Promoting Sustainable Lifestyle Habits: “Real Food” and Social Media in Spain

Obesity and state of being overweight are beginning to be treated as global epidemics. In this context, health professionals are increasingly acting as expert opinion leaders that use social media to connect with the public, in order to promote healthy lifestyles and provide specific recommendations for different product categories, including fresh, processed, and ultra-processed meat products. This study investigates how exposure to content created by health professionals, and posted on social media, influences consumers’ attitudes. For this purpose, the collaboration of one relevant nutritionist influencer in Spain has been obtained. The online survey created has provided 4.584 responses, received from followers (from May to June 2019). After applying a partial least squares path modeling approach, the results suggest that trust in the content shared, the perceived credibility of the professional sharing the information and the informative value, determine the strength with which consumers acquire more knowledge about endorsed products, develop a favorable predisposition towards them, prefer them over their options, and modify their behaviour by purchasing them, instead of their usual foods. The link is stronger, in the case of trust and influencer’s credibility, than for informative value. However, the latter has an indirect effect on the attitude phases through the former.

The Effects of Gender Signals and Performance in Online Product Reviews

This work quantifies the effects of signaling gender through gender specific user names, on the success of reviews written on the popular amazon.com shopping platform. Highly rated reviews play an important role in e-commerce since they are prominently displayed next to products. Differences in reviews, perceived—consciously or unconsciously—with respect to gender signals, can lead to crucial biases in determining what content and perspectives are represented among top reviews. To investigate this, we extract signals of author gender from user names to select reviews where the author’s likely gender can be inferred. Using reviews authored by these gender-signaling authors, we train a deep learning classifier to quantify the gendered writing style (i.e., gendered performance) of reviews written by authors who do not send clear gender signals via their user name. We contrast the effects of gender signaling and performance on the review helpfulness ratings using matching experiments. This is aimed at understanding if an advantage is to be gained by (not) signaling one’s gender when posting reviews. While we find no general trend that gendered signals or performances influence overall review success, we find strong context-specific effects. For example, reviews in product categories such as Electronics or Computers are perceived as less helpful when authors signal that they are likely woman, but are received as more helpful in categories such as Beauty or Clothing. In addition to these interesting findings, we believe this general chain of tools could be deployed across various social media platforms.

Revisiting Sproles and Kendall’s Consumer Styles Inventory (CSI) in the 21st Century: A Case of Australian Consumers Decision-Making Styles in the Context of High and Low-Involvement Purchases

There has been considerable research on the investigation of Consumer Decision-Making Styles (CDMS). However, research designs suggested to date mainly replicate the original study by Sproles and Kendall (1986) proposing eight mental characteristics, the Consumer Styles Inventory (CSI). The research aims to develop this approach further and apply the CSI to different product involvement (e.g., high and low) and compare the relationship between product involvement and consumer decision-making styles. Data were collected from 208 Australian respondents using a self-administered questionnaire. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis was conducted on the CSI adapted for high and low involvement purchases. The generalisability of the CSI was tested within this context. Results found significant differences between the two product categories and demonstrated a relationship between products and CDMS and that CDMS are governed by consumers’ perceived product involvement. Furthermore, the original CSI can still be a valuable measure to low involvement purchases; however, it is questionable and requires further modification in relation to high involvement purchases. For instance, the addition of new factors such as “environmental sustainability”, “innovation consciousness”, “corporate social responsibility”, etc. with the original scale would help understand CDMS effectively. The findings of this research will expand the scientific literature on the relationship between product involvement and CDMS. Knowing that Australians are ‘rational’ and ‘quality conscious’ buyers, managers can employ CDMS to analyse consumers’ needs and develop segmented marketing messages and strategies.

Capturing behavioural outcomes through branded applications: the perspective of the investment model

PurposeNumerous companies have launched branded applications to foster consumer–brand relationships. Due to fierce competition among branded apps, the retention rate is quite low. The facilitation of behavioural outcomes through branded apps is a highly relevant research area. This paper investigates the drivers of behavioural outcomes in the context of branded apps from an investment model perspective.Design/methodology/approachThis work examines various branded apps primarily used by consumers in disparate product categories, namely, Target, Walmart, Under Armour, Nike, Pandora, Spotify, Starbucks, Burger King, Disney and Netflix. Four hundred and one valid online questionnaires were obtained and partial least squares structural equation modelling was used for data analysis.FindingsThe results obtained extend the investment model to the context of branded apps and show that app investment size and app satisfaction facilitate brand relationship commitment, successively enhancing app continuance intention, brand purchase intention and app word-of-mouth (WOM) intention. Furthermore, app confidence benefits and self-enhancement benefits facilitate app satisfaction, while app social benefits and special treatment benefits facilitate app investment size.Originality/valueThe present work applies an investment model to various branded apps to show how relationship components facilitate behavioural outcomes. We contribute to the literature by identifying four types of app relational benefits as drivers of relationship components in the context of branded apps.

The Legitimization Effect of Crowdfunding Success: A Consumer Perspective

Based on legitimacy and consumer inference theory, we examine when, how, and why past crowdfunding success influences the perceptions and behaviors of consumers. Across five studies (four controlled experiments and one field experiment), our findings demonstrate that a young venture’s past crowdfunding success enhances consumers’ perceptions of its cognitive legitimacy. This “legitimization effect of crowdfunding success” leads to positive outcomes with respect to purchase intentions, brand attitudes, and consumers’ willingness to recommend young ventures to others. These effects are robust across different product categories. However, our findings also reveal that these positive effects occur exclusively for young ventures, whereas they disappear or even reverse for established ones.

EXPRESS: High-Energy Ad Content: A Large-scale Investigation of TV Commercials

A trend reported by both academics and practitioners is that advertising on TV has become increasingly energetic. This study investigates the association between the energy level in ad content and consumers’ tendency of ad-tuning. Using a data set of over 27,000 TV commercials delivered to U.S. homes during the period between 2015 and 2018, the authors first present a framework to algorithmically measure the energy level in ad content from the video of ads. This algorithm-based measure is then compared to human-perceived energy levels, which shows that the measure is related to the level of arousal stimulated by ad content. By relating the energy levels in ad content with the tendency of ad-tuning using two empirical procedures, the authors document the following. Overall, more energetic commercials are likely to be tuned in more or avoided less by viewers. The positive association between energy levels in ad content and ad-tuning is statistically significant after controlling for placement and other aspects of commercials. However, the association varies across product categories and program genres. The main implication of this study is that advertisers should pay attention to components of ad content other than loudness, which has been regulated by law.

The impact of exchange rate volatility on trade: The evidence from Russia

This paper analyzes the effects of exchange rate volatility on exports and imports of a range of goods between Russia and its 70 trading partners from 2004 until 2018. The goods in question fall into eight product categories, as follows: (i) agricultural raw materials­; (ii) chemicals; (iii) food; (iv) fuels; (v) manufactured goods; (vi) ores and metals­; (vii) textiles; and (viii) machinery and transport equipment. Exchange rate volatility­ is measured using the standard deviation of the first difference in the logarithmic daily nominal exchange rate. The paper concludes that exchange rate volatility had a negative impact on exports of agricultural raw materials, manufactured goods, and machinery and transport equipment. In contrast, it was found to have a positive and significant impact on trade in fuels and imports of chemicals and textiles.

Antecedents of similarity perception for store-branded lookalikes

PurposeThis paper aims to identify the key antecedences contributing consumer similarity perception toward store branded lookalikes (SBLs), testing to what extent each of the antecedences influences the overall similarity perception.Design/methodology/approachTwo empirical studies were conducted. Study 1 was an online experiment to test the relative importance of packaging features on similarity judgment of SBLs. Study 2 examined the impacts of consumer characteristics and store related elements on similarity perception through a Qualtrics web-based questionnaire covering seven product categories.FindingsThis research yields two key findings. First of all, it revealed that all three packaging attributes studied (i.e. size and shape, image and color) exert positive influence on similarity judgment of SBLs, among which color shows the most significant importance, followed by size and shape, and then color. Then, it showed that brand loyalty fully mediated the effect of brand familiarity on consumers' similarity perception, giving that no direct effect was found from brand familiarity to similarity perception but consumers' brand loyalty increased as they become more familiar with the NBs. As consumers become more loyal to the brands, they would perceive the SBLs to be less similar to imitated national brands.Practical implicationsThis research confirmed the significance of proper manipulation of packaging design, either to the SBLs or to the imitated NBs. It also reveals the critical role of gaining high familiarity and strong loyalty for the NB manufacturers. For retailers, the research highlights the need to maintain a better store image in order to take advantage of SBLs to help with marketing competition.Originality/valueThis research contributes new knowledge on the lookalike phenomenon by uncovering the prerequisites that cause similarity perception between two products.