{"title":"Do Handwritten Notes Benefit Online Retailers? A Field Experiment","authors":"Sanghwa Kim, Jeonghye Choi, Seung Hyun Kim","doi":"10.1177/10949968221102306","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10949968221102306","url":null,"abstract":"Despite the technological advances in online retailing, the human touch continues to be essential to relationships between retailers and customers. Although a handwritten note is proposed as a simple means to help establish a personal relationship, its economic significance and alignment with current practices have been insufficiently studied. In this article, the authors evaluate the benefits of a handwritten note for an online retailer and reveal the boundary conditions of its benefits. A randomized field experiment demonstrates that presenting a handwritten note has a positive and significant effect on customer spending. More importantly, the authors observe that an additional marketing incentive (i.e., giveaway, price discount) attenuates this beneficial effect. Further, the study shows that these two effects arise with loyal customers, but not with nonloyal customers. A follow-up experiment reveals that warmth underlies the key findings, lending support for the theoretical prediction. The article concludes with a general discussion that the authors hope will inspire future research on relationship management in online retailing.","PeriodicalId":48260,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interactive Marketing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":11.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41972131","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When Does Information Transparency Reduce Downside of Personalization? Role of Need for Cognition and Perceived Control","authors":"Laetitia Lambillotte, Yakov Bart, Ingrid Poncin","doi":"10.1177/10949968221095557","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10949968221095557","url":null,"abstract":"Companies increasingly use personalization to offer a better experience to their customers. Online personalization enables them to learn from customers’ data and adapt their website content accordingly. Although customers may value personalization, it may also trigger privacy concerns. In this context, both regulators and firms need a better understanding of the process underlying the effect of personalization on privacy concerns, as well as the role of information transparency in this process. Drawing on signaling theory, the authors propose how perceived control may mediate the negative impact of personalization on privacy concerns and hypothesize that the interaction effect of personalization and information transparency depends on customer need for cognition. Findings from two experimental studies show that perceived control is lower on personalized websites than on nonpersonalized websites, which leads to privacy concerns. However, the presence of a transparency message can mitigate the negative effect of website personalization for customers who are in low need for cognition.","PeriodicalId":48260,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interactive Marketing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":11.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65408702","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What We Know and Don’t Know About Consumer Happiness: Three-Decade Review, Synthesis, and Research Propositions","authors":"N. Dhiman, Ajay Kumar","doi":"10.1177/10949968221095548","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10949968221095548","url":null,"abstract":"The recent rise of consumer happiness research in marketing literature is noticeable. This article presents a systematic review of consumer happiness research from 1991 to 2020. From an initial pool of 600 articles on consumer happiness from 158 marketing journals in the ABS and ABDC lists, 71 articles were selected. The procedure was as follows: (1) search of articles, (2) quality assessment, (3) extraction of data from articles, and (4) thematic synthesis. The review concluded that the term “consumer happiness” does not have a standardized definition in the existing literature. However, happiness has been studied in a variety of contexts, and consumer research is one of these contexts. Further, the review concluded that consumer happiness research is largely segregated across three themes: marketing beyond satisfaction, marketing for health and mind, and digital felicity. Seven areas of future research on consumer happiness are also proposed. The authors present academic and managerial contributions with scholarly implications for the literature in the areas of consumer well-being, the role of marketing/interactive marketing, and the positive side of marketing. The authors also suggest that marketers not only seek consumers’ need fulfillment and satisfaction from their product or service consumption but also try to elicit hedonic associations with their products or services.","PeriodicalId":48260,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interactive Marketing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":11.8,"publicationDate":"2022-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47371153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Some Interactions Are More Equal Than Others: The Effect of Influencer Endorsements in Social Media Brand Posts on Engagement and Online Store Performance","authors":"Adrian Waltenrath, C. Brenner, O. Hinz","doi":"10.1177/10949968221096591","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10949968221096591","url":null,"abstract":"This study investigates the value of influencer endorsement within brand-owned social media posts in terms of engagement and online store performance. Specifically, it focuses on how endorser-caused engagement translates to online store performance. The authors examine metrics that capture short-term performance (online shop visits and immediate sales) by tracking immediate responses to social media posts. They conduct an empirical analysis based on real Facebook posts published over 1.5 years by a leading European online fashion retailer that targets young adults. To confirm results and shed light on the underlying mechanisms, the authors further conduct a randomized online experiment (N = 305) that mimics the field study. They find that influencer endorsements are associated with increased engagement and that engagement is associated with higher online store performance. The results show that endorsement negatively moderates the effect of engagement because it distracts from the products (i.e., the “vampire effect”). The authors conclude that consumers’ underlying intentions of engaging with social media posts vary, which implies that engagement caused by an endorser has less economic value than engagement motivated by other (e.g., product-related) reasons. From a practical perspective, social media brand post endorsement should be considered a tool for brand marketing rather than for performance marketing, and social media metrics should be interpreted with care, because not all engagement may help online store performance.","PeriodicalId":48260,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interactive Marketing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":11.8,"publicationDate":"2022-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49590867","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Decoding Emotional (In)Congruency: A Computational Approach Toward Ad Placement on YouTube","authors":"T. Wen, C. Chuan, W. Tsai, Jing Yang","doi":"10.1177/10949968221095546","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10949968221095546","url":null,"abstract":"This study illuminates the varied emotional mechanisms underlying consumer response to ads paired with emotionally congruent versus incongruent content in different placement positions. This work expands the media planning literature that has narrowly focused on thematic (in)congruency. Focusing on music videos, Study 1 empirically tests the affect regulation effect on consumer response to ads paired with emotionally incongruent music videos and the affect priming effect in congruent pairings. Furthermore, this study incorporates affective computing algorithms to pair ads with music videos based on emotional (in)congruency to advance the emerging field of computational advertising. The results from two experimental studies demonstrate that consumers prefer the emotional flow from a negative to a positive state when the ad and media context are emotionally incongruent. In the emotional congruency condition, regardless of ad position, the positively valenced ad produces more favorable responses. Study 2 further illuminates the boundary conditions of emotional (in)congruency and ad valence, suggesting that consumers’ preference for positively valenced ads in the affect regulation and affect priming processes is more prominent when consumers are less involved. When involvement level is high, negative ads are rated as more persuasive than positive ones. Involvement level also reduces ad skipping, especially when the ad and the media program are emotionally incongruent.","PeriodicalId":48260,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interactive Marketing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":11.8,"publicationDate":"2022-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48531578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Joni O. Salminen, M. Mustak, Juan Corporan, Soon-Gyo Jung, B. Jansen
{"title":"Detecting Pain Points from User-Generated Social Media Posts Using Machine Learning","authors":"Joni O. Salminen, M. Mustak, Juan Corporan, Soon-Gyo Jung, B. Jansen","doi":"10.1177/10949968221095556","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10949968221095556","url":null,"abstract":"Artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning, carries high potential to automatically detect customers’ pain points, which is a particular concern the customer expresses that the company can address. However, unstructured data scattered across social media make detection a nontrivial task. Thus, to help firms gain deeper insights into customers’ pain points, the authors experiment with and evaluate the performance of various machine learning models to automatically detect pain points and pain point types for enhanced customer insights. The data consist of 4.2 million user-generated tweets targeting 20 global brands from five separate industries. Among the models they train, neural networks show the best performance at overall pain point detection, with an accuracy of 85% (F1 score = .80). The best model for detecting five specific pain points was RoBERTa 100 samples using SYNONYM augmentation. This study adds another foundational building block of machine learning research in marketing academia through the application and comparative evaluation of machine learning models for natural language–based content identification and classification. In addition, the authors suggest that firms use pain point profiling, a technique for applying subclasses to the identified pain point messages to gain a deeper understanding of their customers’ concerns.","PeriodicalId":48260,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interactive Marketing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":11.8,"publicationDate":"2022-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44977118","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Impact of Mobile Social App Usage on Offline Shopping Store Visits","authors":"Xuebin Cui, Yacheng Sun, Yubo Chen, Banggang Wu","doi":"10.1177/10949968221095554","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10949968221095554","url":null,"abstract":"This research is a first empirical investigation into the effect of mobile social app usage on consumers’ decisions to visit offline stores and how such an effect varies across consumers and carries over time. The analysis combines data on mobile app usage at the individual consumer level with a fine-grained geolocation data set. The authors find a positive effect of social app usage on consumers’ visits to brick-and-mortar stores. This effect is amplified by the consumer's mobility level and the offline store density in the consumer's neighborhood. The positive impact of social app usage carries over for up to nine days, indicating a short-term effect. Additional analyses indicate that such an effect is likely due to consumers’ social discovery of product- and store-related information via word of mouth on strong-tie social apps (i.e., instant messaging apps). These results point to new opportunities for offline retailers seeking to acquire customers via the mobile channel.","PeriodicalId":48260,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interactive Marketing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":11.8,"publicationDate":"2022-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45854371","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Email Marketing as a Tool for Strategic Persuasion","authors":"Jacquelyn S. Thomas, Chao-Jung Chen, D. Iacobucci","doi":"10.1177/10949968221095552","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10949968221095552","url":null,"abstract":"Email marketing is an important staple of marketing communications. Emails from companies to customers may be promotional in nature, to drive short-term purchasing, or relational in nature, for customer relationship management (CRM) and brand-building objectives. Emails are also issued when customers have opted in to receive alerts and notifications. The authors posit that these different types of emails (promotional, CRM, alerts) reflect both overt and more subtle attempts at persuasion and are associated with different levels of persuasion knowledge. Insights from the persuasion knowledge model ( Friestad and Wright 1994) and advertising wear-out are offered as explanations to understand consumer response to different types of emails. The authors test a model comparing the relative effectiveness of these types of emails on the email opening rate, the spending amount, and the shopping cart abandonment rate. They show that emails associated with relatively lower levels of persuasion knowledge are the most effective at increasing the opening rate and spending amount but are counterproductive for reducing shopping cart abandonment. In contrast, emails that likely trigger higher levels of persuasion knowledge are better for reducing cart abandonment. Alert notifications are mostly ineffective at driving our focal outcomes. The authors show that email effectiveness varies over time and is different for each type of email. They assert that combinations of specific email types, if strategically managed, can be used to enhance the spending of customers who opt in to receive specific alert messages.","PeriodicalId":48260,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interactive Marketing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":11.8,"publicationDate":"2022-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65408614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Chatbots in Marketing: A Literature Review Using Morphological and Co-Occurrence Analyses","authors":"A. Ramesh, Vaibhav Chawla","doi":"10.1177/10949968221095549","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10949968221095549","url":null,"abstract":"Chatbots have become common in marketing-related applications, providing 24/7 service, engaging customers in humanlike conversation, and reducing employee workload in handling customer calls. However, the academic literature on the use of chatbots in marketing remains sparse and scattered across disciplines. The present study combines morphological analysis and co-occurrence analysis to bring structure to this area and to identify relevant research gaps. Morphological analysis divides a problem into pertinent and clearly distinguishable components, namely dimensions (at an abstract level) and variants (at a concrete level). A Zwicky box (a cross-variant matrix of dimensions) is then constructed to identify future research opportunities. Here, the authors obtain 11 dimensions and 264 variants. To eliminate inconsistent configurations (i.e., combinations of variants across dimensions), they perform a cross-consistency assessment and identify potential research gaps. To increase objectivity in the selection of relevant gaps, the authors use VOSviewer software to conduct a co-occurrence analysis of the variants.","PeriodicalId":48260,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interactive Marketing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":11.8,"publicationDate":"2022-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43876407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Antecedents and Consequences of Gift-Receiving in Livestreaming: An Exploratory Study","authors":"Xuejing Ma, Hongju Liu, Qiaowei Shen","doi":"10.1177/10949968221095550","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10949968221095550","url":null,"abstract":"As a novel and booming medium, the livestreaming industry has attracted millions of broadcasters and viewers worldwide. Gifts from viewers have become the main revenue source for most broadcasters and livestreaming platforms. This study employs data from a major showroom livestreaming platform in China to examine this practice of “gifting” during a livestreaming event. The authors first explore the antecedents of gift-receiving, which mainly focus on the effect of social interaction. The results show that the more social interactions in a live session, the more likely the broadcaster receives more gifts, and the effect is enhanced when a more experienced broadcaster is participating. Furthermore, the authors examine the consequences of gift-receiving and social interaction on broadcasters’ short-term activation and long-term retention. They find that both gift-receiving and social interaction can positively affect broadcasters’ live content provision in the short and long run, and the effects change with the increase of broadcasters’ experiences. This study offers insight into gifting in livestreaming, which gives scope for relevant future explorations.","PeriodicalId":48260,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interactive Marketing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":11.8,"publicationDate":"2022-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44948368","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}