Friends with Benefits: Social Coupons as a Strategy to Enhance Customers’ Social Empowerment

Businesses often seek to leverage customers’ social networks to acquire new customers and stimulate word-of-mouth recommendations. While customers make brand recommendations for various reasons (e.g., incentives, reputation enhancement), they are also motivated by a desire for social empowerment—to feel an impact on others. In several multi-method studies, we show that facilitating sharing of social coupons (i.e., coupon sets that include one for self-use and one to be shared) is a unique marketing strategy that facilitates social empowerment. Firms benefit from social coupons because customers who share spend more and report greater purchase intentions than those who do not. Furthermore, we demonstrate that social coupons are most effective when the sharer’s brand relationship is new versus established. For customers with an established relationship, sharing with a receiver who also has an established relationship maximizes potential impact. Together, these studies connect social empowerment to relationship marketing and provide guidance to managers targeting social coupons

Assessing the influence of motivations and attitude on mobile social networking use

Social media have become one of the strongest growing Web 2.0 services worldwide as they are a powerful tool for consumers to recommend products and services. The influence of social networking sites in purchase behaviour and their growing use by consumers justify the need to further study key drivers of users’ behaviour. Although there is now a significant body of literature on the use of social networks from a computer, there is scant literature on their use from mobile devices. As media convergence is a reality nowadays, there is a need to know if consumers behave in the same way when a service is accessed from different platforms. The present work aims to analyse the relationships between motivations, attitude and frequency of mobile social networking.No data (2013)UE

From retail innovation and image to loyalty: moderating effects of product type

This study aims to analyse value-satisfaction-loyalty relationships in retailing by examining the contribution of image and innovation and understanding value as a multidimensional construct. Furthermore, to identify possible differences in these relationships the moderating effect of the type of product marketed in the store is examined. On a sample of 820 customers from four types of stores, SEM methodology and multigroup analysis were applied. The results confirm that image has more influence than innovation on the dimensions of value and that entertainment and excellence are the main antecedents of satisfaction. Some relationships have also been found in which the type of product marketed in the store has a moderating effect