Marketing

The diffusion of an innovation is governed by, among other things, word of mouth. In social systems, growth processes are considered strongly influenced by people who have large number of ties to other people. In the social network literature, such people are called influentials, opinion leaders, mavens, or sometimes hubs. Furthermore, when the marketing literature addresses such people, the focus is typically not on how they influence the overall market but rather on either assessing their influence on people they are in direct contact with or identifying their characteristics.

Do consumers in different cultures evoke different mental structures and processes when they process commercial information? How can we describe these differences? Do these differences affect behavior? These questions, which form the core of research on consumer cognition across cultures, have been barely addressed. Rather than being cross-cultural or comparative in its approach, most research on consumer cognition has been culture-bound.

This chapter examines how the original tenets of the affect-as-information hypothesis can be extended to explain a wide range of judgment phenomena, especially with respect to consumer decision making. To this end, research within social psychology as well as research from other fields such as consumer behavior and behavioral decision making is reviewed. The chapter is organized into three main sections. The first section identifies distinct types of information that people seem to derive from their feelings.

This important handbook explores new and emerging directions in both brand management research and practice and encompasses a diverse set of approaches. These include the latest academic research to offer new frameworks for understanding brand management. Contributors offer the researcher's perspective on current tools in practice by brand managers today and new research and conceptual frameworks for understanding and managing customer experiences.

Social commerce is an emerging trend in which online shops create referral hyperlinks to other shops in the same online marketplace. We study the evolution of a social commerce network in a large online marketplace. Our dataset starts before the birth of the network (at which points shops were not linked to each other) and includes the birth of the network. The network under study exhibits a typical power-law degree distribution. We empirically compare a set of edge formation mechanisms (including preferential attachment and triadic closure) that may explain the emergence of this property.

Results from four studies show that the reliance on affect as a heuristic of judgment and decision making is more pronounced under a promotion focus than under a prevention focus. Two different manifestations of this phenomenon were observed. Studies 1–3 show that different types of affective inputs are weighted more heavily under promotion than under prevention in person-impression formation, product evaluations, and social recommendations.

We offer a constructive critique of Regulatory Engagement Theory (Higgins, E. T. (2006). Value from hedonic experience and engagement. Psychological Review, 113(3), 439?460.; Higgins, E. T., and Scholer, A. A. (2009). Engaging the consumer: The science and art of the value creation process. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 19(2).). After highlighting the major tenets of the theory and its main contributions, we identify some of its conceptual ambiguities.

Want more revenue, contribution, and profits? Then start managing, measuring, and optimizing the most crucial driver: Customer Value Added (CVA®). In Value Above Cost, award-winning professor and top consultant Donald E. Sexton demonstrates why CVA® is such a powerful tool for quantifying customer value and the business activities that achieve it.

The relevance and importance of marketing in innovation management has been questioned in recent years. Marketing has been blamed directly or indirectly for poor returns on investment in innovation, and marketing models of the diffusion of innovations have not been widely adopted. In this monograph we argue that marketing is currently in a unique position to reaffirm its critical role in innovation management. We review some recent research that has already started this "reinstatement" process and propose some future directions that may help complete it.