Personalized mobile marketing strategies Tong, Siliang; Luo, Xueming; Xu, Bo
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science,
2020/1, Letnik:
48, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The prevalence of mobile usage data has provided unprecedented insights into customer hyper-context information and brings ample opportunities for practitioners to design more pertinent marketing ...strategies and timely targeted campaigns. Granular unstructured mobile data also stimulate new research frontiers. This paper integrates the traditional marketing mix model to develop a framework of personalized mobile marketing strategies. The framework incorporates personalization into the center of mobile product, mobile place, mobile price, mobile promotion, and mobile prediction. Extant studies in mobile marketing are reviewed under the proposed framework, and promising topics about personalized mobile marketing are discussed for future research.
Prior research has largely focused on the positive side of customer experience, such as satisfaction. In contrast, this study investigates the negative side of customer experience and tests the ...harmful impact of consumer negative voice on firms' stock returns. Based on a longitudinal real-world data set that matches consumer negative voice (complaint records) in the airline industry with firm stock prices, this article finds that higher levels of current consumer negative voice harm firms' future idiosyncratic stock returns. In addition, this harmful impact is robust (albeit different across airline companies) after latent heterogeneity and traditional finance fundamentals are considered. These findings enable marketers and corporate financers to be more confident with customer equity theory and customer relationship management. In addition, armed with "hard" data (record-based, longitudinal), this research helps relieve criticisms against prior studies that are based on "soft" data (survey-based, cross-sectional). To financial analysts, this research suggests that, all else being equal, they should rate downward the stocks of firms that are shadowed by harmful consumer negative voice. In today's high-tech environment with blogs and online forums, the damage caused by negative voice may be nontrivial and should not be ignored. Overall, this research demonstrates to managers that investments in reducing consumer negative voice could indeed make financial sense in terms of promoting firm-idiosyncratic stock returns. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Firms are exploiting artificial intelligence (AI) coaches to provide training to sales agents and improve their job skills. The authors present several caveats associated with such practices based on ...a series of randomized field experiments. Experiment 1 shows that the incremental benefit of the AI coach over human managers is heterogeneous across agents in an inverted-U shape: whereas middle-ranked agents improve their performance by the largest amount, both bottom- and top-ranked agents show limited incremental gains. This pattern is driven by a learning-based mechanism in which bottom-ranked agents encounter the most severe information overload problem with the AI versus human coach, while top-ranked agents hold the strongest aversion to the AI relative to a human coach. To alleviate the challenge faced by bottom-ranked agents, Experiment 2 redesigns the AI coach by restricting the training feedback level and shows a significant improvement in agent performance. Experiment 3 reveals that the AI–human coach assemblage outperforms either the AI or human coach alone. This assemblage can harness the hard data skills of the AI coach and soft interpersonal skills of human managers, solving both problems faced by bottom- and top-ranked agents. These findings offer novel insights into AI coaches for researchers and managers alike.
Consumers often abandon e-commerce carts, so companies are shifting their online advertising budgets to immediate e-commerce cart retargeting (ECR). They presume that early reminder ads, relative to ...late ones, generate more click-throughs and web revisits. The authors develop a conceptual framework of the double-edged effects of ECR ads and empirically support it with a multistudy, multisetting design. Study 1 involves two field experiments on over 40,500 customers who are randomized to either receive an ECR ad via email and app channels (treatment) or not receive it (control) across different hourly blocks after cart abandonment. The authors find that customers who received an early ECR ad within 30 minutes to one hour after cart abandonment are less likely to make a purchase compared with the control. These findings reveal a causal negative incremental impact of immediate retargeting. In other words, delivering ECR ads too early can engender worse purchase rates than without delivering them, thus wasting online advertising budgets. By contrast, a late ECR ad received one to three days after cart abandonment has a positive incremental impact on customer purchases. In Study 2, another field experiment on 23,900 customers not only replicates the double-edged impact of ECR ads delivered by mobile short message service but also explores cart characteristics that amplify both the negative impact of early ECR ads and positive impact of late ECR ads. These findings offer novel insights into customer responses to online retargeted ads for researchers and managers alike.
The sharing economy has radically reshaped marketing thought and practice, and research has yet to examine whether and how platform-level buyer protection insurance (PPI) affects buyers and sellers ...in this economy. The authors exploit a natural experiment involving an unexpected system glitch during a PPI launch and estimate difference-in-differences models using over 5.4 million data points from a food sharing platform. Results suggest that PPI significantly increases buyer spending and seller revenue, affirming the benefits of this platform-level insurance in the sharing economy. The authors also uncover multifaceted buyer-side and seller-side responses that enable such benefits. PPI increases buyer spending by boosting product orders and variety-seeking behavior. Furthermore, it enhances seller revenue by increasing customer retention and acquisition. This work contributes to the literature by (1) putting a spotlight on the topic of PPI, a platform governance policy that reduces consumer risks and improves the efficacy of sharing platforms; (2) accounting for how PPI alters buyer and seller behaviors on a platform; (3) addressing what types of buyers and sellers benefit more or less from PPI; and (4) offering guidance for managers to improve platform reputation, marketplace efficiency, and consumer welfare in the context of the sharing economy.
As consumers spend more time on their mobile devices, a focal retailer's natural approach is to target potential customers in close proximity to its own location. Yet focal (own) location targeting ...may cannibalize profits on inframarginal sales. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of competitive locational targeting, the practice of promoting to consumers near a competitor's location. The analysis is based on a randomized field experiment in which mobile promotions were sent to customers at three similar shopping areas (competitive, focal, and benchmark locations). The results show that competitive locational targeting can take advantage of heightened demand that a focal retailer would not otherwise capture. Competitive locational targeting produced increasing returns to promotional discount depth, whereas targeting the focal location produced decreasing returns to deep discounts, indicating saturation effects and profit cannibalization. These findings are important for marketers, who can use competitive locational targeting to generate incremental sales without cannibalizing profits. Although the experiment focuses on the effects of unilateral promotions, it represents an initial step in understanding the competitive implications of mobile marketing technologies.
Although prior research has addressed the influence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on perceived customer responses, it is not clear whether CSR affects market value of the firm. This study ...develops and tests a conceptual framework, which predicts that (1) customer satisfaction partially mediates the relationship between CSR and firm market value (i.e., Tobin's q and stock return), (2) corporate abilities (innovativeness capability and product quality) moderate the financial returns to CSR, and (3) these moderated relationships are mediated by customer satisfaction. Based on a large-scale secondary data set, the results show support for this framework. Notably, the authors find that in firms with low innovativeness capability, CSR actually reduces customer satisfaction levels and, through the lowered satisfaction, harms market value. The uncovered mediated and asymmetrically moderated results offer important implications for marketing theory and practice.
In today's market environment, corporate social responsibility (CSR) represents a high-profile notion that has strategic importance to many companies. By dedicating ever-increasing amounts to cash ...donations, in-kind contributions, cause marketing, and employee volunteerism programs, companies are acting on the premise that CSR is not merely the "right thing to do" but also "the smart thing to do." This research investigates the linkage between CSR and firm market value with a longitudinal, archival data set. Given that firms are not the same in their execution, support, and exploitation of CSR initiatives in the marketplace, the authors predict that companies may generate different (i.e., positive, nonsignificant, and negative) market returns from CSR under different conditions. Specifically, this article asks the following questions: (1) Under what conditions do CSR initiatives result in positive financial performance? and (2) Does customer satisfaction matter in the relationship between CSR and firm performance? The authors develop and test a conceptual model that proposes that CSR initiatives enable firms to build a base of satisfied customers, which in turn contributes positively to market value. Based on multiple secondary data sets (e.g., Fortune's "America's Most Admired Companies," the American Customer Satisfaction Index, Compustat) that include ratings of large companies and structural equation modeling methodologies, the results show support for the CSR customer satisfaction firm market value causal linkages. Specifically, the authors find that customer satisfaction partially mediates the relationship between CSR and market value. Furthermore, they establish the boundary conditions under which firms may derive positive or negative market value from CSR. Firms that have better inside-out corporate abilities (i.e., product quality and innovativeness) to begin with tend to generate more market value from outside-in strategic initiatives (i.e., CSR programs). Conversely, firms that exhibit poorer corporate abilities may find that CSR actually harms customer satisfaction and, because of the lowered satisfaction, decreases their stock performance. The finding that CSR contributes positively to market value suggests that managers can obtain competitive advantages and reap more financial benefits from investing in CSR. However, the data also reveal a previously neglected "dark side" of CSR. That is, CSR actually reduces customer satisfaction levels in firms with low innovativeness capability and, through this negative impact, harms firm market value. Thus, firms need to ensure that they are perceived as innovative and as makers of high-quality products before they undertake major CSR initiatives. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Although there is significant evidence that customer satisfaction is an important driver of firm profitability, extant literature has largely neglected two intermediate outcomes of customer ...satisfaction, namely, a firm's advertising and promotion efficiency and its human capital performance. On the basis of longitudinal analyses of large-scale secondary data from multiple sources, the authors find that customer satisfaction boosts the efficiency of future advertising and promotion investments. This finding can be explained by the possibility that customer satisfaction generates free word-of-mouth advertising and saves subsequent marketing costs. In addition, customer satisfaction has a positive influence on a company's excellence in human capital (employee talent and manager superiority). This finding is highly novel, indicating that human resources managers should have a strong interest in customer satisfaction as well. Finally, the authors investigate the moderating influence of market concentration on both relationships. The uncovered results have important implications for marketers in their dialogue with financial executives and human resources managers.
Consumer buzz in the form of user-generated reviews, recommendations, and blogs signals that consumer attitude and advocacy can influence firm value. Web traffic also affects brand awareness and ...customer acquisition, and is a predictor of the performance of a firm's stock in the market. The information systems and accounting literature have treated buzz and traffic separately in studying their relationships with firm performance. We consider the interactions between buzz and traffic as well as competitive effects that have been overlooked heretofore. To study the relationship between user-initiated Web activities and firm performance, we collected a unique data set with metrics for consumer buzz, Web traffic, and firm value. We employed a vector autoregression with exogenous variables model that captures the evolution and interdependence between the time series of dependent variables. This model enables us to examine a series of questions that have been raised but not fully explored to date, such as dynamic effects, interaction effects, and market competition effects. Our results support the dynamic relationships of buzz and traffic with firm value as well as the related mediation effects of buzz and traffic. They also reveal significant market competition effects, including effects of both a firm's own and its rivals' buzz and traffic. The findings also provide insights for e-commerce managers regarding Web site design, customer relation management, and how to best respond to competitors' strategic moves.
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