Evaluating the Effectiveness of Viral Advertising Using Experimental Design

In recent years, viral advertising has received ampleattention from marketers and practitioners due to significant expansionof internet. This research aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of viraladvertising. We applied experiment strategy to conduct the study.Students of Mazandaran University constituted the population. Totally386 students were selected using cluster sampling. The selectedsample was equally divided into experiment and control groups. Someviral and some non-viral ads for unfamiliar brands were selected.Viral ads were shown to the experiment group and non-viral ads wereshown to the control group. Data was collected through aquestionnaire. Reliability of the questionnaire was assessed usingCronbach's alpha. Data was analyzed using SPSS. The results indicatethat viral ads significantly lead to more favorable ad attitude, brandattitude, purchase intention and forwarding intention than non-viralads

Developing a Local Model to Evaluate the Impact of Information Technology Capabilities on the Performance of Pharmaceutical Firms Using the Mediating Role of Supply Chain Approach (Case Study: Pharmaceutical Firms in Iran)

In the technology-based industries, such as pharmaceutical industry, the success of the companies depends on their ability to provide new and continuous innovations to the market. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of information technology capabilities on the performance of organizations in the pharmaceutical industry in Iran. The research method in this study is survey type and a random sampling method has been used. According to the statistics provided by the Ministry of Health of Iran, there are over 170 active pharmaceutical and chemical companies (chemical and plant) in the country. The population of the study includes all the internal, production, human resources, marketing and sales managers in these 170 companies. They were estimated to be around 746, from which 254 were selected as the sample. The main findings of this research are: 1- The technological capabilities are proved effective on three supply chain approaches of purity, resilience, and agility. 2- Those three supply chain approaches (purity, resilience, and agility) have a positive effect on organizational performance