As part of their customer engagement (CE) marketing, firms use different platforms to interact wi... more As part of their customer engagement (CE) marketing, firms use different platforms to interact with customers, in ways that go beyond purchases. Task-based CE strategies call for customers’ participation in structured, often incentivized tasks; experiential CE initiatives instead aim to stimulate pleasurable experiences for customers. But the optimal uses of these two strategies, in terms of improving customer engagement to produce more positive marketing outcomes, are unclear. With a meta-analysis and data from 395 samples, pertaining to 434,233 customers, the present study develops and tests a unifying framework of how to optimize investments in both two engagement strategies across different engagement platforms. On average, task-based initiatives are more effective in driving customer engagement, but the effects depend on the platform. If platforms support continuous or lean interactions, task-based initiatives are more effective; on platforms that encourage spot interactions, e...
To predict how robots will affect the future of retailing, the authors begin this article with a ... more To predict how robots will affect the future of retailing, the authors begin this article with a brief review of recent deployments of robots in the retail and service sectors, along with relevant research pertaining to their uses. Next, they focus on two crucial dimensions, reflecting whether the robots (1) are customer facing or not and (2) intend to augment or substitute for retail associates. These two dimensions suggest four strategic quadrants relating to future robot deployments; some quadrants are attractive in the near term, and others attractive in the years beyond. In closing, the authors also suggest an agenda for continued research.
This article develops a decision-making framework that highlights how display of numeric attribut... more This article develops a decision-making framework that highlights how display of numeric attribute information (e.g., display of calorie information) and shoppers’ goals (i.e., having a diet focus vs. a taste focus) jointly influence shoppers’ choices and preferences. Across two sets of studies, including a field study involving the launch of a new Coca-Cola product, the authors show that when food items are displayed in an aligned manner (i.e., when food items with lower-value calorie information are displayed below food items with higher calorie values), shoppers assign more importance weight to calorie gap information. In turn, higher importance weight assigned to calorie gap information leads diet-focused shoppers to relatively prefer low-calorie food items but leads taste-focused shoppers to relatively prefer higher-calorie food items. The third set of studies shows that this decision-making framework has widespread applicability and is relevant in any domain in which advertisi...
bar for delivering on this promise in the face of substantial investment costs. Firms leverage di... more bar for delivering on this promise in the face of substantial investment costs. Firms leverage digital technologies to differentiate themselves from competitors and to improve their operational efficiency (Bonetti et al., 2022). Such pressing strategic imperatives have driven continually increasing global investments in artificial intelligence (AI), expected to increase more than 1250% from 2020 to 2028 reaching an estimated $641 billion in spending (Georgiadis, 2022). In this rapidly changing landscape of technology-driven marketing innovation, firms have new options for creating brand value for themselves, as is readily apparent in the growth of organizations such as Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Tesla, and Tencent. At the same time, there is increased awareness that businesses must consider carefully how customers and society might be affected by the adoption of digital technologies and how value can best be generated for customers and other shareholders. Recent research highlights the growing importance of digital technology for marketing (Grewal et al., 2020) and retailing (Grewal et al. 2017). A critical area of inquiry pertains to ensuring an effective understanding of how consumers respond to new technologies, such as robots, chatbots, As digital technologies emerge and develop, they are essential to strategic marketing effectiveness in terms of grabbing customers' attention, securing patronage, and ultimately, loyalty. While these technologies hold the promise of providing substantial value in terms of engaging customers with brand messaging and offerings, they have set a high
Following Srivastava et al. (1998), market-based assets include measures for brand equity and cus... more Following Srivastava et al. (1998), market-based assets include measures for brand equity and customer loyalty. Financial performance measures include sales, return on investments, or return on equity.
Consumer-to-consumer brand message sharing is pivotal for effective social media marketing. Even ... more Consumer-to-consumer brand message sharing is pivotal for effective social media marketing. Even as companies join social media conversations and generate millions of brand messages, it remains unclear what, how, and when brand messages stand out and prompt sharing by consumers. With a conceptual extension of speech act theory, this study offers a granular assessment of brands' message intentions (i.e., assertive, expressive, or directive) and the effects on consumer sharing. A text mining study of more than two years of Facebook posts and Twitter tweets by well-known consumer brands empirically demonstrates the impacts of distinct message intentions on consumers' message sharing. Specifically, the use of rhetorical styles (alliteration and repetitions) and cross-message compositions enhance consumer message sharing. As a further extension, an image-based study demonstrates that the presence of visuals, or so-called image acts, increases the ability to account for message sharing. The findings explicate brand message sharing by consumers and thus offer guidance to content managers for developing more effective conversational strategies in social media marketing.
Deciphering consumer's sentiment expressions from Big Data (e.g., online reviews) has become a ma... more Deciphering consumer's sentiment expressions from Big Data (e.g., online reviews) has become a managerial priority to monitor product and service evaluations. However, Sentiment Analysis, the process of automatically distilling sentiment from text, provides little insight regarding the language granularities beyond the use of positive and negative words. Drawing on Speech Act Theory, this study provides a fine-grained analysis of the implicit and explicit language used by consumers to express sentiment in text. An empirical text mining study using more than 45,000 consumer reviews, demonstrates the differential impacts of activation levels (e.g., tentative language), implicit sentiment expressions (e.g., commissive language), and discourse patterns (e.g., incoherence) on overall consumer sentiment (i.e., star ratings). In two follow-up studies, we demonstrate that these speech act features also influence the readers' behavior and are generalizable to other social media contexts such as Twitter and Facebook. We contribute to research on consumer sentiment analysis by offering a more nuanced understanding of consumer sentiments and their implications.
Despite cautionary advice against it, delighting consumers by offering them pleasant surprises is... more Despite cautionary advice against it, delighting consumers by offering them pleasant surprises is widely advocated. In this paper, using a low-price guarantee context, we show that retailers' attempts to use surprise gains to delight consumers might lead to subpar outcomes, if a countervailing cognition such as suspicion of retailer opportunism dominates consumers' thinking. In a low-price guarantee, retailers promise consumers refunds if consumers discover a lower price for a purchased product. We propose that providing a surprise component in the refund over and above the promised refund might boomerang, by increasing the likelihood of countervailing cognitions related to opportunistic signaling, in turn decreasing future purchase intentions. Over multiple studies, we provide evidence for this proposition, illustrate the underlying process, and identify boundary conditions.
Conventional wisdom and prior research on processing fluency suggest that consumers prefer fluent... more Conventional wisdom and prior research on processing fluency suggest that consumers prefer fluent information, such that it has positive effects on their purchase decisions. Challenging this conventional wisdom, and on the basis of recent research on processing disfluency, this study proposes that the increased effort required to process disfluent price information can lead to deeper information processing. If the advertised price offer represents a good value, it can enhance purchase decisions, even if customers prefer the disfluent display less. A series of studies in the field and lab demonstrate support for this positive impact of disfluent price information on purchase decisions.
Recherche et Applications en Marketing (French Edition), 1998
Les différentes recherches et synthèses existant sur la publicité comparative font état de résult... more Les différentes recherches et synthèses existant sur la publicité comparative font état de résultats variés. Les auteurs présentent ici les résultats d'une méta-analyse de l'efficacité de la publicité comparative. Ils montrent que les publicités comparatives sont plus efficaces que les publicités non comparatives lorsqu'il s'agit de susciter l'attention, de faire mémoriser le message et la marque, d'augmenter le traitement du message, d'améliorer l'attitude envers la marque de l'annonceur, et enfin d'augmenter les intentions et les comportements d'achat. Cependant la publicité comparative affaiblit la crédibilité de la source et l'attitude envers la publicité. L'analyse d'un certain nombre de variables modératrices montre que la position sur le marché (de l'annonceur, de la marque de comparaison, et relative), les divers éléments améliorant la crédibilité de la source, le contenu du message et le type de mesure de la variab...
... Employee ability to read affect as an environmental cue Nancy M.PUCCINELLI Dhruv GREWAL Susan... more ... Employee ability to read affect as an environmental cue Nancy M.PUCCINELLI Dhruv GREWAL Susan A. ANDRZEJEWSKI Ereni MARKOS Tracy NOGA ... Nancy M. PUCCINELLI Dhruv GREWAL Susan A. ANDRZEJEWSKI Ereni MARKOS Tracy NOGA Scott MOTYKA Abstract ...
To explore when the presence of compensation enhances repurchase intentions after a service failu... more To explore when the presence of compensation enhances repurchase intentions after a service failure, the authors use an experimental procedure and evaluate the impact of compensation in different stability and locus of responsibility conditions. Findings from three studies using scenarios from different service industries indicate that compensation is necessary only when the company is responsible for the failure and the failure occurs frequently. If the failure occurs infrequently or the company is not responsible, compensation does not affect repurchase intentions. The results further demonstrate that stability and locus of responsibility attributions influence the perceived equity of the exchange, which mediates the effectiveness of compensation as a recovery effort. The authors discuss the theoretical and managerial implications.
Widespread, and growing, use of artificial intelligence (AI)–enabled voice assistants (VAs) creat... more Widespread, and growing, use of artificial intelligence (AI)–enabled voice assistants (VAs) creates a pressing need to understand what drives VA evaluations. This article proposes a new framework wherein perceptions of VA artificiality and VA intelligence are positioned as key drivers of VA evaluations. Building from work on signaling theory, AI, technology adoption, and voice technology, the authors conceptualize VA features as signals related to either artificiality or intelligence, which in turn affect VA evaluations. This study represents the first application of signaling theory when examining VA evaluations; also, it is the first work to position VA artificiality and intelligence (cf. other factors) as key drivers of VA evaluations. Further, the paper examines the role of several theory-driven and/ or practice-relevant moderators, relating to the effects of artificiality and intelligence on VA evaluations. The results of these investigations can help firms suitably design thei...
This research demonstrates that the effect of product information on the evaluation of an experie... more This research demonstrates that the effect of product information on the evaluation of an experiential product depends on the order with which such information is presented. In a series of experiments, we find that when information is presented before consuming an experiential product, the information results in an assimilation effect such that consumers evaluate the same experience more positively when the product information is favorable compared to when it is unfavorable. More interestingly, we demonstrate that when such information is presented after consuming an experiential product, it results in a contrast effect such that consumers evaluate the same experience more negatively when the product information is favorable compared to when it is unfavorable. These findings have important implications for marketers in a host of experiential categories. I magine being at a wine tasting and learning that a wine is expensive after tasting it. Will learning the price afterward affect y...
A growing reliance on customer reviews prompts firms to develop strategies to encourage customers... more A growing reliance on customer reviews prompts firms to develop strategies to encourage customers to post online reviews of their products. However, little research investigates the behavioral consequences of writing a review. The act of sharing personal opinions through reviews is a rewarding experience and makes customers feel socially connected. With an application of reverse alliesthesia theory, the current study predicts that such rewarding experiences drive online reviewers to seek other rewards, such as impulsive buying. Three lab-based and two field studies demonstrate such an emotional review–reward effect: sharing emotional information in the public realm of customer reviews, rather than forming similar opinions privately, drives participants to make more impulsive buying decisions.
Dhruv Grewal (Ph.D. Virginia Tech) is the Toyota chair in Commerce and Electronic Business and a ... more Dhruv Grewal (Ph.D. Virginia Tech) is the Toyota chair in Commerce and Electronic Business and a professor of Marketing at Babson College. His research and teaching interests focus on direct marketing/e-business, retailing, global marketing, pricing, and value-based marketing strategies. He has published over 100 articles in journals such as Journal of Retailing, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, as well as other journals. He currently serves on numerous editorial review boards.
As part of their customer engagement (CE) marketing, firms use different platforms to interact wi... more As part of their customer engagement (CE) marketing, firms use different platforms to interact with customers, in ways that go beyond purchases. Task-based CE strategies call for customers’ participation in structured, often incentivized tasks; experiential CE initiatives instead aim to stimulate pleasurable experiences for customers. But the optimal uses of these two strategies, in terms of improving customer engagement to produce more positive marketing outcomes, are unclear. With a meta-analysis and data from 395 samples, pertaining to 434,233 customers, the present study develops and tests a unifying framework of how to optimize investments in both two engagement strategies across different engagement platforms. On average, task-based initiatives are more effective in driving customer engagement, but the effects depend on the platform. If platforms support continuous or lean interactions, task-based initiatives are more effective; on platforms that encourage spot interactions, e...
To predict how robots will affect the future of retailing, the authors begin this article with a ... more To predict how robots will affect the future of retailing, the authors begin this article with a brief review of recent deployments of robots in the retail and service sectors, along with relevant research pertaining to their uses. Next, they focus on two crucial dimensions, reflecting whether the robots (1) are customer facing or not and (2) intend to augment or substitute for retail associates. These two dimensions suggest four strategic quadrants relating to future robot deployments; some quadrants are attractive in the near term, and others attractive in the years beyond. In closing, the authors also suggest an agenda for continued research.
This article develops a decision-making framework that highlights how display of numeric attribut... more This article develops a decision-making framework that highlights how display of numeric attribute information (e.g., display of calorie information) and shoppers’ goals (i.e., having a diet focus vs. a taste focus) jointly influence shoppers’ choices and preferences. Across two sets of studies, including a field study involving the launch of a new Coca-Cola product, the authors show that when food items are displayed in an aligned manner (i.e., when food items with lower-value calorie information are displayed below food items with higher calorie values), shoppers assign more importance weight to calorie gap information. In turn, higher importance weight assigned to calorie gap information leads diet-focused shoppers to relatively prefer low-calorie food items but leads taste-focused shoppers to relatively prefer higher-calorie food items. The third set of studies shows that this decision-making framework has widespread applicability and is relevant in any domain in which advertisi...
bar for delivering on this promise in the face of substantial investment costs. Firms leverage di... more bar for delivering on this promise in the face of substantial investment costs. Firms leverage digital technologies to differentiate themselves from competitors and to improve their operational efficiency (Bonetti et al., 2022). Such pressing strategic imperatives have driven continually increasing global investments in artificial intelligence (AI), expected to increase more than 1250% from 2020 to 2028 reaching an estimated $641 billion in spending (Georgiadis, 2022). In this rapidly changing landscape of technology-driven marketing innovation, firms have new options for creating brand value for themselves, as is readily apparent in the growth of organizations such as Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Tesla, and Tencent. At the same time, there is increased awareness that businesses must consider carefully how customers and society might be affected by the adoption of digital technologies and how value can best be generated for customers and other shareholders. Recent research highlights the growing importance of digital technology for marketing (Grewal et al., 2020) and retailing (Grewal et al. 2017). A critical area of inquiry pertains to ensuring an effective understanding of how consumers respond to new technologies, such as robots, chatbots, As digital technologies emerge and develop, they are essential to strategic marketing effectiveness in terms of grabbing customers' attention, securing patronage, and ultimately, loyalty. While these technologies hold the promise of providing substantial value in terms of engaging customers with brand messaging and offerings, they have set a high
Following Srivastava et al. (1998), market-based assets include measures for brand equity and cus... more Following Srivastava et al. (1998), market-based assets include measures for brand equity and customer loyalty. Financial performance measures include sales, return on investments, or return on equity.
Consumer-to-consumer brand message sharing is pivotal for effective social media marketing. Even ... more Consumer-to-consumer brand message sharing is pivotal for effective social media marketing. Even as companies join social media conversations and generate millions of brand messages, it remains unclear what, how, and when brand messages stand out and prompt sharing by consumers. With a conceptual extension of speech act theory, this study offers a granular assessment of brands' message intentions (i.e., assertive, expressive, or directive) and the effects on consumer sharing. A text mining study of more than two years of Facebook posts and Twitter tweets by well-known consumer brands empirically demonstrates the impacts of distinct message intentions on consumers' message sharing. Specifically, the use of rhetorical styles (alliteration and repetitions) and cross-message compositions enhance consumer message sharing. As a further extension, an image-based study demonstrates that the presence of visuals, or so-called image acts, increases the ability to account for message sharing. The findings explicate brand message sharing by consumers and thus offer guidance to content managers for developing more effective conversational strategies in social media marketing.
Deciphering consumer's sentiment expressions from Big Data (e.g., online reviews) has become a ma... more Deciphering consumer's sentiment expressions from Big Data (e.g., online reviews) has become a managerial priority to monitor product and service evaluations. However, Sentiment Analysis, the process of automatically distilling sentiment from text, provides little insight regarding the language granularities beyond the use of positive and negative words. Drawing on Speech Act Theory, this study provides a fine-grained analysis of the implicit and explicit language used by consumers to express sentiment in text. An empirical text mining study using more than 45,000 consumer reviews, demonstrates the differential impacts of activation levels (e.g., tentative language), implicit sentiment expressions (e.g., commissive language), and discourse patterns (e.g., incoherence) on overall consumer sentiment (i.e., star ratings). In two follow-up studies, we demonstrate that these speech act features also influence the readers' behavior and are generalizable to other social media contexts such as Twitter and Facebook. We contribute to research on consumer sentiment analysis by offering a more nuanced understanding of consumer sentiments and their implications.
Despite cautionary advice against it, delighting consumers by offering them pleasant surprises is... more Despite cautionary advice against it, delighting consumers by offering them pleasant surprises is widely advocated. In this paper, using a low-price guarantee context, we show that retailers' attempts to use surprise gains to delight consumers might lead to subpar outcomes, if a countervailing cognition such as suspicion of retailer opportunism dominates consumers' thinking. In a low-price guarantee, retailers promise consumers refunds if consumers discover a lower price for a purchased product. We propose that providing a surprise component in the refund over and above the promised refund might boomerang, by increasing the likelihood of countervailing cognitions related to opportunistic signaling, in turn decreasing future purchase intentions. Over multiple studies, we provide evidence for this proposition, illustrate the underlying process, and identify boundary conditions.
Conventional wisdom and prior research on processing fluency suggest that consumers prefer fluent... more Conventional wisdom and prior research on processing fluency suggest that consumers prefer fluent information, such that it has positive effects on their purchase decisions. Challenging this conventional wisdom, and on the basis of recent research on processing disfluency, this study proposes that the increased effort required to process disfluent price information can lead to deeper information processing. If the advertised price offer represents a good value, it can enhance purchase decisions, even if customers prefer the disfluent display less. A series of studies in the field and lab demonstrate support for this positive impact of disfluent price information on purchase decisions.
Recherche et Applications en Marketing (French Edition), 1998
Les différentes recherches et synthèses existant sur la publicité comparative font état de résult... more Les différentes recherches et synthèses existant sur la publicité comparative font état de résultats variés. Les auteurs présentent ici les résultats d'une méta-analyse de l'efficacité de la publicité comparative. Ils montrent que les publicités comparatives sont plus efficaces que les publicités non comparatives lorsqu'il s'agit de susciter l'attention, de faire mémoriser le message et la marque, d'augmenter le traitement du message, d'améliorer l'attitude envers la marque de l'annonceur, et enfin d'augmenter les intentions et les comportements d'achat. Cependant la publicité comparative affaiblit la crédibilité de la source et l'attitude envers la publicité. L'analyse d'un certain nombre de variables modératrices montre que la position sur le marché (de l'annonceur, de la marque de comparaison, et relative), les divers éléments améliorant la crédibilité de la source, le contenu du message et le type de mesure de la variab...
... Employee ability to read affect as an environmental cue Nancy M.PUCCINELLI Dhruv GREWAL Susan... more ... Employee ability to read affect as an environmental cue Nancy M.PUCCINELLI Dhruv GREWAL Susan A. ANDRZEJEWSKI Ereni MARKOS Tracy NOGA ... Nancy M. PUCCINELLI Dhruv GREWAL Susan A. ANDRZEJEWSKI Ereni MARKOS Tracy NOGA Scott MOTYKA Abstract ...
To explore when the presence of compensation enhances repurchase intentions after a service failu... more To explore when the presence of compensation enhances repurchase intentions after a service failure, the authors use an experimental procedure and evaluate the impact of compensation in different stability and locus of responsibility conditions. Findings from three studies using scenarios from different service industries indicate that compensation is necessary only when the company is responsible for the failure and the failure occurs frequently. If the failure occurs infrequently or the company is not responsible, compensation does not affect repurchase intentions. The results further demonstrate that stability and locus of responsibility attributions influence the perceived equity of the exchange, which mediates the effectiveness of compensation as a recovery effort. The authors discuss the theoretical and managerial implications.
Widespread, and growing, use of artificial intelligence (AI)–enabled voice assistants (VAs) creat... more Widespread, and growing, use of artificial intelligence (AI)–enabled voice assistants (VAs) creates a pressing need to understand what drives VA evaluations. This article proposes a new framework wherein perceptions of VA artificiality and VA intelligence are positioned as key drivers of VA evaluations. Building from work on signaling theory, AI, technology adoption, and voice technology, the authors conceptualize VA features as signals related to either artificiality or intelligence, which in turn affect VA evaluations. This study represents the first application of signaling theory when examining VA evaluations; also, it is the first work to position VA artificiality and intelligence (cf. other factors) as key drivers of VA evaluations. Further, the paper examines the role of several theory-driven and/ or practice-relevant moderators, relating to the effects of artificiality and intelligence on VA evaluations. The results of these investigations can help firms suitably design thei...
This research demonstrates that the effect of product information on the evaluation of an experie... more This research demonstrates that the effect of product information on the evaluation of an experiential product depends on the order with which such information is presented. In a series of experiments, we find that when information is presented before consuming an experiential product, the information results in an assimilation effect such that consumers evaluate the same experience more positively when the product information is favorable compared to when it is unfavorable. More interestingly, we demonstrate that when such information is presented after consuming an experiential product, it results in a contrast effect such that consumers evaluate the same experience more negatively when the product information is favorable compared to when it is unfavorable. These findings have important implications for marketers in a host of experiential categories. I magine being at a wine tasting and learning that a wine is expensive after tasting it. Will learning the price afterward affect y...
A growing reliance on customer reviews prompts firms to develop strategies to encourage customers... more A growing reliance on customer reviews prompts firms to develop strategies to encourage customers to post online reviews of their products. However, little research investigates the behavioral consequences of writing a review. The act of sharing personal opinions through reviews is a rewarding experience and makes customers feel socially connected. With an application of reverse alliesthesia theory, the current study predicts that such rewarding experiences drive online reviewers to seek other rewards, such as impulsive buying. Three lab-based and two field studies demonstrate such an emotional review–reward effect: sharing emotional information in the public realm of customer reviews, rather than forming similar opinions privately, drives participants to make more impulsive buying decisions.
Dhruv Grewal (Ph.D. Virginia Tech) is the Toyota chair in Commerce and Electronic Business and a ... more Dhruv Grewal (Ph.D. Virginia Tech) is the Toyota chair in Commerce and Electronic Business and a professor of Marketing at Babson College. His research and teaching interests focus on direct marketing/e-business, retailing, global marketing, pricing, and value-based marketing strategies. He has published over 100 articles in journals such as Journal of Retailing, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, as well as other journals. He currently serves on numerous editorial review boards.
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