Deselling: Cross-Selling Without Upsetting Customers

To boost revenue, many firms are encouraging their service salespeople to cross-sell while providing a service; but cross-selling can upset customers. How, then, may firms effectively cross-sell without upsetting customers? The authors address this question by introducing the concept of deselling behaviors, defined as service salespeople’s actions that are incongruent with persuasive intent. They combine insights gleaned from 101 inconspicuous, fly-on-the-wall videos of actual service salesperson-customer exchanges with theoretical underpinnings of the persuasion knowledge model and reactance theory to advance a novel conceptual framework of deselling behaviors. Their framework advances prior literature by illuminating three unique sets of deselling behaviors that reduce customers’ reactance to cross-selling recommendations, and thereby enhance ambidextrous effects (i.e., enhance cross-selling performance and customer satisfaction): 1) nonverbal source signals (e.g., tangibilizing cooperativeness and passive proxemic positioning), 2) verbal source signals (e.g., proactively discounting and attribution externalizing), and 3) verbal message signals (e.g., vividly educating and piecemeal recommending). Further, they delineate how enacting deselling behaviors prior to a cross-selling episode may impact the relationships between deselling behaviors during a cross-selling episode and reactance to cross-selling recommendations

Native advertising acceptance or avoidance : the effects of personalization and trust

The growth of native advertising seems to be increasing as rapidly as the concerns about it. Growing ethical concerns may hinder advertisers from employing native advertising freely regardless of its effectiveness. Likewise, despite the many industry studies and findings on native advertising, to date, limited academic research has explored the interplay between perceived ethical concerns and consumer response to native advertising. The purpose of this study was to investigate antecedents and consequences of native advertising avoidance and examine the effects of (1) perceived deceptiveness, (2) media trust, (3) brand trust, and (4) perceived personalization on perceived privacy concerns, ad skepticism, attitude toward the brand, ad avoidance, and purchase intention. Findings from the first study revealed significant three-way interaction effects among perceived deceptiveness, media trust, and brand trust on ad skepticism and attitude toward the brand. These findings are notable because consumers’ low perceived deceptiveness appears to be able to offset either low brand trust or low media trust. As such, identifying that native advertising is indeed advertising can enhance the effectiveness of the advertising message by lowering skepticism. Experiment 2 demonstrated significant two-way interaction effects between perceived personalization and media trust on privacy concerns, ad avoidance, and purchase intention. Specifically, consumers who had high trust in the social media in which the native ad appeared generated lower levels of perceived privacy concerns and lower levels of ad avoidance when they felt that the native advertising was highly personalized. In contrast, consumers who had low trust in the social media in which the native ad appeared reacted oppositely in that they had higher privacy concerns and higher ad avoidance when they perceived the ad as highly customized to their needs and interests. The findings contribute theoretically to our understanding of Psychological Reactance Theory and ad avoidance by demonstrating the moderating role of perceived personalization in responding to native advertising. Additionally, findings from this study provide managerial implications in that personalized advertising can offset weaknesses stemming from low media trust or low brand trust.Advertisin

O lado comportamental dos agentes de recomendação : uma revisão bibliométrica

Recommendation agents have been used to assist consumers in online purchase for almost 20 years. Their use has been studied in academic research with two different approaches. The first one addresses computational problems related to generating accurate recommendations. The other seeks to understand how user interaction with recommendation agents can alter behaviors in online shopping. Through bibliometric and scientometric methods, this study looked for the most influential papers, authors and journals in the field of behavioral recommendation research. In the present work, only articles investigating behavioral aspects of recommendation usage were considered. The identified articles were analyzed in terms of their methodology, variables and repercussion. At the end, a total of 175 articles published in journals from many different fields of academic research were found, attesting the multidisciplinary nature of this topic. Most of the studies were empirical investigations using experimental methodology, however theoretical papers showed to be more influential. It was possible to identify 29 different dependent variables used to measure the effects of recommendations in online assisted purchase. The 19 independent variables used in these studies were related to characteristics of the recommendation agent, user characteristics or vendor characteristics. Results also showed that the field still lacks confirmatory studies capable of creating a greater assurance for the knowledge already developed in the field.um período de cerca de 20 anos. Sua utilização atualmente é estudada na pesquisa acadêmica a partir de duas diferentes abordagens. A primeira se destina à resolução de problemas computacionais relacionados à geração de recomendações acuradas. A segunda tem como intuito entender como a interação do usuário com agentes de recomendação pode alterar seu comportamento de compra online. Usando um método bibliométrico e cientométrico, este estudo buscou os artigos, autores e publicações mais influentes no campo de pesquisa comportamental. Isto significa que apenas artigos que investigaram aspectos comportamentais do uso de recomendações foram considerados. Os artigos identificados foram também analisados em termos de sua metodologia, variáveis e repercussão. A maioria dos estudos se tratavam de investigações empíricas usando metodologia experimental, entretanto os artigos teóricos se demonstraram mais influentes. Também foi possível identificar 29 variáveis dependentes usadas para medir os efeitos das recomendações em compras online assistidas. As 19 variáveis independentes usadas nesses estudos estavam relacionadas com características do agente de recomendação, características do usuário ou características do vendedor. Os resultados também demonstraram que o campo ainda carece de estudos confirmatórios capazes de criar mais certeza para o conhecimento já desenvolvido na área

Control-Related Motivations and Information Security Policy Compliance: The Role of Autonomy and Efficacy

Employees' failures to follow information security policy can be costly to organizations, causing organizations to implement security controls to motivate secure behavior. Information security research has explored many control-related motivations (e.g., self-efficacy, response efficacy, and behavioral control) in the context of ISP compliance; however, the behavioral effects of perceptions of autonomous functioning are not well understood in security contexts. This paper examines employee autonomy as a control-related motivation from the lens of self-determination theory and psychological reactance theory. Self-determination theory is widely used in other disciplines to explain intrinsically driven behavior, but has not been applied to security research. Psychological reactance theory is also widely used, but is only beginning to receive attention in security research. Self-determination and psychological reactance offer complementary yet opposite conceptualizations of trait-based autonomy. This paper posits that perceptions of trait-based autonomy influence self-efficacy and response efficacy. Through a survey of government employees, we provide support for several hypotheses. We also discuss important directions for the use of self-determination theory and psychological reactance theory in future research

The mediating role of perceived fairness in consumers’ response to post-purchase ‘out of stock’ in an online grocery context

This study investigates consumer response to a retailer’s substitution policy when facing post-purchase ‘out of stock’ (OOS) in an online grocery shopping context. Substitution policies (timeliness of OOS notification; and substituted product) can have detrimental effects on consumers’ satisfaction with the retailer and behaviour response (whether to accept or reject the substitution). As post-purchased OOS indicates a failure of service, the study focuses its investigation on the mediating effects of perceived fairness (PF) of retailers’ substitution policies on consumers’ response. It is predicted that procedural fairness will have a stronger effect on mitigating consumers’ negative OOS experience than distributive (outcome) fairness. The research will be conducted using three online scenario based experiments