A key question for retailers who already offer a mobile website is, whether they should add an app as an additional purchase channel. We address this issue by exploring whether consumers' app ...adoption stimulates additional purchases and how this change in purchase behavior differs across customers with different levels of spending share for different product categories and customer loyalty. By using transactional data from a Chinese online retailer, we show that app adopters have higher purchase incidence, buy more frequently, and spend more in each order than non-adopters. We also find that app adoption has a stronger positive effect on the order size of customers who have a lower spending share of high-price products and customers who are less loyal to the focal retailer. Hereby, we contribute to multichannel and mobile marketing literature by empirically examining the effects of adding a similar (mobile) purchase channel to an already established (mobile) purchase channel. Managerially, our results suggest that apps are worth investing in despite their similarity to mobile websites and can induce non-loyal customers to purchase more and thus potentially foster these customers' loyalty.
•We explore the influence of customers adopting a newly added app on their subsequent purchase behavior.•Apps are worth investing in despite their similarity to mobile websites.•App adopters show higher purchase incidence and high spending than non-adopters.•Apps help mitigate customers' perceived financial risk.•Apps help foster customers' future loyalty.
The Impact of New Media on Customer Relationships Hennig-Thurau, Thorsten; Malthouse, Edward C.; Friege, Christian ...
Journal of service research : JSR,
08/2010, Volume:
13, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Recent years have witnessed the rise of new media channels such as Facebook, YouTube, Google, and Twitter, which enable customers to take a more active role as market players and reach (and be ...reached by) almost everyone anywhere and anytime. These new media threaten long established business models and corporate strategies, but also provide ample opportunities for growth through new adaptive strategies. This paper introduces a new ‘‘pinball’’ framework of new media’s impact on relationships with customers and identifies key new media phenomena which companies should take into account when managing their relationships with customers in the new media universe. For each phenomenon, we identify challenges for researchers and managers which relate to (a) the understanding of consumer behavior, (b) the use of new media to successfully manage customer interactions, and (c) the effective measurement of customers’ activities and outcomes.
Corporate digital responsibility Lobschat, Lara; Mueller, Benjamin; Eggers, Felix ...
Journal of business research,
January 2021, 2021-01-00, 20210101, Volume:
122
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We propose that digital technologies and related data become increasingly prevalent and that, consequently, ethical concerns arise. Looking at four principal stakeholders, we propose corporate ...digital responsibility (CDR) as a novel concept. We define CDR as the set of shared values and norms guiding an organization's operations with respect to four main processes related to digital technology and data. These processes are the creation of technology and data capture, operation and decision making, inspection and impact assessment, and refinement of technology and data. We expand our discussion by highlighting how to managerially effectuate CDR compliant behavior based on an organizational culture perspective. Our conceptualization unlocks future research opportunities, especially regarding pertinent antecedents and consequences. Managerially, we shed first light on how an organization's shared values and norms regarding CDR can get translated into actionable guidelines for users. This provides grounds for future discussions related to CDR readiness, implementation, and success.
Despite the rise of digital, direct mailing as a marketing communication tool remains relevant and widely applied in practice. Nevertheless, research into the effectiveness of direct mailing in the ...online environment is scant. Key questions that remain entail how direct mails affect different online and offline consumer activity metrics throughout the purchase funnel and how they interact with digital marketing communication tools. The current paper, therefore, investigates these two questions by conducting two studies. First, we focus on the effect of direct mailing on zip-code level upper, middle, and lower funnel performance metrics over time by analyzing quasi-experimental data from a large European insurance firm. The results reveal that direct mailing significantly influences consumer activity metrics in the online channel (i.e., online search and clicking behavior), in support of cross-channel effects of direct mailing. Moreover, direct mailing is shown to be effective throughout the purchase funnel, both directly and indirectly, with a positive net sales effect. Second, we study the joint effect of direct mailing and display advertising by analyzing field experiment data from the same insurance firm. The results show positive synergy between direct mailing and display advertising. Therefore, despite the rise of digital, direct mailing still serves as an effective marketing tool, both by itself and in combination with digital marketing.
•Images increase review helpfulness of positive reviews but reduce it for negative.•Images increase (decrease) review helpfulness for hedonic (experience) products.•Images increase helpfulness more ...in case of reviewers with a high reputation.•Adding multiple, differently composed images increases review helpfulness.•Showing the product in use (instead of showing the packshot) increases helpfulness.
Online retailing is still dominated by information asymmetries, as it often remains difficult for consumers to fully judge the quality of a product online. Reviews written by customers help to reduce this asymmetry. Helpful reviews have thus become an important tool to drive online sales. Beside textual information, reviews nowadays also often include images that can further help consumers to better judge products or services. While online retailers need to invest substantial resources in hosting and incentivizing review images, it remains unclear under which conditions review images drive (or reduce) review helpfulness and how review image content affects review helpfulness. We rely on a set of more than 97,000 reviews from Amazon to investigate the contingencies under which review images increase review helpfulness. Furthermore, we rely on more than 6,000 images in our data set to explore how review image content (i.e., image focus and context fit) drives review helpfulness. Our results show that online retailers should especially motivate consumers to include images in a review when the overall rating is extremely positive, when the reviewer has a high reputation, and when the review addresses a hedonic or experience product. Our image content analysis further shows that images help to increase helpfulness when they show the product in application. This effect is especially strong in the case of longer reviews.
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Shifting the Blame Pallas, Florian; Bolton, Lisa E.; Lobschat, Lara
Journal of service research : JSR,
08/2018, Volume:
21, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The proliferation of surcharges in service pricing raises theoretical and pragmatic questions regarding their impact on consumers. This research investigates how surcharges influence consumer ...responses to a service price increase. We propose that various kinds of surcharge information act in concert to drive blame attributions for a price increase: Internal (vs. external) surcharges increase blame attributions and minimize the influence of other drivers captured in surcharge information such as temporal stability, surcharge benefit, and more than one kind of surcharge. In comparison to all-inclusive pricing, we find that (i) surcharge pricing is detrimental to service firms when surcharges cue internal locus of causality, regardless of the temporal stability or surcharge benefit, whereas (ii) surcharge pricing is beneficial when surcharges cue external locus of causality, particularly when the surcharges are permanent and high benefit; (iii) consumers are more sensitive to increases in the magnitude of internal (vs. external) surcharges; and (iv) in the case of mixed surcharges, internal surcharges are more prominent and minimize the buffering effect of adding external surcharges. Based on our findings, we make recommendations to managers on the optimal design of surcharge pricing to mitigate negative blame reactions when communicating service price increases to consumers.
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•Product-specific price discounts influence customers’ total spending following a U-shaped pattern.•Product-specific price discounts influence purchase quantity positively though at a ...decreasing rate.•Order coupons positively influence total spending and purchase quantity at an increasing rate.•Customers’ expectations of discounts influence purchasing following a U-shaped pattern.•Customers’ expectations of discounts play a moderating role in influencing customers’ total spending.
This paper examines the influence of a permanent discount strategy on customer purchase behavior, i.e., purchase incidence in each week, purchase quantity (in units), and total order spending (in CNY). Permanent discounts are defined as discounts continuously provided by retailers. We identify two types of permanent discounts, namely, product-specific price discounts (PD) and order coupons (OD, which can be redeemed for a total order). We collect transactional data from a Chinese online retailer and empirically examine the effects of the two types of permanent discounts and customers’ expectations of PD and OD. We find nonlinear relationships between permanent discounts and customer purchase behavior. PDs negatively influence spending when they are lower than 19% but show a positive effect beyond this threshold, hence depicting a U-shaped relationship. They also affect purchase quantity positively but at a decreasing rate. Customer expectations of PD influence purchase incidence, spending, and purchase quantity following a U-shaped patter with a positive influence appearing when PD expectations are high than 31%, 27%, and 18% respectively. On the other hand, ODs influence spending and purchase quantity positively at an increasing rate. Customer expectations of OD influence purchase incidence, spending, and purchase quantity following a U-shaped relationship where the positive influence on purchase incidence shows beyond OD expectations of 426 CNY, and the positive effect appearing on spending and purchase quantity when these expectations are higher than 34 CNY. We also find that customer expectations of discounts interact with current discount levels in their influence on spending. Combining these results and considering that order coupons negatively affect the profit margin of the total basket, we suggest that retailers should offer order coupons with relatively low value but product-specific price discounts with high discount depth.
Many firms are allocating increasing parts of their advertising budgets to banner advertising. Yet, for firms that predominantly sell offline, existing research provides little guidance on online ...advertising decisions. In this study, the authors analyze the impact of banner advertising on consumers' online and offline behavior across multiple distinct campaigns for one focal firm, which predominantly sells through the offline channel. Results suggest that banner and TV advertising increase website visit incidence for consumers who have not visited the focal firm's website in the previous four weeks (nonrecent online consumers). For these consumers, banner and TV advertisements indirectly increase offline sales through website visits. For consumers who have visited the firm's website in the previous four weeks (recent online consumers), the authors find evidence for a cross-campaign, brand-building effect of banner advertising, and TV ads also directly affect offline purchases. Overall, the findings indicate that for firms that predominantly (or even exclusively) sell offline, banner advertising is most suitable to generate awareness for a firm's new products among nonrecent online consumers, and to build their brand(s) among recent online consumers.
Shifting the Blame Pallas Florian; Bolton, Lisa E; Lobschat Lara
Journal of service research : JSR,
08/2018, Volume:
21, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The proliferation of surcharges in service pricing raises theoretical and pragmatic questions regarding their impact on consumers. This research investigates how surcharges influence consumer ...responses to a service price increase. We propose that various kinds of surcharge information act in concert to drive blame attributions for a price increase: Internal (vs. external) surcharges increase blame attributions and minimize the influence of other drivers captured in surcharge information such as temporal stability, surcharge benefit, and more than one kind of surcharge. In comparison to all-inclusive pricing, we find that (i) surcharge pricing is detrimental to service firms when surcharges cue internal locus of causality, regardless of the temporal stability or surcharge benefit, whereas (ii) surcharge pricing is beneficial when surcharges cue external locus of causality, particularly when the surcharges are permanent and high benefit; (iii) consumers are more sensitive to increases in the magnitude of internal (vs. external) surcharges; and (iv) in the case of mixed surcharges, internal surcharges are more prominent and minimize the buffering effect of adding external surcharges. Based on our findings, we make recommendations to managers on the optimal design of surcharge pricing to mitigate negative blame reactions when communicating service price increases to consumers.
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