The door is the boundary between the foreign and domestic worlds in the case of an ordinary dwelling, between the profane and sacred worlds in the case of a temple. Therefore to cross the threshold is to unite oneself with a new world (van Gennep 1960: 20).
Despite a 20-year trend toward integrated marketing communications, advertisers seldom coordinate television and search advertising campaigns. We find that television advertising for financial services brands increases both the number of related Google searches and searchers' tendency to use branded keywords in place of generic keywords. The elasticity of a brand's total searches with respect to its TV advertising is 0.17, an effect that peaks in the morning.
At the time of its launch, Contently was a digital marketplace, where small businesses, agencies, and corporations could search for writers. But recent financial results showed that Contently earned substantially more profit from its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business than from its writers' commissions. This case — which includes background on the evolution of content marketing, information on the SaaS industry, as well as data on Contently's financial performance — asks students to evaluate Contently's best path to profitable growth.
This cross-cultural study examined television advertising appeals (functional versus experiential and local versus global appeals) and their relationship with brand knowledge core components (brand awareness, brand attitude, and brand uniqueness) across countries at different levels of economic development. A dataset of 257 television commercials from 23 countries was used in the analysis. The researchers found that the experiential (emotional) appeal had a stronger relationship with the components of brand knowledge in countries with medium and high gross domestic product (GDP).
This research examines how consumers choose retailers when they are uncertain about store prices prior to shopping. Simulating everyday choice, participants made successive retailer choices where on each occasion they chose a retailer and only then learned product prices. The results of a series of studies demonstrated that participants were more likely to choose a retailer that offered an everyday low pricing strategy (EDLP) or that offered frequent small discounts over a retailer that offered infrequent large discounts.
In late 2013, Bloomberg LP, the financial information powerhouse, was challenged by a competing messaging service owned by a consortium of banks, many of whom were Bloomberg's customers. This development came when growth was slowing and news was emerging that Bloomberg's business practices may have compromised the privacy of its customers. Did these events serve to open fissures in the company's ability to maintain industry dominance? This case asks students to consider Bloomberg's business model and the industry's competitive landscape to assess the company's market position.
It has been observed that ad-evoked feelings exert a positive influence on brand attitudes. To investigate the empirical generalizability of this phenomenon, we analyzed the responses of 1,576 consumers to 1,070 TV commercials from more than 150 different product categories. The findings suggest five empirical generalizations. First, ad-evoked feelings indeed have a substantial impact on brand evaluations, even under conditions that better approximate real marketplace settings than past studies did.
Consumer psychology faces serious issues of internal and external relevance. Most of these issues originate in seven fundamental problems with the way consumer psychologists plan and conduct their research that could be called the seven sins of consumer psychology.
Markets for information products exhibit varying degrees of competition on both the supply and the demand side. This paper studies the potential complementarity of information products, equilibrium information buying behaviors and information price setting in such markets. Our game-theoretic model consists of two information providers selling imperfect information to two competing clients and allows for different information quality levels as well as varying degrees of client competition.