How does brand communication affect consumer behavior: The influence of message strategy on word-of-mout

Abstract Purpose: The recent studies on the leveraging of consumer voices has focused on electronic word-of-mouth, while few have assessed message strategies effect on a consumer's word-ofmouth. This study examines the effect different message strategies yield on stimulating a consumer word-of-mouth. Design/methodology/approach: The study takes a cross-sectional survey research with a causal design. The message strategies used in this study are informative, transformative, and interactive, and are based upon a set framework of brand posts that represent each of the message strategies. The data is gathered through a questionnaire on Facebook. The sample is analyzed through factor analysis, independent t-test, a correlation matrix, and a multiple regression analysis. Findings: The results of this study show that the informative and interactional message strategies have a moderate effect on consumer word-of-mouth tendencies, and that there is significant difference between male and female in regards to informative message strategies. The research model explains 46% of the variance for word-of-mouth. Limitations: A cross-sectional study is employed due to time constraints. Thus, there might be issues regarding common method variance (CMV), and causal inference (CI). This study does not employ a control variable. Originality/value: (Contribution): This study contributes to the literature by testing the trichotomy of message strategies’ effect on word-of-mouth. As there is little research conducted regarding this message strategy, this study extends the body of knowledge on how consumers can be engaged by a brand’s message. Furthermore, this study finds support for the differences amongst male and female regarding the informative message strateg

Advertising and Cost Reduction

The empirical literature on internalization has found a positive relationship between advertising intensity and foreign direct investment. The model presented in this paper explains this evidence by a technological change in the communications environment and makes predictions for other cost-reducing investments. We consider a market in which a single producer launches a new product. At first potential buyers are unaware of the product and its price, and the producer decides the optimal advertising strategy. We find that both advertising spending and investment in per unit cost reduction are higher under targeting than under mass advertising when the advertising technology exhibits marginal economies of targeting.Informative advertising, Targeting, Foreign Direct Investment, Cost reduction

THE MAIN APPLICATIONS OF THE INTERNET IN TOURISM MARKETING

The Internet as a marketing media can be of great benefit to virtual all areas of marketing, from marketing research, through market segmentation, targeting and positioning, to the effective use of the marketing mix, and marketing organisation and control. The following discussion does not attempt to provide an exhaustive list of the Net's use in tourism; rather, it simply intends to exemplify its common applications in and main implications for tourism marketing.Internet, tourism, web, marketing

CONSUMERS’ ENDORSEMENT EFFECTS ON MARKETER AND USER-GENERATED CONTENT IN A SOCIAL MEDIA BRAND COMMUNITY

The effects of marketer-generated content (MGC) and user-generated content (UGC) on inducing consumers’ responses have been widely studied as stand-alone main effects. Extending these research, this paper studies the interaction effects of consumers’ endorsements on MGC and UGC posts in a social media brand community (SMBC) of a popular Asian fashion retailer. We examined if passive and active consumers’ endorsements have enhancement effects on MGC/UGC and if they are also effective in inducing consumers’ expenditure by themselves. Passive endorsement refers to “likes” on social network sites (SNS), while active endorsement refers to the more involved act of “commenting” on a post. We found evidence that active endorsements positively moderate the effects of MGC in inducing consumers’ expenditure. However, passive endorsements negatively moderated MGC, making it less effective in inducing expenditure. Interestingly, the results were reversed for UGC whereby passive endorsements positively moderated UGC, while active endorsements negatively moderated UGC in inducing expenditure. Meanwhile, active endorsements through social-tagging on brand fans were found to be very effective, with recipients of social-tags spending $6 more than non-recipients in a particular week. Additional robustness checks on selection bias were conducted, and results remain qualitatively similar

Back to the Future: Proposing a Heuristic for Predicting the Future of Recorded Music Use

This collection of 13 case studies covers issues such as curation algorithms, blockchain, careers of mainstream and independent musicians, festivals and clubs-to inform greater understanding and better navigation of the popular music ..

Buying Love Through Social Media: How Different Types Of Incentives Impact Consumers’ Online Sharing Behavior

A key issue in social media marketing is insufficient consumer participation and engagement. Oftentimes companies have to devise tactics to encourage more social sharing of brand messages, such as through the use of incentives and rewards. Previous research has investigated incentive effects under the traditional offline context, which addresses mostly economic exchanges and fails to consider the social dynamics of the social media environment. Addressing this gap, this research aims to answer the following research question: how can companies target different consumers with different incentives to maximize consumer sharing through social media? Specifically, the present research proposes three factors that can affect the relative appropriateness of monetary versus non-monetary incentives in driving consumer sharing: consumer loyalty, audience size and brand personality. Three experimental studies were conducted to examine these factors. The findings of study 1 indicate that consumers with high loyalty are more likely to engage in social sharing when faced with non-monetary incentives. In contrast, non-loyal consumers are more likely to engage in social sharing when offered monetary incentives. Study 2 shows that non-monetary incentives are more effective when sharing to a wide audience is requested, but incentive type does not make a difference when sharing is limited to specific individuals. The results of Study 3 show that, for a brand characterized by sincerity, consumers are more likely to engage in social sharing when a non-monetary incentive is used than when a monetary incentive is used. For an “exciting” brand, the incentive type does not matter. By examining these moderators, this dissertation contributes to a better understanding of how to use incentives more appropriately to increase social sharing under different situations. Moreover, the research findings here can help marketers define the appropriate strategies to target different types of social interactions, and allow them to restore some control in the co-creation of brand stories in the social media context

Studying and Modeling the Connection between People's Preferences and Content Sharing

People regularly share items using online social media. However, people's decisions around sharing---who shares what to whom and why---are not well understood. We present a user study involving 87 pairs of Facebook users to understand how people make their sharing decisions. We find that even when sharing to a specific individual, people's own preference for an item (individuation) dominates over the recipient's preferences (altruism). People's open-ended responses about how they share, however, indicate that they do try to personalize shares based on the recipient. To explain these contrasting results, we propose a novel process model of sharing that takes into account people's preferences and the salience of an item. We also present encouraging results for a sharing prediction model that incorporates both the senders' and the recipients' preferences. These results suggest improvements to both algorithms that support sharing in social media and to information diffusion models.Comment: CSCW 201

THE MAIN APPLICATIONS OF THE INTERNET IN TOURISM MARKETING

Abstract The Internet as a marketing media can be of great benefit to virtual all areas of marketing, from marketing research, through market segmentation, targeting and positioning, to the effective use of the marketing mix, and marketing organisation and control. The following discussion does not attempt to provide an exhaustive list of the Net's use in tourism; rather, it simply intends to exemplify its common applications in and main implications for tourism marketing. Keywords: Internet, tourism, web, marketing. The Internet is widely recognised as an extremely valuable marketing tool. It is generally held that the Internet offers substantial advantages over traditional means of communication: reduced costs of information exchange; increased speed of information transfer and retrieval; increased customer involvement in and control of transactions; and greater flexibility of using the marketing mix. Its main business uses include communications (both internal and external), market research, customer services, market penetration, product development, cost savings through process reengineering, direct marketing, advertising and product delivering. The Internet has the unique quality that, through its addressibility, can transform the prominent marketing communication paradigm from one-to-many to one-to-one or from broadcasting to narrowcasting. The traditional media, such as print, radio and television, follow a passive one-to-many communication model, whereby a company reaches many current and potential customers through the broadcasting of the same message. This approach to communication has three problems: uncustomised message to every consumer, wasted exposures to uninterested audiences, and "noise" distraction from competing and conflicting messages. Another feature of the Net that distinguishes itself from traditional communication media is its ability to respond to user inputs, i.e. interactivity

Panel discussion: the role of macroeconomic policy

Macroeconomics

Educational use of video tape and cable to communicate information

As educators, communicating timely, important information to parents and to the community is a challenge. By using video technology, the ability to convey such information is not only possible but rather simple. Taking it one step further, utilizing cable television allows for the transmission of a variety of information to every living room in our community