Consumer Behavior

The modal scientific approach in consumer research is to deduce hypotheses from existing theory about relationships between theoretic constructs, test those relationships experimentally, and then show “process” evidence via moderation and mediation. This approach has its advantages, but other styles of research also have much to offer. We distinguish among alternative research styles in terms of their philosophical orientation (theory-driven vs. phenomenon-driven) and their intended contribution (understanding a substantive phenomenon vs. building or expanding theory).

In this report, the authors quantify the strategic relationship between brand management (brand equity) and customer management (the components of CLV), and demonstrate the role that marketing activities play in this relationship. They examine a unique database from the U.S. automobile market, comprised of 10 years of survey-based brand equity measures as well as acquisition rates, retention rates, and customer profitability.

This paper analyzes optimal decisions concerning the size of the sample and the price of the paid content for online publishers of digital information goods when sampling serves the dual purpose of disclosing content quality and generating advertising revenue. We show in a reduced-form model how the publisher?s optimal ratio of advertising revenue to sales revenue is linked to characteristics of both the content market and the advertising market.

Web 2.0 provides gathering places for internet users in blogs, forums, and chat rooms. These gathering places leave footprints in the form of colossal amounts of data regarding consumers' thoughts, beliefs, experiences, and even interactions. In this paper, we propose an approach for firms to explore online user-generated content and "listen" to what customers write about their and the competitors' products. Our objective is to convert the user-generated content to market structures and competitive landscape insights.

Mad Men depicts advertising agency life as it was decades ago. The practice of creative meetings, like our culture, has evolved. But the aims, conflicts, displays, and compromises in advertising meetings are not markedly different than they were in the 1960s. This article provides some observations regarding creative meetings based on participant observation along with Mad Men examples.

We pose a fundamental question in understanding how to identify and design successful communities: What factors predict whether a community will grow and survive in the long term? Social scientists have addressed this question extensively by analyzing offline groups which endeavor to attract new members, such as social movements, finding that new individuals are influenced strongly by their ties to members of the group.

We examine decision makers' use of tacit linguistic intuitions and explicit linguistic knowledge for brand name translations from English to Chinese. We present a market study, which reveals that managers intuitively use linguistic sound and meaning characteristics, that is, which sounds and meanings best fit for the Chinese translation of the English names. A subsequent experiment shows that generalized types of existing name approaches (that is, whether the names are translated based on sound or based on meaning) are employed as explicit benchmark standards for new names.

Whether done intentionally or out of habit, many behaviors are repeated. Prior research has demonstrated that past behavior is an excellent predictor of future behavior in contexts as varied as media use, eating and drinking, substance abuse, voting, and travel mode choice, just to name a few. Although no one denies the evidence regarding the prevalence of repeat behavior and the predictive power of past behavior, two issues remain intensely debated

In the standard certainty multiperiod demand problem it is well-known that if a consumer's preferences are log additive (or equivalently Cobb-Douglas), demand in each period is myopic in the sense of being independent of future prices. As a result, less stringent informational requirements in terms of price expectations are imposed on the consumer. Given the general aversion of Fisher (1930), Hicks (1965) and Lucas (1978), among others, to requiring preferences to be additively separable, it is natural to ask whether myopia can hold for non-additive forms of utility.