How Brand Empowerment Strategies Affect Consumer Behavior: From A Psychological Ownership Perspective

Companies are increasingly incorporating empowerment into their brand websites (e.g., IKEA’s “Ideas” website), as a strategy to create a competitive advantage. Despite its growing popularity, research on empowerment strategy is at a nascent stage; many issues remain unaddressed. The current research develops a framework to explain how empowerment strategies produce favorable outcomes (i.e., customer evaluation of the end product). Specifically, this dissertation examines (a) how different empowerment strategies (i.e., empowerment-to-create, empowerment-to-select, non-empowerment) have varying effects on consumer responses; (b) how a contextual factor (brand type) moderates the effects of empowerment strategies on consumer responses; (c) how an individual factor (self-brand connection) as a moderator affects interactions between empowerment strategies, brand type and consumer responses; and (d) whether psychological ownership mediates the effectiveness of empowerment strategies. Two experimental studies test the hypotheses.Study 1 shows that the higher the level of empowerment in an empowerment strategy, the more favorable the responses to the strategy. That is, the empowerment-to-create strategy was most effective in increasing product attitude and perceived product quality compared to empowerment-to-select, followed by non-empowerment strategies. Further, empowerment strategies increase product attitude and perceived product quality by heightening a sense of ownership of the product, confirming psychological ownership as a mediator in the empowerment strategy effect.Study 2 shows that the relationship between empowerment strategies and product attitude is moderated by fashion brand type (luxury vs. mass-market). For a luxury brand, an empowerment-to-create strategy led to greater product attitude values than empowerment-to-select, followed by non-empowerment strategies. However, the brand type did not moderate the relationship between empowerment strategies and perceived product quality. The self-brand connection also did not moderate the interactive relationship between empowerment strategies and product attitudes and perceived product quality.This study contributes to the empowerment strategy literature and psychological ownership theory by elucidating how a brand’s empowerment strategy affects consumer product evaluation within the product development process. This study offers practical solutions for retailers to enable them to translate consumer needs into actionable product engagements within their marketing programs

User-generated Content across Social Media: An Apparel vs. Service Brand Comparison

As firms attempt to facilitate conversations on social media to connect with and better understand consumers, research evidence is accumulating that consumer-generated content on social media play an important role in consumer brand experience (Gensler et al., 2013; Schivinsk &Dabrowski, 2014); however, an answered question remains: How does variance in brand-related user-generated content (UGC) across social media platforms vary by the type of retail brands? The purpose of this study is to address this question by examining disparity inherent to the brand user-generated content in existing social media channels and compare the disparity between goods and service retail brands as opposed to service retail brands. It is among the first to investigate brand-related user-generated content in social media of apparel retail brands as opposed to service retail brands

Fair Trade Advertising: What Messages Do Fair Trade Fashion Brands Send to Consumers?

Using content analysis, this study explores what types of approaches and messages are commonly used in fair trade advertising in the fashion business sector from the social marketing advertising perspective. Drawing upon Zharekhina and Kubacki\u27s (2015) framework of social marketing contents, two social marketing approaches (empowerment and patronizing) and the valence of consequence (positive or negative) together with its beneficiary (i.e., company, society, or consumers) were identified. Our results indicated that the empowerment subcategories were far more dominant in the fair trade fashion advertisements than the patronizing tactics. As for consequences, positive consequences were more significantly featured than negative consequences. Especially, society was most commonly mentioned as the beneficiary across both consequences. By analyzing different extant approaches, this study enriches the current understanding of strategic communication techniques and ad messages in fashion fair trade business

I or She ? The impact of visual perspectives on creation of consumption imagery on Instagram

This study examines how visual perspective in the image (visual perspective: first-person vs. third-person) of a brand post creates consumption imagery (imagery fluency) and consumption imagery acts as the underlying mechanism that drives attitudinal and relational outcomes on Instagram. Our results reveal that a first-person visual perspective on brand post increases viewer\u27s imagery fluency more than a third-person visual perspective (H1). This imagery fluency enhances consumers\u27 self-brand connection (H2a), attitude toward a brand\u27s Instagram (H2b), and intention to extended information search (H2c). Additionally, the effect of visual perspective on self-brand connection (H3a), attitude toward a brand\u27s Instagram (H3b), and intention to extended information search (H3c) are mediate by imagery fluency. This study contributes to the existing literature in the area of brand marketing and social media and offers practical insights by showing the importance of visual perspective in leading the success of a visual strategy

Mapping Consumer Engagement and Brand Impression Management in Instagram: A Decision Tree Approach

The current research explores the relationships between brand impression management and consumer engagement in Instagram. Specifically, two research questions were addressed: How does a brand utilize Instagram for online impression management? And how do consumers respond to it? Pictures posted by a fashion brand on its Instagram account function as a tool for brand impression management (Vilnai-Yavetz & Tifferet, 2015). A total of 100 pictures from a fashion brand Instagram page were coded and analyzed using a decision tree approach. Results revealed that visual elements of pictures on fashion brands\u27 Instagram differentiated consumer engagement behavior with respect to making comments, adding emojis, putting likes, and sharing with others (word-of-mouth)

Grocery Shopping Channels: Segmentation by Gender and Age Group

Grocery shopping via online and multi-channel (using both physical stores and online) has been increasing. Although physical stores still serve a dominant format for grocery shopping, the research examining consumption patterns across grocery channels fails to show this wave of increasing online or multi-channel grocery shopping. Using a secondary data set of 7212 grocery shoppers, we used corresponding analysis to identify grocery shopper segments based on gender and age group that were associated with specific channels (physical store, online, and multi-channel), and GLM to examine consumption patterns across the segments. We offer both theoretical and practical implications for grocery marketers

A Netnography on Consumer Engagement in Virtual Brand Communities

Over 40 million people worldwide are estimated to participate in some form of virtual brand community (Sicillia & Palazon, 2008). The online environment provides numerous venues for consumers to have a safe space to share their opinions and ideas and find solutions to problems, as well as opportunities for retailers to take advantage of interactive and personalized marketing. Express, a US specialty apparel retailer, has implemented a virtual community using asynchronous discussions on product review pages to generate increased sales, positive word-of-mouth, increased information sharing, and richer marketing research data. Such virtual environments help the retailer to engage customers in conversations; however, research has not yet examined the patterns of customer-generated knowledge for online apparel retailers

User-generated Content across Social Media: An Apparel vs. Service Brand Comparison

As firms attempt to facilitate conversations on social media to connect with and better understand consumers, research evidence is accumulating that consumer-generated content on social media play an important role in consumer brand experience (Gensler et al., 2013; Schivinsk &Dabrowski, 2014); however, an answered question remains: How does variance in brand-related user-generated content (UGC) across social media platforms vary by the type of retail brands? The purpose of this study is to address this question by examining disparity inherent to the brand user-generated content in existing social media channels and compare the disparity between goods and service retail brands as opposed to service retail brands. It is among the first to investigate brand-related user-generated content in social media of apparel retail brands as opposed to service retail brands.</p

Fair Trade Advertising: What Messages Do Fair Trade Fashion Brands Send to Consumers?

Using content analysis, this study explores what types of approaches and messages are commonly used in fair trade advertising in the fashion business sector from the social marketing advertising perspective. Drawing upon Zharekhina and Kubacki's (2015) framework of social marketing contents, two social marketing approaches (empowerment and patronizing) and the valence of consequence (positive or negative) together with its beneficiary (i.e., company, society, or consumers) were identified. Our results indicated that the empowerment subcategories were far more dominant in the fair trade fashion advertisements than the patronizing tactics. As for consequences, positive consequences were more significantly featured than negative consequences. Especially, society was most commonly mentioned as the beneficiary across both consequences. By analyzing different extant approaches, this study enriches the current understanding of strategic communication techniques and ad messages in fashion fair trade business.</p

The Role of Clothing Involvement in Evaluating Fair Trade Advertisements

This study is designed to explore whether advertisements depicting promotion hope and prevention hope and the corresponding attitudes influence purchase intention of a clothing product depicted in FT advertisements</p