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

Measuring working memory capacity in children using adaptive tasks: Example validation of an adaptive complex span

International audienceWorking memory tasks designed for children usually present trials in order of ascending difficulty, with testing discontinued when the child fails a particular level. Unfortunately, this procedure comes with a number of issues, such as limited psychometric qualities for working memory scores, decreased engagement from high-ability children, and large between-subjects variations in number of trials and testing time. To circumvent these problems, the goal of the present study was to demonstrate the feasibility of assessing working memory in children using an adaptive testing procedure. The principle of adaptive testing is to dynamically adjust the level of difficulty as the task progresses to match the participant's ability. We used this method to develop an adaptive complex span task (the ACCES) comprising verbal and visuo-spatial subtests. The task presents a fixed number of trials to all participants, allows for partial credit scoring and can be used with children regardless of ability level. The ACCES demonstrated satisfying psychometric properties in a sample of 268 children aged 8 to 13 years, confirming the feasibility of using adaptive tasks to measure working memory capacity in children. A free-to-use implementation of the ACCES is provided