Effects of Advertising Campaign on the Salesperson’s Performance: Should a Multilevel Marketing Firm Advertise Its Brand to Customers?

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to explore how advertising for multilevel marketing brands affect the salesperson’s activity including customer-salesperson interactivity, work attitude, and perceived and actual performance after the campaign. Research Design, data, and methodology - This study collects experimental data, survey data, and actual sales data and applies statistical analyses such as factor analysis, t-tests, and a structural equation model. Results - The results show that advertising campaign can enhance a salesperson’s selling activities and provide wide managerial implications to a multilevel marketing firm by filling the gaps for the field of advertising research. Conclusions - Managerial implications include: i) multilevel marketing firms should consider advertising campaigns as a means of changing customer responses because advertising plays a significant role in increasing familiarity with, and knowledge of, attitudes toward the brand, which also helps salespeople interact with customers; ii) multilevel marketing firms should consider brand advertising as a means to support the sales activities of salespeople including sales effectiveness, work attitudes, and perceived performance, and iii) multilevel marketing firms should consider brand advertising as a means to enhance a salesperson’s pride and motivation for selling their brand, which will lead to improved sales performances.2

The effect of variation among brands on product category similarity judgment.

The effects of product category similarity on marketing variables (e.g., success of brand extension or choice strategies) has recently emerged as an important topic in the marketing literature. However, this research stream has rarely specified how consumers perceive similarity between product categories. This paper investigates the factors that influence consumers' similarity judgments. A Two-Process model, which integrates recent views on product category similarity in marketing and theories and findings on similarity in psychology, is developed. The Two-Process Model for product category judgments basically proposes that consumers first look for a comparable attribute and subsequently use that attribute for their similarity judgments. Based on this Two-Process Model, it is hypothesized that distance between product categories and variation among brands influence product category similarity judgments. Interactions between distance and variation are also hypothesized. Study results show that variation among brands as well as distance strongly influence the similarity judgments. Moreover, the effects of variation among brands depends on the distance. In addition, the effects of variation were significant only when considerable change of overlap in perceptual distribution (which was controlled by interpoint distance) could be noticed by subjects. Comparisons of the results of the two studies (Study 1 and Study 2) lead us to conclude that subjects look for a comparable attribute and use it for their similarity judgments. Supplemental measures such as similarity judgments between brands offer further support for the Two-Process Model

The effect of mobile application-driven customer participation on bakery purchase behavior: evidence from a field experiment

This paper empirically examines individual and joint effects of two types of customer participation (CP)—mandatory and replaceable—within a mobile app on bakery purchase behavior. This research conducts a field experiment to track customer decisions on whether to participate in in-app CP events—store loyalty program enrollment and store satisfaction survey—and whether to change their purchasing amount and frequency. After controlling other influencing factors, the authors performed ANOVA with the sample of 19,065 bakery customers’ behavioral decisions. The results confirm that mandatory CP has a positive effect on purchase behavior, while replaceable CP has mixed effects across stores. In addition, the results confirm that customers who engaged in both types of CP increased their purchase amount and frequency, compared to customers who engaged in one type or neither. The study suggests hospitality firms should motivate customers to engage in mandatory and replaceable CP to enhance customer loyalty cost-effectively

Measuring hard sell vs. soft sell advertising appeals

The terms "soft sell" and "hard sell" are well known to advertising scholars and practitioners. Despite widespread use of these terms, generally accepted definitions do not exist. Attempts to measure soft-sell and hard-sell appeals have typically been unsophisticated, relying on a single item that classifies an ad into one category or the other. This study is designed to provide a deeper understanding of the concepts "soft sell" and "hard sell," and to examine whether they are better measured on a single dimension than on two distinct dimensions. The main objective of the study is to develop and validate a method for measuring soft-sell and hard-sell appeals. To this end, candidate items were generated via a review of prior literature, supplemented by content analysis, a free-association task, expert judgment, and focus groups. The measurement instruments were then purified and validated using a pretest with a sample of student participants, and further validated using a general consumer sample. Results indicate that soft-sell appeals can be measured using a 12-item, 3-factor index, whereas hard-sell appeals can be measured using a 15-item, 3-factor index.This research was funded by a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (National Plan for Research, Development and Innovation EC02008-01557) and the Yoshida Hideo Memorial Foundation (Tokyo, Japan)