In pursuit of satisfaction and the prevention of embarrassment : affective state in group recommender systems

Peer reviewedPostprin

Explaining and predicting the single channel versus multi-channel consumer: the case of an embarrassing product

The fundamental purpose of this thesis was to determine how effective is the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) to predict and explain shopping for embarrassing products in single and multi-channel. This is important because multi-channel consumers buy more, the question is why (Neslin, Grewal et al. 2006). The question was answered by comparing consumer behaviour in three different channels: drugstore, internet and multi-channel. The Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) has been successful to predict intentions for a wide variety of products and behaviours. However, little is known about how effective it is when the behaviour under study is influenced by the emotion of embarrassment. Similarly, the TPB is parsimonious and has a good predictive power; nevertheless, this thesis identified that the TPB could be more effective if it considered: (1) the role of positive and negative emotions (2) other determinants of choice like personality and demographics (3) variables that are useful to make marketing decisions like the synergistic effect of brands, retailers and channels (4) variables that explain consumer response like approach and avoidance. To provide a comprehensive theoretical framework that is able to understand single and multi-channel, this thesis integrated the TPB within the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework. To evaluate the proposed model, the study used a context and target product that resonated with the theory: the purchase of Regaine (a hair loss product that is embarrassing to buy) in Boots (a well-known UK. multi-channel drugstore). The embarrassing nature of Regaine created differences in the importance that variables play in each channel. The results were analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) and the three shopping environments were compared using multi-group analysis (MGA). The effectiveness of the TPB was improved. The variance explained (R² to intention) was 73 percent for the drugstore, 67 percent for the internet and 54 percent for multi-channel. However, subjective norm (SN) was the only factor that achieved significance for the three shopping environments. Personality and demographic factors had a low but significant moderating effect on intention. This thesis built on a series of contributions in different areas, such as the TPB, attitudes, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control, embarrassing products, multi-channel, marketing, emotions, personality and demographics. Future research should expand this thesis to other embarrassing products, industries and social media settings

Modeling Relationships Among Affective Measures of Food Choice: Acceptance, Emotions And Satisfaction

The importance of ascertaining holistic product and consumer understanding beyond liking in the product development process cannot be overstated. This research investigated the role of attribute performance on satisfaction in explaining the relationship between food-evoked emotions and sensory preferences, and examined factors influencing the sensory-emotion profile of food products. In the first phase of this research, a series of consumer studies were conducted using eggs as a test product. First, the extent to which critical product attributes contribute to the satisfaction of quality requirements and purchase intent was determined using Kano modeling concepts. The emotional profile of the product was then examined in attribute presence and absence conditions to evaluate impact of egg quality types. Subsequently, the data were analyzed to elucidate relationships between emotions, satisfaction performance measures and product acceptability. For the expansive aspects of intrinsic, extrinsic, aesthetic, expedient and wholesome characteristics influencing purchase decision of eggs, 8 elements were identified as must-be, 1 attractive, 1 one-dimensional, and 10 indifferent Kano attributes. Attribute absence rather than presence evoked greater consumer discriminating emotions, and emotions and acceptability were more correlated for attribute absence than presence. Emotion and attribute satisfaction performance scores were better predictors of liking in combination than alone. However, emotions in attribute absence outperformed that in its presence, reflecting impact of deeper emotional conceptualizations in attribute absence being a better predictor of liking. Associations were found between Kano attributes and positive emotions. Attractive Kano-related attributes were distinctly drivers of liking, separate from both positive and negative emotions. No evidence of moderating effects of satisfaction performance of expedient egg attributes on the relationship between emotions and liking was found. In the second phase of this research, the relative effects of color and labeling cues on sensory perception, emotional responses and the sensory-emotion space were evaluated using sweeteners as a food model. Results demonstrated additive effects of color and labeling cues on flavor perception and emotions, contrary to significant interactions on their sensory-emotion profile. Identified associations between attribute performance on consumer satisfaction, emotions and acceptability in this research offer new insights on food-evoked emotions in product development

An investigation of brand image and its role in brand development

The main objective of this research is to investigate the most vital issue in the realm of branding - what makes a brand powerful, from the perspective of brand image. This concept has yet to gain due recognition as relatively little recent original research has been published on brand image. The research was undertaken in the fragrances industry in the UK. This research explores the brand image concept as a determinant of brand success; therefore, first and foremost, this concept has to be defined in terms of the nature of image - conveyed approach versus received approach, the notion of components structure and in terms of the concept elements. The original definition proposed is described as the "Three Dimensions' Brand Image" model (functional needs, nonfunctional needs and brand personality) and has been built from the assumption of creating a practical facet, where the marketer will be able to identify the meaning of each dimension and reinforce every one of them in his attempt to create brand image strategy. Therefore, a number of hypotheses have been tested with regard to the model structure as follows: the importance of brand personality dimension and non-functional dimension in high and low brand image situations in comparison to other dimensions was explored in revealing the notion's component structure, and the importance of price and special feeling elements in comparison to other brand image elements was researched in revealing the concept's elements. Finally, the link between brand image concept and brand success phenomenon was explored to define this concept in terms of a managerial marketing concept. This research focuses on men's and women's fragrances product groups because apart from the tangible facet of brand in these product groups, there is a significant meaning to brand personality facet, which makes this very appropriate for this research into "image". The research method for data collection was firstly based on focus groups interviews, and then on a survey (personal interviews) which took place during the months of March and April 1997 in four department stores of Debenhams in which 320 respondents participated. The findings of the research show evidence of the proposed "Three Dimensions' Brand Image" model existence, where the concept brand image is described as an amalgamation of two schools of thought, one which emphasizes the dependence of brand image creation upon the individual psyche, and the other which sees the marketers as the image creators. In addition, the findings show that in high and low brand image situations the functional dimension is perceived as the most important one, the next one is the non-functional dimension and the least important is the brand personality dimension. The research's findings show evidence of existence between brand image and brand success where high brand image leads to high brand success and low brand image leads to low brand success. The most important contribution of the proposed model as a new definition of brand image is its ability to act as an applied marketing concept for creating and managing the image of a brand, and by doing so it ceases to be purely a theoretical concept

Life in the Time of a Pandemic

It has been confirmed that the number of cases and the death toll of COVID-19 are continuing to rise in many countries around the globe. Governments around the world have been struggling with containing and reducing the socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19; however, their respective responses have not been consistent. Aggressive measures imposed by some governments have resulted in a complete lockdown that has disrupted all facets of life and poses massive health, social, and financial impacts. Other countries, however, are taking a more wait-and-see approach in an attempt to maintain business as usual. Collectively, these challenges reflect a super wicked problem that places immense pressure on economies and societies and requires the strategic management of health systems to avoid overwhelming them—this has been linked to the public mantra of ‘flattening the curve’, which acknowledges that while the pandemic cannot be stopped, its impact can be regulated so that the number of cases at any given time is not beyond the capacity of the health system. Dynamic simulation modelling is a framework that facilitates the understanding/exploring of complex problems, of searching for and finding the best option(s) from all practical solutions where time dynamics are essential. The papers in this book provide research insights into this super wicked problem and case studies exploring the interactions between social, economic, environmental, and health factors through the use of a systems approach

Towards a Better Understanding of Emotion Communication in Music: An Interactive Production Approach.

It has been well established that composers and performers are able to encode certain emotional expressions in music, which in turn are decoded by listeners, and in general, successfully recognised. There is still much to discover, however, as to how musical cues combine to shape different emotions in the music, since previous literature has tended to focus on a limited number of cues and emotional expressions. The work in this thesis aims to investigate how combinations of tempo, articulation, pitch, dynamics, brightness, mode, and later, instrumentation, are used to shape sadness, joy, calmness, anger, fear, power, and surprise in Western tonal music. In addition, new tools for music and emotion research are presented with the aim of providing an efficient production approach to explore a large cue-emotion space in a relatively short time. To this end, a new interactive interface called EmoteControl was created which allows users to alter musical pieces in real-time through the available cues. Moreover, musical pieces were specifically composed to be used as stimuli. Empirical experiments were then carried out with the interface to determine how participants shaped different emotions in the pieces using the available cues. Specific cue combinations for the different emotions were produced. Findings revealed that overall, mode and tempo were the strongest contributors to the conveyed emotion whilst brightness was the least effective cue. However, the importance of the cues varied depending on the intended emotion. Finally, a comparative evaluation of production and traditional approaches was carried out which showed that similar results may be obtained with both. However, the production approach allowed for a larger cue-emotion space to be navigated in a shorter time. In sum, the production approach allowed participants to directly show us how they think emotional expressions should sound, and how they are shaped in music

Detecting consumer emotions on social networking websites

The social networking environment goes beyond connecting friends. It also connects customers with companies and vice versa. Customers share their experience with friends, followers, and companies and these experiences carry sentiments and emotions thereby creating big data. There is an ocean of data that is available for companies to extract and make meaning out of it by applying to different business contexts such as consumer feedback analysis and marketing & communications. For companies to benefit from consumer emotion data, they must make use of computational methods that can save time and work consumed by traditional consumer research methods such as questionnaires and interviews. The objective of this research is to explore existing literatures on detecting consumer emotions from social networking data. The author carried out a systematic literature review on research articles from three bibliographic databases with the intent to find out social networking data extraction process, dataset sizes, computational methods used, consumer sentiments, emotions studied, limitations and its application in a managerial context. To further understand consumer emotion detection, a case study in the form of a Twitter marketing campaign was conducted to emulate the process of consumer emotion detection on a company that is selling stress management products and services. The results indicate that most companies use Twitter networking platform to carry out consumer emotion analysis. The dataset sizes range from small to very large. The studies have used variety of computational methods, some with accuracies to measure the performance. These methods have been applied in various industries such as travel, restaurant, healthcare, and finance to name a few. Managerial applications include marketing, supply chain, feedback analysis, product development, and customer satisfaction. There are few limitations that were identified from using these methods. The case study results and discussion with the case company CIO communicated the potential for the use of some of the methods for consumer behavior research. The valuable feedback from the CIO revealed that by customizing existing methods, their company can create new tools and methods to understand their customers by providing better recommendations and customize their offerings to individual customers

The impact of culturally acquired behavioral norms on workplace communication.

This study explored cultural diversity influences on the concepts of time and punctuality; allowable limits of expressiveness; kinesics and oculesic cues; request/response time; and ethnic and gender preferences for supervisors. The research was conducted using participant volunteer personnel in a large U.S. Army Medical.Using the theoretical background of Blumer's Symbolic Interactionalism, thirty-two volunteer participants were individually interviewed in a qualitative, grounded theory research design study. The study population consisted of active duty military personnel with equal representation of males and females and officers and enlisted personnel from African-American and Euro-American heritage. Analysis of the data revealed a central theme of interpersonal relationship expectations. The responses provided in four vignettes exploring time, punctuality, expressiveness, kinesics and oculesic characteristics, request/response time, and preference choices for supervisors revealed that the African-American participants communicated workplace relationship efforts with an orientation toward an interpersonal approach (collectivistic). The participants from Euro-American heritages approached most workplace relationships from a "business only" perspective (individualistic). The findings suggest that relationship expectations have a cultural basis in some of the miscues in work environment communication. Further research among other population and ethnic groups to corroborate this theory

Novel Techniques to Measure the Sensory, Emotional, and Physiological (Biometric) Responses of Consumers toward Foods and Packaging

This book reprinted from articles published in the Special Issue “Novel Techniques to Measure the Sensory, Emotional, and Physiological (Biometric) Responses of Consumers toward Foods and Packaging” of the journal Foods aims to provide a deeper understanding of novel techniques to measure the different sensory, emotional, and physiological responses toward foods. The editor hopes that the findings from this Special Issue can help the broader scientific community to understand the use of novel sensory science techniques that can be used in the evaluation of products