Women in Business Branding: Consumer Behavior Based on Hedonic vs. Utilitarian Positioning

Starting in 2009, big name companies like Walmart, Ex-IM Bank, and Toyota have begun initiatives to promote women-owned business enterprises. Women-owned businesses have seen unprecedented growth and market presence in the past decade. In response, Walmart has pledged to source $20 billion in goods from women-owned businesses by 2016. Walmart began using the Women-Owned business logo (WOB) that was developed by a partnership between the Women\u27s Business Enterprise National Council and Women Enterprise Connect International. As with country of origin labeling (Made in USA, etc.), this new logo was designed to be a differentiator for qualified products from their competition. However, since the initial Walmart WOB study in 2009, few recent studies conclude the effectiveness of a WOB logo for consumer products or services. The focus of this study is to provide consumer buying behavior information to women business leaders and potential distributors of WOB labeled products or services. Also, to explore what types of product and services would benefit most from a WOB label. The study will be conducted by surveying 300 diverse participants through Amazon\u27s Mechanical Turk compensation system. Participants will complete randomly selected question banks pertaining to either products or services described as either a hedonic or a utilitarian offering. Each of the prompts will also indicate if the product or service is women-owned, men-owned, or non-specified. The hypothesis for this study is that there will be differences in consumer buying behavior dependent on the nature of the product, the gender of the participant, and also the ethnicity of the participant. By analyzing the results of the study, women owned businesses will be able to target the right consumers and market their product or service to optimally affect buying behavior

Improving consumer decisions : the conscious use of primes as performance enhancers

Through this article we examine ways through which consumers can take advantage of marketers’ priming attempts and make better decisions. Specifically, we investigate what happens when individuals are made aware of primes that may potentially improve their performance. Using an Embedded Figures Test, we demonstrate that individuals can be consciously primed into an analytic thinking mindset and perform better when they believe that the prime will enhance performance. Individuals are able to successfully ignore the prime when they believe that the prime hinders performance. Utilizing both holistic and analytic primes and by alternating the valence of the prime’s potential outcome, we are able to disentangle the conscious effects of primes from demand effects. We discuss how these findings may lead to and suggest avenues for future research

Parents’ and children’s violent gameplay: role of co-playing

Purpose – The purpose of this study was to explore the role of co-playing as a moderator of the relation between parents’ and children’s play of violent video games. Design/methodology/approach – The study uses dyadic parent/child survey data to estimate the conditional effects in the model, both direct and indirect. Findings – The positive effect of parent’s violent video game play of children’s playing behaviors is attenuated by parent/child co-playing. Parent’s knowledge of the Entertainment Software Rating Board ratings leads to higher levels of co-playing, thereby indirectly attenuating violent video game play in children as driven by parent’s play. Research limitations/implications – The paper extends the literature on consumer socialization and the impact of co-playing, and identifies an antecedent for co-playing in this context. Practical implications – The paper reveals that knowledge of the self-regulatory ESRB rules plays a valuable (indirect) role in mitigating violent video game play by children through an increase in co-playing, which attenuates the positive effect of parent’ play on children’s play. Originality/value – The study incorporates data from both parents and children to investigate the relationship between parents’ and children’s violent video game play, while empirically investigating the uncertainty in the literature concerning the moderating impact of co-playing.This submitted article is published as Doug Walker, E. Deanne Brocato, Les Carlson, Russell N. Laczniak, (2018) "Parents’ and children’s violent gameplay: role of co-playing", Journal of Consumer Marketing, doi:10.1108/JCM-10-2017-2397.Posted with permission.</p

Healthcare management tools: promotion or prevention regulatory focus? A scale (PR-PV) development and validation

Health self-management tools, believed to provide effective and cost-ef?cient healthcare, are often rejected by consumers. Regulatory focus theory (Higgins 2014) could facilitate adoption patterns of such tools by positioning adoption as matching/mismatching individual motivational concern: promotion/prevention focus. This research proposes that people perceive products as inherently promotion or prevention oriented, and matching person orientation to product orientation enhances tool uptake. The paper outlines the development of a scale measuring promotion/prevention characteristics of objects, providing evidence for dimensionality, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. The resulting PM-PV scale allows promotion/prevention categorization for personal healthcare tools with potential for wider generalization