Seeing eye to eye: social augmented reality and shared decision making in the marketplace

Firms increasingly seek to improve the online shopping experience by enabling customers to exchange product recommendations through social augmented reality (AR). We utilize socially situated cognition theory and conduct a series of five studies to explore how social AR supports shared decision making in recommender–decision maker dyads. We demonstrate that optimal configurations of social AR, that is, a static (vs. dynamic) point-of-view sharing format matched with an image-enhanced (vs. text-only) communicative act, increase recommenders’ comfort with providing advice and decision makers’ likelihood of using the advice in their choice. For both, these effects are due to a sense of social empowerment, which also stimulates recommenders’ desire for a product and positive behavioral intentions. However, recommenders’ communication motives impose boundary conditions. When recommenders have strong impression management concerns, this weakens the effect of social empowerment on recommendation comfort. Furthermore, the stronger a recommender’s persuasion goal, the less likely the decision maker is to use the recommendation in their choice

Private labels and national brands: a comparison within brand extension

This paper focuses on private labels and manufacturers’ brands; its specific goal is to answer the question whether they are the same in terms of their brand extension effectiveness. The paper reports the results of three experimental studies which analyze the impact of category fit and brand knowledge on brand extension of private label vs. national brands. The results seem to support the view that private labels differ from national brands; contrary to what stated by the branding literature both category fit and brand knowledge, have no significant effect on their extension evaluations

The influence of price comparison websites on online switching behavior: A consumer empowerment perspective

While online price comparison websites have burgeoned, there is scant understanding of how they influence online consumer behavior. This study addresses this gap in the literature by investigating the influence of price comparison websites on online switching behavior, and also suggests some additional factors that may be considered when looking at this relationship. We argue that shopper innovativeness, their perceived usefulness of the ad, and their customer service experience consciousness are important factors to consider when evaluating the impact of price comparison websites on eSwitching behavior. We also argue that the most appropriate theoretical lens through which to investigate this relationship is that of the consumer empowerment paradigm. A conceptual model is proposed and tested. Our analysis of 345 sample respondents finds that perceived usefulness of ads and customer service experience expectations are important enablers to price comparison websites use. Similarly, we find that shopper innovativeness and customer service expectations, in addition to price comparison websites use, are significant enablers to eSwitching behaviour. However, contrary to prediction, we find that shopper innovativeness has little to no influence on shoppers’ use of price comparison websites; we also observed similar patterns concerning the link between the perceived usefulness of online ads and eSwitching behaviour. In conclusion, our research contributes to better understanding the influence of price comparison websites on online switching behavior, and the factors that might influence this relationship. © 2020, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing