Social Media’s impact on Intellectual Property Rights

This is a draft chapter. The final version is available in Handbook of Research on Counterfeiting and Illicit Trade, edited by Peggy E. Chaudhry, published in 2017 by Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, https://doi.org/10.4337/9781785366451. This material is for private use only, and cannot be used for any other purpose without further permission of the publisher.Peer reviewe

Internet auctions in marketing: The consumer perspective

Internet auctions for consumer are among the most popular and most successful business models in electronic commerce. Research so far, however, has focused on prerequisites and consequences of auctions as a marketing intstrument of suppliers. Even though it is a key success factor from a marketing perspective, the demand side has not inspired similar attention. This paper focuses on the attitudes, motives, and behavior of auction customers. It shows why ccurrent beliefs about bidder characteristics are myths. Taking these misconceptions as a starting point, the existence of an experiential and a pragmatic type of auction customer is proposed. An explorative empirical study looking for the characteristics of both types of auction customers is described. Results indicate that less than half of auction shoppers in the sudy are experiential oriented. Except substantial additional demand concerning technological and emotional qualities of auctions these shoppers do not differ dramatically from pragmatic oriented shoppers. Both types are open-minded towards further development of consumer auctions to commercial marketplaces. Business models of auctioneers and suppliers should concentrate on the basic utility of the auction algorithm by facilitating individual matchmaking instead of pursuing costly additional utility by promoting the entertainment value of auctions. --

Peer Priming? A Large-Scale Field Experiment Studying the Impact of Popular Rankings on Demand in Mobile Retail

Consumers on mobile retail apps face significant search costs due to the small screen size of devices. One of the search aid features to improve the search convenience is to show consumers a small set of frequently used searches conducted by peer consumers on the platform as a prime cue. We refer to this feature as the popular ranking search aid (PRSA). Collaborating with Meituan, a leading services mobile app in China, we implement a large-scale field experiment to explore how PRSA affects consumer search activities and purchases. Our analyses generate three key findings. First, PRSA leads to an increase of 18.6% in page views and a 6.4% increase in purchases. Second, the change in shopping behavior emerges through a change in search behavior with more non-directed searches and fewer directed searches. Third, our mediation analysis supports that search behavior mediates the business outcomes. We offer theoretical and managerial implications

The Omnichannel Marketplace: A Look at Modern Consumers

Since the advent of the digital marketplace, marketing techniques to reach consumers have shifted. Traditional media and demographic analysis are no longer the only means for brands reaching consumers. Marketing has now taken an omnichannel approach. This study examined the relationship between the omnichannel consumer, the consumer benefits sought online versus in brick and mortar, and the modern marketer’s approach to omnichannel marketing. It outlines a psychographic and demographic profile of today’s omnichannel consumer, which will ultimately create a more detailed profile for businesses to market across integrated channels ultimately delivering a hybrid consumer experience (HCE). Findings in this study include cluster analyses related to consumer benefits sought and demographics as well as correlations between psychographic profiling data and demographics

Personality in Computational Advertising: A Benchmark

In the last decade, new ways of shopping online have increased the possibility of buying products and services more easily and faster than ever. In this new context, personality is a key determinant in the decision making of the consumer when shopping. A person’s buying choices are influenced by psychological factors like impulsiveness; indeed some consumers may be more susceptible to making impulse purchases than others. Since affective metadata are more closely related to the user’s experience than generic parameters, accurate predictions reveal important aspects of user’s attitudes, social life, including attitude of others and social identity. This work proposes a highly innovative research that uses a personality perspective to determine the unique associations among the consumer’s buying tendency and advert recommendations. In fact, the lack of a publicly available benchmark for computational advertising do not allow both the exploration of this intriguing research direction and the evaluation of recent algorithms. We present the ADS Dataset, a publicly available benchmark consisting of 300 real advertisements (i.e., Rich Media Ads, Image Ads, Text Ads) rated by 120 unacquainted individuals, enriched with Big-Five users’ personality factors and 1,200 personal users’ pictures

The influencing factors of user loyalty on e-commerce shopping guide platform -- Case “Shenmezhidemai”

In recent years, the development of the online retail market has become more and more diversified. There are a large number of advertisements and products gathered on major e-commerce platforms. Consumers cannot efficiently select the products they want in the huge product pool, and it is also difficult for merchants to select high-quality products. The products are precisely oriented to consumers, so the e-commerce shopping guide industry has begun to spread, develop and become popular. To help consumers select high-quality goods more quickly, the e-commerce shopping guide platforms collect and integrate information and discounts for users, and provide users with decision-making suggestions. However, there is a phenomenon that users who are dissatisfied after purchasing a product because of product price reduction, quality problems or logistics problems become angry with the e-commerce shopping guide platform. As a result, users even quit and uninstall the e-commerce shopping guide platform completely. In fact, the result should be the responsibility of the merchant who sells the product. This thesis takes the e-commerce shopping guide platform “Shenmezhidemai” as the re-search object, and uses grounded theory, case study and in-depth interview to carry out this research. First of all, this thesis sorts out the relevant research on e-commerce shopping guide platform and user loyalty, and conducts an overview of the environment, development history and status quo, classification, characteristics and profit model of e-commerce shop-ping guide platform. Secondly, based on grounded theory and in-depth interview method, 20 people participated in the interview, and the interview records of about 20,000 words were obtained. Through open coding, axial coding, selective coding and other processes, the key influencing factors of e-commerce shopping guide platform user loyalty are analyzed and the theoretical model is constructed. Through the eight categories of user-related factors, information utility, system utility, platform reputation, recommending function, interactive function, price comparison function and cross-border shopping function, the model of influencing factors of e-commerce shopping guide platform user loyalty is carefully analyzed. Finally, aiming at the above eight categories, corresponding suggestions are put forward for e-commerce shopping guide platforms to cultivate and increase user loyalty. The thesis hopes to provide some implications and recommendations for the development of e-commerce shopping guide platforms

Think Local-Act Local: Is It Time to Slow Down the Accelerated Move to Global Marketing?

In view of the accelerated move of great corporations towards global marketing, the strategic changes of such companies raise interesting questions. Is marketing globalization reaching its limits after years of implementation? Is it time for companies to rethink their strategies and move back, like Coca-Cola, to a multi-domestic marketing approach?Global Marketing, Multi-Domestic Marketing Approach, Brand Equity, Drawbacks of Marketing Globalization, Coca-Cola