Online Reviews Generated Through Product Testing: Can More Favorable Reviews Be Enticed with Free Products?

Online reviews have profound impacts on firm success in terms of sales volume and how much customers are willing to pay, yet firms remain highly dependent on customers' voluntary contributions. A popular way to increase the number of online reviews is to use product testing programs, which offer participants free products in exchange for writing reviews. Firms that employ this practice generally hope to increase review quality and secure higher product rating scores. However, a qualitative study, experimental study, and multilevel analysis of a field study dataset of more than 200,000 online reviews by product testers combine to reveal that product testing programs do not necessarily generate higher quality reviews, nor better product ratings. Only in certain circumstances (e.g., higher priced products) does offering a product testing program generate these benefits for the firm. Therefore, companies should consider carefully if and when they want to offer product testing programs

How Profound Is the Allure of Endowed Status in Hierarchical Loyalty Programs?

Hierarchical loyalty programs are common relationship marketing instruments that award elevated status to customers exceeding a certain spending level (e.g., gold membership, platinum customer). In business practice, some companies also offer elevated status to selected customers even if they do not meet the required spending level, in an attempt to profit from the profound allure of status. Relying on social psychology research, this study analyzes the loyalty impact of such a status endowment. A first experimental study reveals the bright and dark sides of endowed status, with customer gratitude and customer skepticism acting as mediating mechanisms. A second experiment delineates that in order to alleviate the dark side, managers should let target customers make an active choice to be endowed with status and select target customers who are close to achieving that status on their own

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

The Online Bingo Boom in the UK: A Qualitative Examination of Its Appeal

Online bingo has seen significant growth in recent years. This study sought to increase understanding of this growth by exploring the appeal of online bingo. Our aim was to examine the content of ten online bingo websites in the UK and analyse a qualitative secondary dataset of 12 female bingo players to investigate the appeal of online bingo. Using two distinct data sources allowed us to assess how the key messages online websites are trying to convey compare with actual players' motivation to play bingo. Our analysis of bingo websites found a common theme where websites were easy to navigate and structured to present a light-hearted, fun, reassuring, social image of gambling. In addition, the design decisions reflected in the bingo sites had the effect of positioning online bingo as a benign, child-like, homely, women-friendly, social activity. Comparison of the website content with our participants' reasons to play bingo showed congruence between the strategies used by the bingo websites and the motivations of bingo players themselves and the benefits which they seek; suggesting that bingo websites strive to replicate and update the sociability of traditional bingo halls. Online bingo differs from traditional forms of bingo in its ability to be played anywhere and at any time, and its capacity to offer a deeply immersive experience. The potential for this type of online immersion in gambling to lead to harm is only just being investigated and further research is required to understand how the industry is regulated, as well as the effects of online bingo on individual gambling ‘careers'

Time Extension of Sales Promotions: How Do Customers React?

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Walk Your Talk: An Experimental Investigation of the Relationship between Word of Mouth and Communicators’ Loyalty

Contains fulltext : 95494.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)Research provides ample evidence regarding the impact of word-of-mouth (WOM) communication on recipients. Service providers increasingly attempt to harness this power of WOM by introducing referral reward programs and other marketing instruments that aim to stimulate positive WOM. However, scholars have neglected to research the possibility that providing WOM also has consequences for the sender. Building on self-perception theory, this article argues that recommending a service provider improves the current customers’ loyalty to the provider and that positive WOM is not only effective for gaining but also for keeping customers. By conducting experiments in two different service settings, it is demonstrated that providing a recommendation influences the senders’ attitudinal and behavioral loyalty. The effect is found to be stronger for customers with low expertise in the service category and little experience with the provider. This means that encouraging customers in the early stages of their customer life cycle to give recommendations is specifically effective in increasing loyalty to the provider. Managers should consider using positive WOM as a loyalty-enhancing instrument and take the additional value from increased loyalty of their customer base into account for return-on-marketing calculations regarding WOM marketing campaigns, as well as customer equity calculations.15 p

May we buy your love? psychological effects of incentives on writing likelihood and valence of online product reviews

Acknowledging the impact on their sales, companies strive to increase the number of positive online reviews of their products. A recently popular practice for stimulating online reviews is offering monetary rewards to customers in return for writing an online review. However, it is unclear whether such practices succeed in fulfilling two main objectives, namely, increasing the number and the valence of online reviews. With one pilot and two experimental studies, this research shows that offering incentives indeed increases the likelihood of review writing. However, the effect on review valence is mixed, due to contradictory psychological effects: Incentive recipients intend to reciprocate by writing favorable reviews but also perceive a need to resist marketers’ influence, which negatively affects their review valence. Finally, recipients who are less satisfied with the product are particularly prone to psychological costs and decrease the positivity of their online reviews. Consequently, incentives should be applied carefully