What’s “Funny” about Technology Adoption? Humorous Appropriation of Online Review Platforms

The open nature of online review platforms allows for use of the technology in unexpected ways, attracting some visitors with an objective other than aiding other consumers’ purchase decision. These consumers are exhibiting a particular form of adoption called technology appropriation by writing humorous reviews that often make fun of the products or telling absurd stories. This study conceptualizes humorous appropriation of an online review platform through a content analysis of 33,987 reviews for 14 products on Amazon.com. We find reviews written for products where the review platform has been appropriated for humor differ from “regular” reviews across three dimensions: narrativity, emotionality, and impropriety. These humorous reviews tend to be more narrative, more negative, and contain more words about inappropriate or sensitive subjects. Our model of humorous appropriation extends the technology appropriation literature and has implications for how online retailers and sellers manage this emerging form of digital performance

Understanding the Review Bombing Phenomenon in Movies and Television

Review bombing, where users post many negative reviews to lower a product’s rating, is a phenomenon that has become an increasingly prevalent problem in the entertainment industry and garnered significant attention in the popular press. These reviews are characterized by inflammatory language over a social, cultural, or political issue related to the product, and are less about the quality of the product itself. Using a dataset of 3232 reviews from Metacritic.com, we find evidence that review-bombed products have a high expert/user score gap, high review polarity, high negative imbalance, and evidence of collective action, compared with a paired set of non-bombed products. Specifically, we find evidence of collective trolling, as bombed product reviews are 20% shorter, but have 83% more negative emotion, 25% more anger, and 130% more controversial words. We provide several avenues for future research on review bombing

Predicting consumer product demands via Big Data: the roles of online promotional marketing and online reviews

This study aims to investigate the contributions of online promotional marketing and online reviews as predictors of consumer product demands. Using electronic data from Amazon.com, we attempt to predict if online review variables such as valence and volume of reviews, the number of positive and negative reviews, and online promotional marketing variables such as discounts and free deliveries, can influence the demand of electronic products in Amazon.com. A Big Data architecture was developed and Node.JS agents were deployed for scraping the Amazon.com pages using asynchronous Input/Output calls. The completed Web crawling and scraping data-sets were then preprocessed for Neural Network analysis. Our results showed that variables from both online reviews and promotional marketing strategies are important predictors of product demands. Variables in online reviews in general were better predictors as compared to online marketing promotional variables. This study provides important implications for practitioners as they can better understand how online reviews and online promotional marketing can influence product demands. Our empirical contributions include the design of a Big Data architecture that incorporate Neural Network analysis which can used as a platform for future researchers to investigate how Big Data can be used to understand and predict online consumer product demands

The importance of branding in industrial markets

Demonstrations of the power of branding in consumer markets reverberate around the globe. In contrast, the role of branding in industrial markets is unclear and under-researched. Three basic questions stimulate the thesis: (1) What is industrial branding?; (2) Is industrial branding important, and if so, to whom?; and (3) What are the implications of industrial branding for managers? Industrial branding is the process of increasing the meaningful differentiation of an industrial product by developing added values or benefits of the brand and communicating them to the customer. The thesis introduces a continuum of industrial brands from commodities to independent brands. Functional benefits form the foundation of value, yet industrial branding emphasises that intangible and emotional values can also affect the choices customers make. Successful branding engineers a close fit between the benefits desired by customers and the tangible and intangible features of the brand. The pinwheel of brand value to the industrial customer captures the dynamics of the situation. Most previous research examines branding from the seller's perspective. Instead, the thesis utiises in-depth interviews to gain insights into the perceived benefits of branding to the buyer. Then, two extensive surveys of UK industrial buyers contribute to knowledge by successfully measuring the importance of branding in specific product markets (bearings and circuit-breakers). Analysis of the survey data reveals that branding is important, but not to all buyers or in all situations. The data are used to test hypotheses emanating from a preliminary new model of industrial branding in the purchase decision process. Cluster analysis is used for benefit segmentation, the grouping of customers by the perceived importance of choice criteria or attributes. The relative importance of branding is a significant factor in the creation of three buyer clusters. Firms in the branding receptive cluster highly value branding attributes such as how well known the company is, the company's general reputation, and the number of prior purchases from the company. Firms in the high tangibility cluster value tangible attributes such as physical product properties and price most highly, and branding least highly. Firms in the low relevancy cluster show low interest in the purchase and rate all the attributes relatively low in importance. Previous research has shown the difficulty of linking benefit segments to more accessible characteristics. However, in the thesis, attribute importance of firms in the three segments is related to a number of buyer, purchase, and decision process characteristics. Branding importance is related to aspects such as buyer expertise, perceived risk, and the level of involvement in the decision process. Finally, the thesis offers suggestions for adjusting the marketing mix for buyers in each of the clusters. These recommendations recognise that segmentation analysis is only as good as how well it can be utilised by the sales force. Overall, the thesis provides evidence of the power of industrial branding, and helps explain its importance. For a significant portion of buyers, the purchase decision comes down to the relatively intangible attributes of the company brand. Despite this, the potential of industrial branding remains relatively untapped

Multinationality and the performance of IPOs

Does multinationality affect the Initial Public Offering (IPO) performance of entrepreneurial firms? Theoretical arguments can be made for a positive effect of multinationality as well as for a negative effect. We examine this question empirically by analysing IPO data for 240 UK firms. We find that multinationality has significant and positive effects on long-run IPO performance. This suggests that the market perceives entrepreneurial firms with multinational activities as possessing unique intangible assets that are indicative of future financial success. Factors affecting the IPO performance also differ systematically between firms with multinational operations and those without multinational operations. Stocks of intangible assets and the quality of the network significantly affect the performance of entrepreneurial IPO firms that ‘go global’. In contrast, domestic IPO firm performance is affected by offer size and underwriters’ perception of firm quality. The findings have important implications for entrepreneurial firms who are making decisions on ‘going global’ and ‘going public’