Focal Products Research Articles

Effects of Influencer Attitudes on Persistent Brand Engagement: Mediating Roles of Relationship Maintenance and Purchase Intention

Purpose: This study analyzes the effects of influencer attributes on relationship maintenance, purchase intention, and brand engagement. In doing so, we also attempt to understand the moderating effects of relationship maintenance and purchase intention on brand engagement. In addition, we also verified the differential direct and indirect relationship between gender and product usage.Methods: The study sample comprises 320 respondents representing the overall population. The measurement items in the questionnaire were based on previous literature with some modifications. The SPSS software was utilized for statistical analyses. We first verified the reliability and validity of the research constructs and used multiple regression and mediation models to confirm the research questions.Results: Research question 1’s results showed that influencers’ attributes significantly affect relationship maintenance and intention of purchase. However, just the familiarity of an influencer significantly affects persistent brand engagement. These findings imply that firms need to carefully choose influencers, who closely resemble their target customers for close representation. The indirect effects in research question 2’s results show that relationship maintenance and purchase intention significantly mediate the effects of influencer attributes on brand engagement.Conclusion: Thus, to achieve positive long-term brand engagement, it is crucial to maintain a positive relationship with participating influencers and emphasize consumers’ experience and feedback with the focal products.

Implied Market Shares and Antitrust Markets as Fuzzy Sets

Market definition is an important aspect of antitrust analysis, but the exercise requires designating each potentially relevant good as either completely in or out of the market. In a market with differentiated goods, this often necessitates making unsatisfactory designations. This article introduces the concept of the antitrust market as a fuzzy set, where each relevant good can have a degree of membership in the market, rather than only the traditional binary in or out designation. A product’s degree of membership in the market is assigned based on its closeness of substitutability to the focal products. We then show how implied market shares can be calculated from a defined fuzzy antitrust market. We illustrate an implementation of these concepts using data from the grocery retail market and demand estimations from prior literature. We also discuss how this concept serves as a middle way between supporters and detractors of market definition, as implied market shares are objects that not only reflect demand substitutability but also allow for the rhetorical benefits of having delineated a market to focus discussion and analysis of competitive issues.

Which Receives More Attention, Online Review Sentiment or Online Review Rating? Spillover Effect Analysis from JD.com.

Studies have found that competitive products' online review ratings (ORRs) have a spillover effect on the focal product's sales. However, the spillover effect of online review sentiment (ORS) as an essential component of online review analysis has yet to be studied. In this study, we analyze online review content from JD.com using the latent Dirichlet allocation to identify the product attribute topics that consumers are most concerned about. We then construct a baseline regression model of ORS and ORRs to explore the effects of online competitive product reviews on focal product sales. Moreover, we examine how the interaction between ORS and critical factors of online reviews affect sales. Our results indicate that the ORS of competitive products has a negative effect on focal product sales, and the effect is greater than the ORS and ORRs of focal products, respectively. In addition, the ORS of competitive products inhibits the sale of focal products as evaluations of product attributes become more positive or online review usefulness increases. We also find that the effect of ORRs of competitive products is not significant, which may be because clothing, as an experiential product, requires consumers to gain more information about specific usage scenarios before making a decision. This study provides a more accurate basis for consumer decision-making and offers retailers a novel approach to developing marketing strategies.

The Effect of Alternative vs. Focal Identity Accessibility on the Intent to Purchase Products: An Exploratory Study Based on Chinese Culture.

Much of early western research has focused on identity. A primed identity can inhibit the priming of other alternative identities, and also negatively affect the intention to purchase products related to those alternative identities. In western culture, individuals operate within a cultural framework that makes them more likely to prioritize their own goals and less likely to rely on environmental factors when evaluating others. Individuals are more likely to choose products that fit their primed identity. In this study, we suggest that in collectivist Chinese culture, individuals may give priority to group-level goals and attach more importance to situational factors when evaluating others. Therefore, a primed identity may not necessarily inhibit the priming of alternative identities. In this research, we examine the association between a focal identity and alternative identities, with particular emphasis on the accessibility, discrepancies, and effects on purchase intention of alternative identities. We also examine the intent to purchase products related to the alternative identity vs. the focal identity, developing a model with which to explore this construct. We test four hypotheses through experiments using an online questionnaire and analyzing the resulting data using statistical product service solutions (SPSS) 22.0 and the PROCESS macro modeling tool. The results are as follows: First, the association between a focal identity and alternative identity has a positive impact on the accessibility of the alternative identity. The clearer the alternative identity is, the greater the impact of the association between the focal identity and alternative identity on the latter’s accessibility. Second, the accessibility of the alternative identity has a positive impact on the intent to purchase alternative identity vs. focal identity-related products. The greater the discrepancy between the focal identity and the alternative identity, the greater the impact on the intent to purchase alternative identity vs. focal identity-related products. The results of this study confirmed the interaction between identity association and the clarity of the alternative identity, as well as the influence of the accessibility of the alternative identity on the intent to purchase alternative identity vs. focal identity-related products. We contribute to the development of a theory on intention to purchase identity-related products.

Recommendations and Cross-selling: Pricing Strategies when Personalizing Firms Cross-sell

ABSTRACT Recommender systems enable firms to target customers with products and services that better match their needs, as well as cross-sell products and services. Considering these factors in markets with monopoly and duopoly, we investigate (i) How do pricing strategies differ when firms cross-sell versus when they do not cross-sell, and (ii) How do these pricing strategies change when a firm improves its recommender system? We find that cross-selling can enable a monopolist to subsidize its price for the focal products, while maximizing its profit. In a duopoly, the price set by the firm with the inferior system (low-type firm) is always lower when the firms cross-sell than when the firms do not cross-sell; however, that does not necessarily hold for the high-type firm. When the high-type firm improves its recommender system, the low-type firm may decrease its price when firms cross-sell, which does not happen when firms do not cross-sell.

Customization in Luxury Brands: Can Valentino Get Personal?

Luxury brands have started to offer consumers the opportunity to customize their exclusive products by making certain aesthetic decisions such as the color, fabric, or cut of their products. A robust finding in the marketing literature is that consumers place a greater value on customized versus standard products because these unique products better fit and communicate their tastes, preferences, and identity. However, the vast majority of the focal products in these studies fall outside of the luxury segment. In this paper, we demonstrate that consumers’ customization preferences differ for mainstream and luxury brands. In the luxury segment, consumers pay a premium for the designer’s expertise and the status that it can convey. As such, the consumers’ desire for selfexpression can potentially erode the product’s signaling value. Through a series of four experiments, we demonstrate that luxury brands can take customization too far. Our findings suggest that brand managers should allow consumers to make fewer design decisions for luxury versus mainstream brands in order to preserve the signal value created by the designer.

Research and Market Structure: Evidence from a Pathogenic Outbreak

Do upstream research shocks directly and contemporaneously impact related but disconnected downstream product markets? We explore this question using a natural experiment involving the New Delhi Metallo-Beta-Lactamase 1 superbug pathogenic outbreak in India. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that this upstream research shock caused multinational firms selling antibiotics in India to reduce their market exposure. Surprisingly, this void was filled by domestic Indian firms. These results are bolstered by a concurrent decline in multinational prescriptions of focal products by Indian physicians relative to prescriptions for domestic firm products. We present a stylized model building on a Cournot differentiated duopoly model to explain these heterogeneous responses. Results are robust to alternate control groups, including synthetic controls, as well as placebo testing. Implications for health policy and innovation policy are discussed.

Lateral Attitude Change: Stalking the Elusive Displacement Effect

Recent theorizing (Glaser et al., 2015, Personality and Social Psychology Review) distinguishes two types of lateral attitude change (LAC): generalization, where explicit attitude change toward a focal object transfers to lateral (= related) objects, and displacement, where only lateral (but not focal) attitudes change. Three experiments tested the hypothesis that generalization versus displacement effects depend on acceptance versus rejection of focal attitude change. Participants (total n = 471) read positive and negative ratings of different products that served as focal attitude objects. Subsequent attitude change toward focal products generalized to lateral products as a function of similarity (Experiments 1–3) and of induced preference for consistency (Experiment. 3). However, manipulations designed to induce rejection of focal change by telling participants not to trust the information presented were not successful: Instead of displacement, they produced attenuated generalization (Experiments 1–3). Theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.

Customization in Luxury Brands: Can Valentino Get Personal?

Luxury brands have started to offer consumers the opportunity to customize their exclusive products by making certain aesthetic decisions, such as the color, fabric, or cut of their products. A robust finding in the marketing literature is that consumers place a greater value on customized than on standard products because these unique products better fit and communicate their tastes, preferences, and identity. However, the majority of focal products in these studies fall outside the luxury segment. The authors demonstrate that consumers’ customization preferences differ between mainstream and luxury brands. In the luxury segment, consumers pay a premium for the designer’s expertise and the status that it can convey. As such, the consumers’ desire for self-expression can potentially erode the product’s signaling value. Through a series of four experiments, the authors demonstrate that luxury brands can benefit from customization but they can also take customization too far. Their findings suggest that brand managers should allow consumers to make fewer design decisions for luxury versus mainstream brands to preserve the signal value created by the designer.

Connecting Customers and Merchants Offline: Experimental Evidence From the Commercialization of Last-Mile Stations at Alibaba

Many e-commerce platforms have established extensive networks of stations as their last-mile logistics infrastructure. In this study, we investigate how this last-mile infrastructure may serve as an offline platform to connect customers and merchants in the physical world and stimulate offline-to-online effect by leveraging the spontaneous walk-in traffic (organic interaction) and by prompting interested customers through online intervention (induced interaction). Using free sample distribution as an example, we design two large-scale experimental studies in collaboration with Alibaba---a quasi-experiment across 1,032 stations and a randomized field experiment among 189,019 customers---to examine the causal effects of organic and induced interactions on customers' subsequent online purchases at the focal brands, respectively. We find that induced interaction drives significantly more online sales compared with organic interaction. We further identify a \textit{screening} mechanism underlying its effectiveness. Because of the additional traveling cost on the customer side, induced interaction tends to attract customers who have a stronger preference over the focal products. Such advantageous self-selection, in turn, leads to a large increase in customers' subsequent online engagement. Finally, we propose a customized targeting framework using instrumental forest to further enhance the effectiveness of induced interaction at the last-mile stations.

Is It Beneficial to Recommend Differently Priced Products? Experimental Evidence from an Online Product Recommendation System

Online recommendation systems recommend products with widely different prices than that of their focal products. While conventional wisdom suggests that consumers may prefer lower priced recommendations, prior literature also indicates that consumers may not accept such products if their prices fall outside the range of their reference prices. We empirically examine this question – how does recommending differently priced product affect their demand – with a field experiment on a US based fashion retailer's website. We find that recommending differently priced products decreases their purchase probability by 12.5 percent. We estimate several exacting specifications to show that our results are due to the differences in prices and not characteristics between the focal and recommended products. Based on our estimate, we simulate the demand for recommended products by replacing the lowest order differently priced recommendations for focal products with the similarly priced products. Such replacement results in 23 percent increase in the purchase probability of recommended products, which translates into a 2 percent increase in the total sales of recommended products. Overall, our study highlights that the relative price of recommended products could significantly influence their demand and therefore, it should be considered as an additional factor in design of recommendation algorithm.

Adapting to Uncertainty in Complements: Product Innovation and Evolution of Complementary Technolo

Although prior research highlights the strategic importance of complementary technologies, less attention has been paid to implications of changes in complementary technologies. This paper studies how product innovation in firms is affected by uncertainty during the evolution of complementary technologies. We argue that technological uncertainty about the future of complementary technologies creates an inducement for firms to alter features in focal products. We hypothesize that firms launch products with a greater number of features when uncertainty about the future of complementary technologies is higher. We then hypothesize that the effects of uncertainty reduce for firms with a higher breadth of technical knowledge about the focal product and for firms with greater commercial knowledge about the focal product. These hypotheses are supported in a sample of mobile device manufacturers during 2006-2015, a period that witnessed rapid and uncertain changes in complementary mobile technologies. Additional analysis reveals that firms mainly increased recombination of existing features, suggesting a shift away from novelty during higher uncertainty in complementary technologies. The paper advances our understanding of how complementary technologies shape innovation, showing that change in complementary assets is likely to be an important area of investigation for strategy research.

Complements Are Warm and Substitutes Are Competent: The Effect of Recommendation Type on Focal Product Evaluation

Previous research has largely ignored how online recommendation systems may affect the evaluation of focal products. Three studies show when and why complement-based recommendations may lead to more (less) favorable evaluation of a focal product than substitute-based recommendations. Study 1 demonstrates a general “complementation-warmth & competition-competence” association. Study 2 applies this association to online retailing contexts and finds that when a focal product has a warm (competent) image, complement-based (substitute-based) recommendations lead customers to evaluate it more favorably than substitute-based (complement-based) recommendations. Study 3 further demonstrates that processing fluency mediates the above effect.

Measuring the Value of Recommendation Links on Product Demand

Recommending substitute products on focal products’ pages on an e-commerce website can impact product sales in two ways. First, the visibility of a product as a recommendation on other products’ pages may increase its exposure and result in a greater number of its page views. Second, visibility of substitute products on the product’s page may cannibalize its own sales while resulting in greater exposure for the substitute products. The net impact of these opposing effects is unclear. We conduct a randomized experiment on a fashion apparel retailer’s website to answer the following questions: (1) What is the causal value of recommendation links from a product to its recommended products in terms of the additional sales for both the product and its recommended products, and (2) how does the value of a product’s recommendation links vary based on its network characteristics, such as its PageRank and the strength of its relationship with neighboring products. We find that due to recommendation, on average: (1) daily number of product page views increased by 7.5 percent and (2) conditional on a product’s page view, its sales decreased by 1.9 percent and the sales of its recommended substitutes increased by nine percent. On average, recommendation links of a product result in an 11 percent gain in total sales of the product and its recommended substitutes. However, these gains are not evenly distributed among all products. We find that while number of page views for a product are positively affected by the number and strength of its incoming links, its sales (its recommended products’ sales) conditional on its page view are negatively (positively) affected by the strength of its outgoing links. We conduct policy simulations to highlight how retailers and producers can apply this knowledge by engineering the recommendation network through sponsored links.

Consumer reaction to price increase: an investigation in gasoline industry

Purpose – The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of increase in price of an essential product (i.e. gasoline) toward the focal product and other seemingly non-related products. Design/methodology/approach – A self-administered survey was used to collect data from the drivers at a large metroplex in Southwest USA. Multiple regression and scanning electron microscope procedures were used to analyze and test the proposed hypotheses. Findings – When consumers notice the increase in gas prices, they become very anxious. This anxiety is positively associated with average gas bought in gallons and negatively associated with threshold price. Further, this consumer anxiety has the strongest influence on lifestyle changes, followed by automobile technology change and transportation mode change, and has the weakest influence on gasoline brand/type change. Research limitations/implications – We focus on only anxiety as a mediator between increase in gas prices and the behavioral outcomes, and collect data from only one location. Practical implications – Managers must be cognizant that a price increase in essential goods not only influences the demand for focal products but also for products that may not seem related to the focal products. Social implications – Increase in gasoline price will not only affect the demand for gasoline, but also the demand for alternate forms of transportation, fuel efficient vehicles, and other aspects of life. Originality/value – This study is the first to look at the role of anxiety as a mediator and looks at the effects of increase in gas prices in a holistic manner.

Multifocal Oscillatory Potentials in the ‘Two Global Flash’ mfERG in High and Normal Tension Primary Open-Angle Glaucoma

Purpose: In a previous study using the 2 flash mfERG, 90% of normal tension glaucoma (NTG) patients and 85% of high tension primary open angle (POAG) patients could be correctly classified as abnormal while 80% of the control subjects were correctly classified as normal. The purpose of this study was to analyse whether glaucomatous changes contribute to alterations of multifocal oscillatory potentials. Methods: MfERGs were recorded from 20 NTG and 20 POAG patients and compared to those of 20 controls. The mfERG array consisted of 103 hexagons. Each m-sequence step started with a focal flash that could be either dark or light (m-sequence: 2^13, Lmax: 200cd/m2, Lmin: 1cd/m2), followed by two global flashes (Lmax: 200cd/m2) at an interval of ∼26ms. Signals were recorded with a bandpass filter at 10-300Hz. Oscillatory potentials were obtained through offline bandpass filtering at 100-300 Hz (VERIS 5.1). Focal scalar products (SP) were calculated for the response to the focal flash, the direct component at 10-40 ms (DC) and the following two components induced by the effects of the preceding focal flash on the response to the global flashes at 40-70ms (IC-1) and at 70-100 ms (IC-2). For each epoch, eight small group averages were analyzed. Results: Overall, OPs had a larger SP in control subjects than in glaucoma subjects. In both, the response to the direct component, DC, and in the second induced response, IC2, OPs differed significantly between the control group and the glaucoma patients (repeat measure ANOVA). Conclusion: Small areas of impaired mfOPs can be detected in both NTG and POAG in the 2 global flash multifocal OP.

QUANTIFICATION OF THE TRADE IN MEDICINAL AND AROMATIC PLANTS IN AND FROM NEPAL

QUANTIFICATION OF THE TRADE IN MEDICINAL AND AROMATIC PLANTS IN AND FROM NEPAL

The Influence of Editorial Context on Consumer Response to Advertisements in a Specialty Magazine

Specialty magazines contain a rich array of contextual cues with regard to the focal products, and these cues can influence the consumer's processing of advertisements for such products. This study, conducted in Korea, investigates such an editorial context effect on the retrieval of the advertised brand from memory. The results suggest that subjects exposed to the advertisement in a specialty magazine have poorer discrimination ability than those seeing the advertisement in a general audience magazine. Also, within the context of the specialty magazine, advertisements promoting analytic processing outperform advertisements promoting non-analytic processing in terms of higher recall of ad claims and more favorable brand judgments.