SmartEx: a case study on user profiling and adaptation in exhibition booths

An investigation into user profiling and adaptation with exhibition booth as a case study is reported. First a review of the field of exhibitions and trade fairs and a summary introduction to adaptation and profiling are given. We then introduce three criteria for the evaluation of exhibition booth: effectiveness, efficiency and affect. Effectiveness is related the amount of information collected, efficiency is a measurement of the time taken to collect the information, and affect is the perception of the experience and the mood booth visitors have during and after their visit. We have selected these criteria to assess adaptive and profiled exhibition booths, we call smart exhibition (SmartEx). The assessment is performed with an experiment with three test conditions (non-profiled/non adaptive, profiled/non-adaptive and profiled adaptive presentations). Results of the experiment are presented along discussion. While there is significant improvements of effectiveness and efficiency between the two-first test conditions, the improvement is not significant for the last test condition, for reasons explained. As for the affect, the results show that it has an under-estimated importance in people minds and that it should be addressed more carefully

Unlocking the power of big data in new product development

This study explores how big data can be used to enable customers to express unrecognised needs. By acquiring this information, managers can gain opportunities to develop customer-centred products. Big data can be defined as multimedia-rich and interactive low-cost information resulting from mass communication. It offers customers a better understanding of new products and provides new, simplified modes of large-scale interaction between customers and firms. Although previous studies have pointed out that firms can better understand customers’ preferences and needs by leveraging different types of available data, the situation is evolving, with increasing application of big data analytics for product development, operations and supply chain management. In order to utilise the customer information available from big data to a larger extent, managers need to identify how to establish a customer-involving environment that encourages customers to share their ideas with managers, contribute their know-how, fiddle around with new products, and express their actual preferences. We investigate a new product development project at an electronics company, STE, and describe how big data is used to connect to, interact with and involve customers in new product development in practice. Our findings reveal that big data can offer customer involvement so as to provide valuable input for developing new products. In this paper, we introduce a customer involvement approach as a new means of coming up with customer-centred new product development

Proposal, project, practice, pause: developing a framework for evaluating smart domestic product engagement

Smart homes are fast becoming a reality, with smart TVs, smart meters and other such “smart” devices/systems already representing a substantial household presence. These, which we collectively term “smart domestic products” (SDPs), will need to be promoted, adopted, and normalized into daily routines. Despite this, the marketing canon lacks a substantive discourse on pertinent research. We look to help correct this by melding ideas from organizational sociology, innovation diffusion and appropriation studies, and service dominant logic. Consequently, we suggest a framework for research that responds directly to the specific characteristics of SDPs. Using the SDP eco-system as a context, our framework emphasizes the interplay of embeddedness, practice, value and engagement. It comprises a four-stage horizontal/ longitudinal axis we describe as proposal, project, practice and pause. Cross-sectionally we focus on value, and combine aspects of existing thought to suggest how this impacts each stage of our engagement continuum. We subsequently identify perceived personal advantage as the resultant of these two axes and propose this as the key for understanding consumer and SDP sociomaterial engagement. This article also advances a definition of SDPs and ends with an agenda for further research

Does corporate reputation matter? Role of social media in consumer intention to purchase innovative food product

The exponential growth of the corporate reputation in food industry has resulted in innovations in every link of its supply chain. There have been studies that have characterized innovation in various industries from the perspective of technology, but far fewer in the area of corporate reputation, consumer perception, and intention towards innovations in food products. This research analyses the innovations in the food industry from the perspective of the consumer and provides a conceptual framework of food innovation stages. The study also investigates the relationship between corporate reputation and intention towards food innovation along with the other components of TPB model with an extension of social media engagement. The results from India and US samples confirm that social media engagement have a significant role to play in creating intention to purchase innovative food products. The study compares the US and Indian samples and identifies differences in subjective norms and perceived behavioural control

Beyond lessons learned: Opportunities and challenges for interplay between knowledge management, arts and humanities in the digital age

How do knowledge management, arts and humanities and big data dialogue in the digital era? What are the opportunities and challenges for arts and humanities in the age of big data? In the last years, we are seeing an increasing exploitation of big data and analytics in arts and humanities fields. Big data and digital technologies are inspiring new paths of development in the arts and humanities field, facilitating the creation and transfer of knowledge. The arts and humanities, in turn, are significantly contributing to the effective exploitation and extraction of meaning and knowledge from big data in several fields. It is evident that the innovative potential of a data-driven approach across the full range of arts and humanities disciplines is becoming more and more huge. However, more research and applications are still required to better understand both the value of creating and using such “strong data-driven ecosystems” in arts and humanities and their contribution to knowledge management processes. Accordingly, this chapter attempts to shed more light on the promising dialogue between arts and humanities and big data approaches in the digital age, by highlighting opportunities and challenges connected to knowledge management aspects

The social dimension of mobile commerce – engaging customers through group purchase

Social commerce and mobile commerce have become increasingly popular in recent years because they enhance customer’s shopping process and increase businesses’ revenue. However, the extant literature does not prescribe sufficient design guidelines for implementing social commerce in a mobile commerce context. This research draws on the idea of group purchase to inject an element of social commerce into mobile commerce. A set of mobile commerce design features is carefully contrived to support group purchase in a process that maximizes social interaction among customers and their shopping partners. This could potentially increase user engagement with the mobile commerce application and encourage customer loyalty and repeated purchase

Conceptual foundation for a town centre physical/digital integration measurement tool

The purpose of this research is to propose a theoretical framework for the assessment of Town Centre Management from an omni-channel perspective. Moreover, there is a need for more multi-dimensional and empirical methods of measuring the Digital High Street performance (i.e., the integration of the physical/digital Town Centre experience or health of the Digital High Street). Earlier measurement tools do not consider measures of different stakeholders, such as their digital skills and involvement in the Digital High Street. There are also methodological considerations as previous tools are mainly based on survey measures, which are difficult to be updated regularly. Therefore, this study fills these research gaps by means of an holistic theoretical framework that uses a wide set of observed measures from different primary and secondary sources