbrich 2011; Grewal et al. 2004; Valentino-Devries et al. 2012).

Although a long stream of research has been devoted over the last two decades to the definition and the measurement of the brand equity (Leuthesser 1988; Farquhar 1989; Aaker 1991, 1996; Keller 1993), little attention has been paid to the equity of the retailer as a brand. However, retailers are predominant actors in our current society since they build the bridge between manufacturers and consumers (Baldauf et al. 2009). On the one hand, they are crucial for manufacturers insofar as retailers can choose to remove a brand or to provide it more shelf space, depending on the impact the brand has on the retailer’s performance. On the other hand, they gather in the same outlets various brands and products at competitive prices, making shopping more convenient and pleasant for customers. The main objective of this work is to offer a proper definition and conceptualization of retailer brand equity from the consumer’s perspective that can serve for both researchers and practitioners since we emphasize that former measures badly reflect the concrete “added value” of some retailers (Ailawadi and Keller 2004).

We have assessed the effect of 10:1 lossy (JPEG) compression on six board-certified radiologists' ability to detect three commonly seen abnormalities on chest radiographs. The study radiographs included 150 chest radiographs with one of four diagnoses: normal (n = 101), pulmonary nodule (n = 19), interstitial lung disease (n = 19), and pneumothorax (n = 11). Before compression, these images were printed on laser film and interpreted in a blinded fashion by six radiologists. Following an 8-week interval, the images were reinterpreted on an image display workstation after undergoing 10:1 lossy compression. The results for the compressed images were compared with those of the uncompressed images using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses. For five of six readers, the diagnostic accuracy was higher for the uncompressed images than for the compressed images, but the difference was not significant (P.1111). Combined readings for the uncompressed images were also more accurate when compared with the compressed images, but this difference was also not significant (P = .1430). The sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy values were 81.5%, 89.2%, and 86.7% for the compressed images, respectively, as compared with 78.9%, 94.5%, and 89.3% for the uncompressed images. There was no correlation between the readers' accuracy and their experience with soft-copy interpretation; the extent of radiographic interpretation experience had no correlation with overall interpretation accuracy. In conclusion, five of six radiologists had a higher diagnostic accuracy when interpreting uncompressed chest radiographs versus the same images modified by 10:1 lossy compression, but this difference was not statistically significant.

The value of trust plays a critical role in social and economic exchanges (Adler & Kwon, 2002; Butler, 1991; Giffin, 1967; Kumar, Scheer & Steenkamp, 1995; Morgan, 1994). Trust also has a significant impact on e-commerce activity (Bhattacherjee, 2002; Gefen, 2000; Green & Pearson 2011; Kassim, & Abdullah, 2008; McKnight & Chervany 2001; Tan & Theon, 2003). Furthermore, trust levels and trust development processes have been shown to vary cross-nationally (Doney, Cannon, & Mullen, 1998; Gefen & Heart, 2006), and affect differences in e-commerce between nations (Greenberg, Wong-On-Wing, & Lui, 2008; Kim, 2008; Mahmood, Bagchi & Ford, 2004; Schumann, Von Wangenheim, Stringfellow, et al., 2010). However, cross-cultural studies of the relationship between trust and e-commerce activity have only been conducted at the national level with no studies to date investigating the relationship of trust to e-commerce activity among within-nation regions. This gap in the literature is troublesome given that a number of scholars have demonstrated that within-nation regional differences are a key area in need of further research (Fukuyama, 1995; Lenartowicz & Roth, 2001; Locke, 1995; Peterson & Smith 2008; Stelzl & Seligman, 2009). Therefore, the role that trust plays in e-commerce activity among withinnation regions should be further investigated. This paper explores within-nation regional differences in e-commerce activity and investigates whether trust is significantly related to regional e-commerce activity.