As sound therapy, Songbo Sound Therapy is widely used around the world for the treatment of sleep disorders and physiotherapy. Therefore, it is of great significance to explore consumers’ willingness ...to purchase Songbo Bowl products and their influencing factors to enhance consumers’ willingness to purchase and to promote the high-quality development of China’s sound therapy instrument industry. The empirical results show that among the four dimensions affecting consumers’ willingness to buy, consumers’ price sensitivity, awareness and trust significantly affect consumers’ willingness to buy, and consumers’ perceived value is also a factor affecting willingness to buy. From the study of the four dimensions of willingness to buy, this paper finds that young people in faster-developing cities have a higher demand for Songbo products used to alleviate insomnia and other diseases, and at the same time, sound therapy is included in the national health insurance for the first time in 2022, which indicates that the sound therapy products have gone to the public. Targeted countermeasures and recommendations from the government level. The government should increase the publicity and promotion of sound therapy products, enhance consumer awareness and health consciousness, and establish a sound product feedback system and regulatory mechanism.
Since 2016, community group buying has grown significantly in China, largely driven by its efficient logistics, supply chains, low prices, and convenience. This model has been further popularized ...during the COVID-19 pandemic due to its effectiveness in meeting daily needs while minimizing human-to-human contact. A key component of this business model are the “group leaders” - influential individuals within a community responsible for managing group buying activities, which include order collection, supplier liaison, and goods distribution. Their primary task is to form and sustain a reliable community group buying consortium, a task that demands excellent organizational and interpersonal skills. This paper examines this phenomenon using the lens of the differential mode of association, a theoretical model explaining interpersonal relationships in traditional Chinese society. The research indicates that group leaders, through regular interaction with consumers, are able to alter their social network position, increase their influence, understand consumer needs, provide satisfying services, and enhance trust, thereby transforming consumers into loyal group buying participants. This transformation not only brings stability to group buying activities but also reinforces the community influence of group leaders, thus fostering the growth of community group buying.
This research explores how consumers respond to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in China with a multiproduct, comparative survey. Empirical results conclude that (1) Chinese consumers, who show ...a high level of awareness and trust of CSR, are more likely to transform a good CSR record into positive corporate evaluation, product association, and purchase intention; (2) Consumer responses to CSR vary across different product categories. Those firms selling experience products (vs. search and credence products) are more likely to gain consumers' positive product associations and purchase support through CSR practices; and (3) The relationships between consumer demographics and their CSR responses are not linear, and those consumers with a middle level of age and income would respond to CSR more positively. Managerial implications are provided.
The public is rightly concerned about climate change and conscious of the need to insulate their homes – but is spray foam roof insulation the way to go? A new RICS consumer guide aims to provide ...clarity
Abstract
Transparency remains a contested concept in European Union (EU) law and policy. All the main instruments of EU consumer and data protection law require that consumers be given access to and ...understand certain information about their relationships with traders. Improved transparency is also proposed as a response to a variety of problems associated with digital markets, including those experienced by consumers and data subjects. At the same time, transparency is increasingly challenged as ineffective and potentially even counterproductive from doctrinal and critical scholarship alike. First, transparency is seen as inherently unable to transform the economic reality on the ground and to address the power imbalances between consumers and traders. Secondly, it is argued that acts of representation involved in transparency suffer from complexity and are prone to exploitation by the actors who engage in it. This, in turn, casts doubt on the ability of transparency to steer the behaviour of businesses and transform markets to the benefit of consumers and society. This article builds upon prior critiques of transparency and connects them with a doctrinal analysis of EU consumer and data protection law and in particular the Unfair Contract Terms Directive, the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, and the General Data Protection Regulation. Seven different notions of transparency are identified: (i) Transparency as access to the medium over time; (ii) Transparency as presentation of information that facilitates understanding; (iii) Transparency as formulations that facilitate understanding; (iv) Transparency as non-ambiguity and logical intelligibility; (v) Transparency as the absence of deception and confusion; (vi) Transparency as completeness and specificity; and (vii) Transparency as non-arbitrariness. The article submits that the acts of representation involved in transparency are already recognized in the three legal regimes and attempts are made to leverage the mediated nature of transparency to consumers’ advantage. Crucially, existing efforts to regulate mediation and improve its quality can, nowadays, be reinforced with the help of algorithmic systems geared toward supporting consumers. Moreover, some of the deployments of transparency identified—most notably transparency as non-arbitrariness—push its outer conceptual boundaries in ways that bring transparency very close to fairness. The article ultimately questions a vision of transparency as a necessarily softer-touch protective frame, which cannot alter business conduct. The conceptual richness of transparency offers opportunities for its deployment in more disruptive ways.
As cadeias agroalimentares curtas estão diretamente relacionadas aos mercados da agricultura familiar, cuja lógica é permitir uma conexão com maior interatividade, fundamentada nas relações de ...confiança mútua. A crescente demanda por esses produtos também está fortemente relacionada ao aumento da exigência dos consumidores, preocupação com a qualidade dos alimentos e com os impactos da agricultura sobre o meio ambiente. Entender o comportamento desses consumidores é fundamental para que o produtor possa oferecer exatamente o que eles querem. Esta revisão insere-se nesse debate e tem por objetivo fazer uma trajetória referente ao surgimento das cadeias agroalimentares curtas, com enfoque principal nos desejos e motivações dos consumidores. Percebe-se nos estudos considerados que o consumidor está disposto a pagar mais pelo produto a fim de receber uma mercadoria com maior qualidade, onde a sustentabilidade estabelece grande importância. Outros fatores importantes são o contato direto com o produtor, a construção de lealdade e confiança, a acessibilidade e a integração com a comunidade local.
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CEKLJ, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
This study aims to analyze what drives and prevents the purchasing of eco-friendly products across different consumer groups and develops a conceptual model embracing the positive altruistic (care ...for the environmental consequences of purchasing), positive ego-centric (green self-identity and moral obligation), and negative ego-centric (perceived personal inconvenience of purchasing eco-friendly products) antecedents of eco-friendly product purchase intention and behavior. We empirically validate the conceptual model for green (n = 453) and non-green (n = 473) consumers (i.e., consumers who engage in a set of pro-environmental behaviors for environmental reasons versus consumers who do not engage in these behaviors). Data are analyzed using structural equation modeling and multi-group analysis of the two groups. The results confirm the relevance of the determining factors in the model and show significant differences in eco-friendly product purchasing patterns between green and non-green consumers. Altruistic motives are more important for green than for non-green consumers. Negative ego-centric motives affect the purchase intentions of non-green consumers more than the intentions of green consumers, whereas the impact of negative motives on behavior is stronger for green than for non-green consumers. The first contribution of this paper is the development and testing of a parsimonious model of eco-friendly products purchasing that embraces both positive (altruistic and ego-centric) and negative (ego-centric) antecedents, which have been theoretically suggested in the past but have rarely been empirically tested together. The second contribution of this study is that it develops insight into the specific antecedents of eco-friendly products purchasing for green and non-green consumers to assess potential similarities and differences in eco-friendly products purchasing process, the hypothesized antecedents, their impact on eco-friendly products purchase intention and behavior, and the intention–behavior relation.
With the growth of e-commerce, online consumer reviews have increasingly become important sources of information that help consumers in their purchase decisions. However, the influx of online ...consumer reviews has caused information overload, making it difficult for consumers to choose reliable reviews. For an online retail market to succeed, it is important to lead product reviewers to write more helpful reviews, and for consumers to get helpful reviews more easily by figuring out the factors determining the helpfulness of online reviews. For this research, 75,226 online consumer reviews were collected from Amazon.com using a Web data crawler. Additional information on review content was also gathered by carrying out a sentiment analysis for mining review text. Our results show that both peripheral cues, including review rating and reviewer's credibility, and central cues, such as the content of reviews, influence the helpfulness of reviews. Based on dual process theories, we find that consumers focus on different information sources of reviews, depending on their purposes for reading reviews: online reviews can be used for information search or for evaluating alternatives. Our findings provide new perspectives to online market owners on how to manage online reviews on their Web sites.
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BFBNIB, IZUM, KILJ, NMLJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
Whilst the actual origins of English consumer culture are a source of much debate, it is
clear that the nineteenth century witnessed a revolution in retailing and consumption.
Mass production of ...goods, improved transport facilities and more sophisticated sales
techniques brought consumerism to the masses on a scale previously unimaginable. Yet
with this new consumerism came new problems and challenges. Focusing on retailing in
nineteenth-century Britain, this book traces the expansion of commodity culture and a
mass consumer orientated market, and explores the wider social and cultural implications
this had for society. Using trial records, advertisements, newspaper reports,
literature, and popular ballads, it analyses the rise, criticism, and entrenchment of
consumerism by looking at retail changes around the period 1800-1880 and society's
responses to them. By viewing this in the context of what had gone before Professor
Whitlock emphasizes the key role women played in this evolution, and argues that the
dazzling new world of consumption had beginnings that predate the later English, French
and American department store cultures. It also challenges the view that women were
helpless consumers manipulated by merchants' use of colour, light and display into
excessive purchases, or even driven by their desires into acts of theft. With its
interdisciplinary approach drawing on social and economic history, gender studies,
cultural studies and the history of crime, this study asks fascinating questions
regarding the nature of consumer culture and how society reacts to the challenges this
creates.
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