Consumer Motivations for Online Shopping

Consumers shop online for goal-oriented, instrumental reasons, and for experiential reasons. However, goaloriented motives are more common among online shoppers than are experiential motives. Based on our exploratory research of online shopping using 5 offline and 4 online focus groups conducted in conjunction with Harris Interactive, we identify and discuss attributes that facilitate goal-oriented online shopping, including accessibility/convenience, selection, information availability and lack of unwanted sociality from retail sales help or shopping partners such as spouses. The goal-oriented characteristics of online shopping collectively result in an experience that is involving for buyers, but which results in low commitment to purchasing. Buyers shop when and where they want, and are comfortable abandoning a site and products placed in a shopping cart either on a whim or to further consider their purchase; consumers often use the words freedom and control in explaining the value of online shopping. While consumers are more likely to describe offline rather than online shopping in experiential terms, we find evidence of experiential motivations for online shopping emerging. We offer managerial implications for cultivating goal-oriented and experiential online buyers

A Conceptual Taxonomy of Technology Adoption and Diffusion in the Classroom

We suggest that faculty adoption patterns move through three identifiable stages (cf. Rayport and Sviokla 1995). In Stage 1, technology serves a support function which improves efficiency, but does not significantly impact teaching. During Stage 2, teaching technology enables faculty to efficiently mirror classroom activities utilizing new technologies. Stage 3 utilization of technology not only supports and mirrors current activities; the goal is to substantively improve teaching and to strengthen the interaction between students and professors; unique applications result in improved application of new technologies. Our conceptualization should help departments and individuals better understand how they are currently using technology, to identify barriers which hinder stage 3 adoption behavior, and to develop goals and create applications which will push faculty beyond using new technologies merely to support or mirror previous functions

The Evolving IT - Marketing Strategy Relationship: Will Business Schools Meet the Need?

As eCommerce grows in importance, the use of information technologies, such as web sites and corporate extranets is increasingly customer facing. As a result, an increased integration between IT and business-marketing strategic functions is necessary in businesses. An important consequence of this integration is that students, employees, and managers must be trained to operate in this cross-disciplinary business world. We review the historical role of technology in businesses, arguing that the role of technology in organizations has evolved from a paradigm in which technology served primarily as a support function to being a critical business function that cannot be properly executed without an understanding of consumer behavior and marketing strategy. We suggest that business schools need to redefine disciplinary boundaries, allow cross-disciplinary student majors, and rethink their missions. New research streams and courses must be developed, and time-to-publication windows need to be shorter for research findings to be relevant to the New Economy

Employees as internal audience: how advertising affects employees’ customer focus

Ad campaigns target consumers with information about the company, its products, and sometimes its employees. Ads also reach the organization’s employees and may contain information useful to employees in meeting customer needs. Results from a study involving a high-tech firm indicate that when employees believe ads are effective and value congruent, their customer focus increases. Pride completely mediates the effects of value congruence and effectiveness on customer focus. Organizational identification of employees generally results in a more favorable reaction to ads. A second study involving a regional health facility replicates and extends these findings to include employee portrayal accuracy when employees are featured in ads. Employee portrayal accuracy affects promise accuracy, effectiveness and value-congruence. In addition, employee portrayal accuracy has a direct effect on customer focus

comQ: Dimensionalizing, Measuring and Predicting Quality of The E-tail Experience

www.crito.uci.ed

Consumer Identity Renaissance: The Resurgence of Identity‐Inspired Consumption in Retirement

Using multimethod data, we investigate retirement as a life stage centered on consumption, where cultural scripts are particularly contested and in flux and where we witness an increase in breadth and depth of identity‐related consumption, which we term consumer identity renaissance. While prior research on older consumers focuses on corporeal and cognitive decline and its impact on individual decision‐making situations, our attention is drawn to the competency and growth potential of those who have exited their formal productive stage and privilege consumption as a means to create and enact identity. Contrary to the received view of older consumers simply reviewing and integrating their already developed identities, we find retirement can be a time of extensive identity work with multiple revived and emergent inspirations weaving across all time orientations (past, present, and future) and involving intricate consumption enactments.

Essentials of marketing research

xviii, 414 p. ; 26 cm