Editor’s Introduction

Abstract

The supported, and often steered, bottom-up marketing by individuals on social media occupies a significant place in the firms’ marketing budgets and a highly respectable place in the researchers’ attention. As a component of the co-creation of value by consumers, it may be treated as a financial boon by the producers of goods and services, or managed at a great expense while maintaining the credibility of its independence. This resonant marketing intensifies the entry of the ever new influencers, the deployment of the accumulated longitudinal corpora, and the novel means of making the user-generated content accessible in an attractive form to the consumers and other parties at interest. The new uses of the real-time and the accumulated body of opinion emerge and are worthy of intensive study. The first article in this issue of IJEC does indeed investigate the use of the influencer opinion in the evaluation of the sellers’ responses to the cases when they failed to satisfy consumers. It had been established by prior marketing research and practice that a skillful response to such a failure often leads to long-term positive results for the brand, akin to a bond between the previously complaining consumer and the seller exceeding this consumer’s expectations in response. Anshu Suri, Bo Huang, and Sylvain Sénécal study empirically, with a strong theoretical grounding, the differential response of consumers at a postpurchase stage of their journey to a disappointment with their purchase—depending on the influencers’ opinion of the product. Will the reaction of Consumer A who encounters a positive influencer opinion as the disappointed consumer is trying to form her own opinion differ from the response of a disappointed Consumer B reading a negative opinion of influencers? This research shows that such response is indeed different, affectively and behaviorally. The positive opinion of the influencers matters on this stage as well—in the positive direction for the sellers. The work significantly expands our understanding of the role of influencers in the totality of e-retail. Product reviews reflect, most naturally, product quality. Quality costs money and needs to be congruent with the price and the satisfaction of the desires of the addressed consumer segments. In the face of this vox populi, the sellers need to select the bundle of quality and price to elicit a positive word of mouth online. The online environment also affords the opportunity to dynamically adjust prices and (to some extent and with a latency) quality in response to customer reviews. Here, Cui Zhao and Xiaoshuai Peng offer a formal gametheoretic model in a competitive setting that would allow the sellers to adjust prices and quality in seeking profits while benefiting from real-time consumer feedback online. The practical, as well as theoretical, conclusions of the work show up the potential of the distinguishing features of online selling in successfully addressing the consumer marketplace. A different opportunity to deploy more fully the advantages of the online marketplace is investigated by the authors of the next article, who study the effects of haptic stimulation on consumer behavior. Margot Racot and Daria Plotkina study the effects of tactile stimulation received as the vibrations activated by a smartphone INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE 2023, VOL. 27, NO. 3, 295–296 https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.2023.2226897