If individuals buy a Snickers bar and subsequently see their favorite basketball team begin to play better, they might attribute this improved performance to their purchase decision. Even as consumers acknowledge that this type of control is irrational, we demonstrate that they are willing to superstitiously alter their purchase behavior (by choosing a less-preferred option) in hopes of helping their favorite team.
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.
Accusations of wrongdoing, baseless or justified, can severely tarnish a company's reputation. Once disseminated, even baseless accusations can persist and cause considerable damage for a company. This study examines the proactive crisis communication strategy of inoculating individuals against invalid accusations before they go viral. An experiment was conducted in a real world consumer context among members of an online consumer panel using an electronics discounter as the research stimulus.
We study the drivers of the emergence of opinion leaders in a networked community where users establish links to others, indicating their "trust" for the link receiver's opinion. This leads to the formation of a network, with high in-degree individuals being the opinion leaders. We use a dyad-level proportional hazard model with time-varying covariates to model the growth of this network. To estimate our model, we use Weighted Exogenous Sampling with Bayesian Inference, a methodology that we develop for fast estimation of dyadic models on large network data sets.
As firms increasingly seek out consumers' ideas in various domains, they will encounter individuals with different levels of domain-specific knowledge. While both low- and high-knowledge consumers may be willing to share their ideas benevolently, the performance of the former is likely to be hindered by their lack of relevant knowledge in the problem domain. It is also well established that, despite their abundant knowledge, high-knowledge consumers may not perform in accordance with their full potential (due to factors such as shallow processing and inattention).
The Attachment-Aversion (AA) Relationship model offers a unifying model of customer-brand relationships. To develop it further as a relevant consumer-psychology model, future research should examine three key factors: how brand perception differs from person perceptions; what role brand experiences play as determinants of customer-brand relationships, and how the AA Relationship model fits with other brand frameworks. The author offers insights and suggestions on how to address these three tasks.
We consider price competition models for oligopolistic markets, in which a significant part of the product or service price is paid by a third party, as a subsidy. The consumer is, therefore, impacted by the net price, defined as the difference between the nominal price and the subsidy, while the firms earn the full nominal price, partially paid by the subsidizing third party and the remainder by the consumer.
A high quality customer database is a cornerstone of successful interactive marketing strategies and tactics. Based on the notion that customer data quality is not only a technical but also an organizational problem, this study develops and tests an organizational learning framework of the relationship between organizational processes, customer data quality and firm performance. The findings show that high quality customer data impact both customer and business performance and that the most important driver of customer data quality comes from the executive suite.