What Happens in Vegas Stays on TripAdvisor? A Theory and Technique to Understand Narrativity in Consumer Reviews

Many consumers base their purchase decisions on online consumer reviews. An overlooked feature of these texts is their narrativity: the extent to which they tell a story. The authors construct a new theory of narrativity to link the narrative content and discourse of consumer reviews to consumer behavior. They also develop from scratch a computerized technique that reliably determines the degree of narrativity of 190,461 verbatim, online consumer reviews and validate the automated text analysis with two controlled experiments. More transporting (i.e., engaging) and persuasive reviews have better developed characters and events as well as more emotionally changing genres and dramatic event orders. This interdisciplinary, multimethod research should help future researchers (1) predict how narrativity affects consumers’ narrative transportation and persuasion, (2) measure the narrativity of large digital corpora of textual data, and (3) understand how this important linguistic feature varies along a continuum

Creación de un Cuerpo de Alienistas (1926).

La reorganización de los servicios de asistencia de los alienados exige que se cree en España el Cuerpo de Alienistas. El establecimiento de dicho Cuerpo facilitaría en todo caso la importante labor que en el transcurso de algunos años debe modificar radicalmente el actual estado de cosas; reuniría las iniciativas de los competentes, concretándolas en proyectos beneficiosos; serviría para organizar,  reglamentándolos, los servicios de inspección, tan necesarios; permitiría disponer, en condiciones que podrían señalarse como deberes inherentes a las categorías o puestos respectivos, la enseñanza de la Medicina mental; garantizaría en todo  momento la pericia del personal técnico, o, lo que es lo mismo, la eficiencia y el rendimiento de su trabajo; nos colocaría, en fin, en circunstancias análogas a las de los países que en el mundo civilizado se distinguen por el esmero con que atienden a todos los aspectos de la Sanidad y de la Beneficencia públicas

Creación de un Cuerpo de Alienistas (1926).

La reorganización de los servicios de asistencia de los alienados exige que se cree en España el Cuerpo de Alienistas. El establecimiento de dicho Cuerpo facilitaría en todo caso la importante labor que en el transcurso de algunos años debe modificar radicalmente el actual estado de cosas; reuniría las iniciativas de los competentes, concretándolas en proyectos beneficiosos; serviría para organizar,  reglamentándolos, los servicios de inspección, tan necesarios; permitiría disponer, en condiciones que podrían señalarse como deberes inherentes a las categorías o puestos respectivos, la enseñanza de la Medicina mental; garantizaría en todo  momento la pericia del personal técnico, o, lo que es lo mismo, la eficiencia y el rendimiento de su trabajo; nos colocaría, en fin, en circunstancias análogas a las de los países que en el mundo civilizado se distinguen por el esmero con que atienden a todos los aspectos de la Sanidad y de la Beneficencia públicas

A Discourse Analysis of Pilgrimage Reviews

This paper is the first to provide an account of the discursive features of online consumer reviews of pilgrimage sites. Drawing from pilgrimage studies and narrativity theory in consumer research, we explore how consumers communicate the spiritual and material aspects of pilgrimage experiences by examining a corpus of 833 consumer reviews on TripAdvisor of the most sacred pilgrimage sites of the world’s major five faith groups. Pilgrims include analytical discursive features to communicate the material aspect of their consumption experience. They reserve narration for spiritual transformation and the experience of strong emotions. Moreover, review ratings are only reflective of the spiritual aspect of their consumption experience. As such, our research complements previous studies by highlighting the material, physical aspect of this extraordinary consumption experience

Exploring Appropriation of Global Cultural Rituals

Adolescents, as a consequence of identification with popular culture, have been described as having homogenous consumption patterns. More recently, however, it has been recognised that ‘glocalisation’ (global practices reworked to fit local contexts) affords an opportunity for differentiation. This paper considers a recent UK phenomenon, namely that of the US high school prom, and seeks to explore the ways in which this ritual has been adopted or adapted as part of youth culture. The method employed here was mixed methods and included in-depth interviews with those who attended a prom in the last three years as well as a questionnaire distributed amongst high school pupils who were anticipating a high school prom. The findings illustrate that the high school prom in the UK is becoming increasingly integrated into the fabric of youth culture although, depending on the agentic abilities employed by the emerging adults in the sample, there is differing appropriation of this ritual event particularly in relation to attitudes towards and motivations for attending the prom. A typology of prom attendees is posited. This paper contributes to our understanding of this practice in a local context

Multi-tier Loyalty Programs to Stimulate Customer Engagement

Customers differ in their purchase behavior, profitability, attitude toward the firm, and so on. These differences between customers have led to numerous firms introducing multi-tier loyalty programs. A multi-tier loyalty program explicitly distinguishes between customers by means of hierarchical tiers (e.g. Silver, Gold, Platinum) and assigns customers to different tiers based on their past purchase behavior. Next, customers in different tiers are provided varying levels of tangible rewards and intangible benefits, which are potentially powerful instruments to stimulate customer engagement. In this chapter, we focus on the design and effectiveness of such multi-tier loyalty programs. Building on loyalty program and customer prioritization research, we discuss whether, why, and how multi-tier loyalty programs are effective (or not) in influencing customer behavior, thereby enhancing customer engagement and financial performance