Electronic Marketing Minitrack

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10125/42499

Firms continue learning how to more effectively market with new media and related technologies. There are a variety of important issues and questions. For example: What are effective strategies to attract and engage customers, and to increase purchase, satisfaction, retention, and loyalty? How do consumers behave in social networks and social-media related contexts, in online auctions, and in a variety of connected channels? How do they respond to novel forms of advertising or representation of product and store information? Why do they engage, and how do they use, consumer generated content? How are organizations making sense of and leveraging new, or relatively new, forms of consumer data, such as those related to social media and the Internet of Things?

Submitted papers may be quantitative or qualitative, including (and not limited to):

Rich descriptive statistics of online customer behavior
Tested theories of online behavior
Novel models and frameworks on how new technologies impact marketing to customers or organization of the marketing function
Detailed case studies of electronic-marketing applications used to generate theories and hypotheses through comparative case analysis or to illustrate novel business practices
Design and critical evaluation of novel electronic marketing systems and embedded methods
Data collection methods
Ethnography

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Bruce Weinberg (Primary Contact)
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Email: bostongarden@gmail.com

Ajit Kambil
Deloitte LLP
Email: akambil@deloitte.com

Lenita Davis
University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Email: lmdavis@ualr.edu

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 10

Will They Stay or Will They Go? An Examination of the Factors Influencing User Loyalty towards News Websites
(2017-01-04) Berger, Benedikt; Geimer, Andre; Hess, Thomas
Owing to the increased competition in electronic markets, customer loyalty has become an important success factor in e-business. However, the antecedents of customer loyalty differ between business domains. While the formation of customer loyalty in e-commerce has been studied extensively, little is known about how loyalty towards news websites develops. Integrating findings from uses and gratifications research into DeLone and McLean’s theory on information systems success, we built a quality-value-satisfaction-loyalty chain for news websites. To test our research model, we conducted a survey and applied partial least squares structural equation modeling. The results reveal that loyalty towards news websites depends on both utilitarian and hedonic value perceptions, which, in turn, are influenced by content quality. Our study combines communication, information systems, as well as marketing research theories and has important implications for news website providers.
Usage of Social Media Systems in Customer Service Strategies
(2017-01-04) Rossmann, Alexander; Wilke, Tim; Stei, Gerald
This paper examines the efficacy of social media systems in customer complaint handling. The emergence of social media, as a useful complement and (possibly) a viable alternative to the traditional channels of service delivery, motivates this research. The theoretical framework, developed from literature on social media and complaint handling, is tested against data collected from two different channels (hotline and social media) of a German telecommunication services provider, in order to gain insights into channel efficacy in complaint handling. We contribute to the understanding of firm’s technology usage for complaint handling in two ways: (a) by conceptualizing and evaluating complaint handling quality across traditional and social media channels and (b) by comparing the impact of complaint handling quality on key performance outcomes such as customer loyalty, positive word-of-mouth, and cross-purchase intentions across traditional and social media channels.
Online Search Behavior in the Air Travel Market: Reconsidering the Consideration Set and Customer Journey Concepts
(2017-01-04) Jacobs, Julia A; Klein, Stefan; Holland, Christopher P; Benning, Maximilian
The online air travel market is a complex and dynamic multi-channel environment in which consumers use a range of decision criteria to search for their best flight options. Online Travel Agents and Price Comparison Engines have transformed the search process and enhanced market transparency. These Air Travel Intermediaries (ATIs) are sophisticated decision support tools that enable online search and booking across thousands of flight options for all users, regardless of user expertise. An experiment was conducted to explore the detailed search behavior and processes of 29 individuals. A revised model of the customer journey as search funnel and a different operationalization of the consideration set is described that are more realistic representations of actual search behavior
Membership Free Shipping Programs: Effect on Competition and Optimality of Member Fees
(2017-01-04) Wen, Zhong; Lin, Lihui
Fee-based membership free shipping is an important shipping fee schedule in E-Commerce. This paper studies how the membership free shipping (MFS) program affects firm competition and how to set the membership fee optimally. We find MFS relaxes price competition. The firm that adopts MFS has a higher pricing band than the other firm. Both firms have positive profits, strictly better than when membership free shipping is not a choice. The MFS firm subsidizes subscribers, so the subscribers always have a lower average total cost (price plus shipping fee) per order. The MFS firm could still earn a higher profit than the other firm, although the MFS firm's profit excluding membership fee is lower than that of the other firm. The paper also characterizes how to set the optimal membership fee and shows that an intermediate percentage of subscribers is optimal for the firm that adopts the free shipping program.
Impression Effect vs. Click-through Effect: Mechanism Design of Online Advertising
(2017-01-04) Zou, Xiang; Wu, Ruhai; Zhong, Weijun
Search advertising and display advertising are two major online advertising formats. Search advertising emphasizes ads’ click-through effect. Advertisers only pay when users click the link of their ads. Traditional display advertising emphasizes ads’ impression effect. Most display ads are charged based on the number of views on the ads. Considering that most online ads increase brand awareness (impression effect) and directly promote sales (click-through effect), the not-emphasized effect in search advertising or display advertising actually has a significant impact on the market outcome. However, these impacts have been largely ignored. In this paper, we examine various mechanisms in search and display advertising by considering both ads’ impression effect and click-through effect. Interestingly, we show a seesaw relationship between ads’ two effects in search advertising. The advertiser whose advertisement has a strong click-through effect benefits relatively less from its impression effect. In display advertising, the real-time-bidding (RTB) mechanism considers both ads’ impression effect and click-through effect. It allows a publisher to gain more surplus than that through a static auction. However, we show that RTB is associated with a high risk of market failure.
Does the Source Matter? How Referral Channels and Personal Communication Tools Affect Consumers’ Referral Propensity
(2017-01-04) Köster, Antonia; Matt, Christian; Hess, Thomas
Many companies are using social sharing buttons to make it easier for consumers to refer a website or app to other potential consumers. Although these buttons are ubiquitous online, it remains unclear whether consumer referral propensity (i.e. the likelihood of consumers referring other consumers) varies across the channels through which consumers arrive at the website. In particular, we test whether referral propensity is higher for consumers themselves acquired through social referrals and compare them with consumers accessing the website through other commonly used channels, such as search engines and online advertisements. In addition, we examine whether the communication tool (i.e. social networking websites or instant messaging clients) through which the referral is transmitted affects consumers’ referral decisions. Our results indicate that consumers acquired through social referrals are more likely to make a referral and that the communication tools do not differ in their influence on consumers’ referral propensity. \
Consumers’ Sentiments and Popularity of Brand Posts in Social Media: The Moderating Role of Up-votes
(2017-01-04) Khobzi, Hamid; Lau, Raymond Yiu Keung; Cheung, Terence Chun-Ho
User-generated contents (UGC) on online social media plays an important role in the branding and marketing of firms’ products and services. In this study, we examine the effect of consumers’ sentiments embedded in UGC on the popularity of brand posts. We retrieved real-world data from a social media platform and utilized a rigorous data analysis method that exploited state-of-the-art semi-supervised sentiment analysis technique. Our empirical findings confirm that positive and negative sentiments are associated with post popularity to some extent. Also, the customers’ up-votes for negative comments somehow moderates the effect of negative comments on post popularity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that demonstrates the specific role of up-votes in enhancing the popularity of brand posts on online social media. Our findings provide a promising theoretical contribution to the literature. The managerial implication is that firms can apply our findings to develop more effective strategies for marketing through social media brand communities.
Can I See Beyond What You See? Blending Machine Learning and Econometrics to Discover Household TV Viewing Preferences
(2017-01-04) Li, Zhuolun; Kauffman, Robert; Dai, Bingtian
This article discusses the emergence of a computational social science analytics fusion as a mainstream scientific approach involving machine-based methods and explanatory empiricism as a basis for the discovery of new policy-related insights for business, consumer and social settings. It reflects the interdisciplinary background of the new approaches that the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science has embraced over the years, and especially some of the recent development and shifts in the scientific study of technology-related phenomena. It also has evoked new forms of research inquiry, blended approaches to research methodology, and more pointed interest in the production of research results that have direct application in various industry contexts. We review background knowledge to showcase the methods shifts, and demonstrate the new forms of research, by showcasing contemporary applications that will be interesting to the audience on the occasion of the HICSS 50th anniversary.
Achieving more by saying less? On the Moderating Effect of Information Cues in Paid Search
(2017-01-04) Schlangenotto, Darius; Kundisch, Dennis
Research on ad copy design is well-studied in the context of offline marketing. However, researchers have only recently started to investigate ad copies in the context of paid search, and have not yet explored the potential of information cues to enhance customers’ search process. In this paper we analyze the impact of an information cue on user behavior in ad copies. Contrary to prevalent advice, results suggest that reducing the number of words in an ad is not always beneficial. Users act quite differently (and unexpectedly) in response to an information cue depending on their search phrases. In turn, practitioners could leverage the observed moderating effect of an information cue to enhance paid search success. Furthermore, having detected deviating user behavior in terms of clicks and conversions, we provide first indicative evidence of a self-selection mechanism at play when paid search users respond to differently phrased ad copies.
Introduction to Electronic Marketing Minitrack
(2017-01-04) Weinberg, Bruce; Kambil, Ajit; Davis, Lenita

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