How Does Buzz Build Brands? Investigating the Link between Word of Mouth and Brand Performance

To aid in resolving some of the ambiguity in the literature about the impact of different forms of WOM on brand performance, this dissertation investigates how WOM influences three consumer responses to WOM: purchase, WOM retransmission, and additional information search. The author investigates these questions by analyzing a database comprising more than three years of detailed WOM data from a unique, nationally representative panel merged with other secondary sources that provide various measures of brand strength (the American Consumer Satisfaction Index and Harris Interactive’s Equitrend). Using a series of hierarchical regression models, the results from this study reveal numerous insights into the contextual factors that moderate the impact of a WOM episode. For example, negative WOM about a brand has a larger absolute effect on consumer purchase intentions than positive WOM, but positive WOM has a larger positive effect on WOM retransmission than the positive effect of negative WOM. Offline WOM tends to exacerbate the effect of positive and negative brand sentiment on purchase intentions. WOM between stronger social ties tends to have greater impact on brand-related responses than WOM between weak ties, except in the case of motivating additional information search. The results also indicate that strong brands (those with higher levels of brand equity) tend to reap greater benefits from WOM. For example, negative, mixed, or neutral WOM has greater influence on purchase, and WOM from weak social ties about strong brands motivates higher levels of information search than when WOM from weak ties is about weaker brands

Customer Relationship Management : Concept, Strategy, and Tools -3/E

Customer relationship management (CRM) as a strategy and as a technology has gone through an amazing evolutionary journey. After the initial technological approaches, this process has matured considerably – both from a conceptual and from an applications point of view. Of course this evolution continues, especially in the light of the digital transformation. Today, CRM refers to a strategy, a set of tactics, and a technology that has become indispensable in the modern economy. Based on both authors’ rich academic and managerial experience, this book gives a unified treatment of the strategic and tactical aspects of customer relationship management as we know it today. It stresses developing an understanding of economic customer value as the guiding concept for marketing decisions. The goal of this book is to be a comprehensive and up-to-date learning companion for advanced undergraduate students, master students, and executives who want a detailed and conceptually sound insight into the field of CRM

The Role of Referrals in New Client Capture Within the Field of Independent Financial Advice

The field of regulated financial services has been ill-served by marketing theory. As a consequence: (1) the nature of marketing in this sector has been misunderstood; (2) the key mechanism for generating new business in the field, namely, referrals, has been the subject of serious misapprehension; and, (3) the guidance offered to practitioners has been negligible. In particular, the role of the independent financial advisor (IFA) appears to have been conceptualised as a sales role, and the nature of the relationship between the IFA and the client has been addressed as though it were a straightforward buyer-seller relationship, with the IFA selling products to the client. It is unlikely that these conceptualisations were ever satisfactory and following recent regulatory changes in the sector they have become even less relevant. Since January 1st 2013 commission-based selling of financial investment products to consumers has been prohibited so that independent financial advice has become largely a fee-based service. The focus of this research is on referrals as a method of generating new business; the research context is the UK independent financial advice industry. The objectives of the study are to: (1) define and conceptualise referrals in the context of the financial advice industry; (2) develop a framework of the referral process; (3) provide practitioners with empirical evidence in connection with their embedded beliefs about referrals in this industry; (4) explore whether (as many practitioner believe) it is possible to actively manage referral generation within a financial advice business; and, (5) to investigate the importance of referrals as a means of generating new business for advisors. It was found that practitioners believe they influence referrals in four main ways: excellent service, higher qualifications, contact frequency and speed of response. However the results of this study clearly indicate that referrals are not the outcome of agency; they are a random occurrence, determined by happenstance and the result of an opportunist conversation between a prospect and a client. In turn, contrary to the advice of consultancy providers, asking for referrals was found to be ineffective and not welcomed by consumers. While word-of-mouth (WOM) often instigates referral generation, the value of WOM, needs be treated with caution, since consumers were found to have limited understanding of the service provided by independent advisors. Despite the importance consumers attribute to investment performance practitioners do not, commonly, provide investment benchmarks nor do consumers use analytical tools to assess the performance of their advisor. The absence of performance measures connects with the finding that practitioners have difficulty in describing what they do hence consumers are uncertain how to describe the service and what to say about it when asked

Investigating the Drivers, Measures and Consequences of Customer Online Social Experience

This research plays a pioneering role in investigating the social aspect of online customer experience. Guided by the social presence and social response theory, and using a mixed methods approach, the research introduces customer online social experience (COSE) in the extant literature by defining the concept, identifying its dimensions, drivers and developing its measures. It also develops a scale for measuring omni-channel management (OCM) and reveals that OCM drives COSE, which eventually influences customer behaviour

Influential Factors In Consumer\u27s Adoption Of Innovative Products

This dissertation addresses the challenges involved with the process of diffusion of innovations in the contexts of innovative educational materials and technological innovations. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss building and using Online Brand Communities (OBCs) to disseminate innovative math educational materials. OBCs are known to be important platforms where consumers can communicate with the brand as well as other consumers. Through the effective use of these platforms, brands could accelerate the process of diffusion of their innovations. However, OBCs will not survive if consumers do not get engaged and participate in these communities. The purpose of this section of the dissertation is to investigate how customer engagement can be increased in social media based Online Brand Communities (OBCs) so that these communities could be effectively used as platforms for disseminating innovations. Different hypotheses are suggested based on the consumer engagement literature and well-known organizational and psychological theories. These hypotheses are then tested in different studies in order to better understand the drivers of customer engagement behavior. Since one of the important factors that can impact the success of OBCs is the size of the communities, chapter 3 discusses Referral Reward Programs (RRPs) as a means for growing the OBC size. In this chapter, different hypotheses are proposed based on well-known psychological theories. These hypotheses are then tested in 3 different research studies to understand the impact of different rewards on customers’ likelihood to participate in the referral programs. The next section of this dissertation which is presented in chapter 5 uses the context of technological innovations, particularly Augmented Reality Smart Glasses (ARSGs). The purpose of this chapter is to understand the factors that would impact consumer’s decision to adopt a particular type of ARSGs: Microsoft HoloLens. The results of the studies in this dissertation have important theoretical and managerial implications in the areas of customer engagement in OBCs, Word-of-Mouth marketing, and consumer’s adoption of innovations

Investigating factors affecting purchase intention in collaborative consumption: the antecedents of social trust and self-efficacy

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonCollaborative consumption (CC) has transformed the way people consume goods and/or services nowadays. With the information communication technology (ICT), CC platforms connect the users to trade services and products. On the one side of the platform consists with consumers, on the other side of the platform consists with services and/or product providers. The increased popularity of the CC platforms has challenged many traditional incumbents. Several attempts have been made to address the issues, such as the social and economic impacts, drivers of CC, the attributes of the users and characteristics of the CC model. Nevertheless, limited research attention has explored how social trust and self-efficacy could affect people’s intention to participate in collaborative consumption, hence failing to explain how collaborative consumption could be promoted in society to support community building and the resource-saving consumption culture. To address this research gap, this study proposes a comprehensive framework that explains how social trust and self-efficacy drive users’ purchase purchase intentionin CC. The framework also investigates the antecedents of social trust through system quality, shared goals, social referral and network stability, whereas the antecedents of self-efficacy include social referral and shared goals. Employing partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) and importance-performance matrix (IPMA), with data collected from 373 respondents using TaskRabbit, a skill-based exchange collaborative consumption platform. The findings from this study reveal that both social trust and self-efficacy play vital roles in determining user’s purchase intention in CC. Social referral, system quality, and shared goals were found to positively affect social trust and self-efficacy. In particular, shared goals is proven as the strongest antecedent in determining social trust and self-efficacy, highlighting its relevance in promoting collaborative consumption. This study is the first to introduce and empirically test the effects of social referral on individuals’ self-efficacy. The framework developed in the study provides new insights into the understanding of social trust and self-efficacy in CC, leading to practical managerial implications for collaborative consumption platforms and firms

The role of consumer-brand engagement in a digital marketing era

The purpose of this thesis is to understand the role of consumer-brand engagement in a digital marketing era. We explore the consumer-brand engagement construct in relation to consumers as the engagement subjects, and brands (i.e., brand/companies) as the engagement objects. Our intention is to contribute to advancing the theoretical knowledge of this subject and to provide useful insights that can be used by practitioners, particularly companies that use interactive platforms to create consumer-brand relationships.O objetivo desta tese é o de compreender o papel do compromisso entre o consumidor e a marca nesta nova era de marketing digital. Exploramos nesse sentido o constructo do compromisso entre o consumidor e a marca, sendo o consumidor o sujeito do compromisso e a marca (isto é, marcas ou empresas) o objeto desse compromisso. É nosso objetivo contribuir para o avanço teórico do conhecimento sobre esta área do saber, bem como fornecer novos conhecimentos que possam ser úteis e utilizados pelos gestores nas empresas, nomeadamente no que diz respeito a empresas que utilizem plataformas interativas para criar relacionamentos entre os consumidores e as marcas

Conceptualizing the Electronic Word-of-Mouth Process: What We Know and Need to Know About eWOM Creation, Exposure, and Evaluation

Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) is a prevalent consumer practice that has undeniable effects on the company bottom line, yet it remains an over-labeled and under-theorized concept. Thus, marketers could benefit from a practical, science-based roadmap to maximize its business value. Building on the consumer motivation–opportunity–ability framework, this study conceptualizes three distinct stages in the eWOM process: eWOM creation, eWOM exposure, and eWOM evaluation. For each stage, we adopt a dual lens—from the perspective of the consumer (who sends and receives eWOM) and that of the marketer (who amplifies and manages eWOM for business results)—to synthesize key research insights and propose a research agenda based on a multidisciplinary systematic review of 1050 academic publications on eWOM published between 1996 and 2019. We conclude with a discussion of the future of eWOM research and practice

Show me what you share and I’ll tell you who you are

Viral marketing is a technique employing consumers as a market force to spread messages in social networks, almost like a virus. The challenge with viral marketing is knowing how it works. We argue that previous research has focused too much on the content of the messages, rather the ones who actually share them. The purpose of this study is to gain deeper insights into viral marketing from a consumer perspective, focusing on the aspects consumers find significant when sharing material online. By conducting qualitative interviews our findings show that even though the respondents were active on social media, they were quite passive users. Our analysis show that what consumers decided to share were contingent upon the purpose of the share, the messages had higher significance than the content. Our analyses show that sharing viral messages is not seen as an innocent share, but rather elements in the respondents identity construction.Viral marknadsföring är en metod som använder konsumenter som en marknadsföringskraft för att sprida budskap i sociala nätverk, likt ett virus. Utmaningen med viral marknadsföring är att förstå hur metoden fungerar. Vi menar att tidigare forskning mest fokuserat på innehållet av materialet snarare än de som faktiskt delar dem. Syftet med denna studie är att erhålla djupare kunskap och förståelse av viral marknadsföring utifrån ett konsumentperspektiv genom att fokusera på de aspekter som konsumenterna anser vara viktiga när material delas på nätet. Genom att genomföra kvalitativa intervjuer har våra upptäckter visat att även om respondenterna var aktiva i sociala medier, var de relativt passiva i sitt själva användande. Analysen visar att vad konsumenter väljer att dela är kopplat till syftet med själva delningen, budskapet är större än själva materialets betydelse. Vår analys visar även att delningar inte är bara är simpla delningar, det är snarare ett verktyg för respondentens identitetsuppbyggnad