59 research outputs found
Friends with Benefits: Social Coupons as a Strategy to Enhance Customersâ Social Empowerment
Businesses often seek to leverage customersâ 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 empowermentâto 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 sharerâs 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
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 recommenderâdecision 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 recommendersâ comfort with providing advice and decision makersâ likelihood of using the advice in their choice. For both, these effects are due to a sense of social empowerment, which also stimulates recommendersâ desire for a product and positive behavioral intentions. However, recommendersâ 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 recommenderâs persuasion goal, the less likely the decision maker is to use the recommendation in their choice
Improving Consumer Decisions: The Conscious Use of Primes as Performance Enhancers
Through this article we examine ways through which consumers can take advantage of marketersâ priming
attempts and make better decisions. Specifically, we investigate what happens when individuals are made aware
of primes that may potentially improve their performance. Using an Embedded Figures Test, we demonstrate that
individuals can be consciously primed into an analytic thinking mindset and perform better when they believe that
the prime will enhance performance. Individuals are able to successfully ignore the prime when they believe that
the prime hinders performance. Utilizing both holistic and analytic primes and by alternating the valence of the
primeâs potential outcome, we are able to disentangle the conscious effects of primes from demand effects. We
discuss how these findings may lead to and suggest avenues for future research
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