Factors influencing customer engagement with branded content in the social network sites of integrated resorts

The integrated resorts rely on social network sites (SNSs) for content marketing, while one of the main purposes of content marketing is customer engagement that will leverage the impact of branded content. This study investigates the factors influencing customer engagement with brand posts of integrated resorts on the SNSs. The findings highlight the important influence of both media-type and content-type factors on the level of customer engagement in SNSs of integrated resorts. This study provides practical implications for integrated resorts to develop SNS online content marketing strategy.     

Product Touch and Consumers’ Online and Offline Buying: The Role of Mental Representation

As offline retailers struggle to compete with online ones, the importance of a consumer’s ability to touch a product prior to purchase becomes important to study. Prior research has found inconsistent results on whether product touch facilitates consumers’ product-related decision making. Some studies report a positive effect, whereas others do not. The current research reconciles this inconsistency and draws retailing implications. Across three experiments, we show that the effect of product touch on consumers’ purchase intentions and willingness to pay for a product being evaluated is evident when consumers’ mental representation of the product is concrete, but not when abstract. We further show that perceived risk and perceived ownership simultaneously mediate this moderating effect of mental representation. Implications are drawn for both offline and online retailers.     

Peer Effects among Swimmers

We develop a novel identification strategy and examine various aspects of peer effects using swimming data. We find that the performance of adjacent competitors positively influences swimmers' performances. In particular, swimmers are influenced by slower‐lane peers, suggesting that being chased improves one's performance. We use absenteeism data to directly compare the performances of swimmers with and without peers. We have found that swimmers swim faster with peers swimming behind them than when swimming alone, but that they swim slower with peers swimming ahead. Finally, we find that observability is a key determinant of peer effects, by comparing freestyle and backstroke competitions.     

Examining the relationships between online store atmospheric color,flow experience and consumer behavior

Although atmospherics and flow experience are widely studied, the relationship between online store atmospheric cues and flow experience has received a little attention. Furthermore, there is a lack of published results about the role of atmospheric color in creating flow. Using the Stimulus – Organism – Response model and the theory of optimal experience of flow, this study investigated the impact of online store background color on the achievement of flow and its effects on online consumer behavior. In this study, an online experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of a warm hue – yellow versus a cool hue – blue of the background and used a self-administered online survey for data collection. The results underscore the important role online store color plays in creating the flow experience and revealed that blue hue induces more flow than yellow. The two dimensions of flow (perceived enjoyment and concentration) have direct and mediating effects on purchase intention and revisit intention. Concentration, but not enjoyment, has direct and mediating effects on the number of viewed pages and time spent per visit. This research enhances our understanding of the relationship between online store atmospheric color and flow and highlights the role of flow as an extension of SOR model applied online. Other theoretical and managerial implications of the results are discussed. Finally, suggestions regarding future research are presented.     

Shopping for fun or shopping to buy: Is it different online and offline?

Consumers can shop both online and offline, either for fun or for needs. We investigate the consequences of shopping for fun or for need on word-of-mouth (WOM), intentional loyalty, and price consciousness directly comparing the offline and online settings. We find differences in the relationships among the considered variables, with the offline context being characterized by a simplified structure of causalities, greater maturity, and fewer but stronger ties among the considered constructs, compared with the online context. Furthermore, the content of WOM changes: consumers share experiential issues when they shop for fun, and efficiency issues when their shopping is goal-oriented     

Mobile payment and online to offline retail business models

Mobile payments are services that use mobile devices to make payments. When digitalization moves across channel boundaries, online to offline channel retail will expand. Online to offline retailing will become the future retail owner stream and retail operators will move from cross-channel or multi-channel to omni-channel. This study investigates a market survey in Taiwan developing a data mining analytics including clustering analysis and association rules based on a snowflake schema database design. The role of mobile payment is determined in terms of new retail payment mechanism that promotes a better consumer purchase experience in an online to offline business environment.     

Coloring the destination: The role of color psychology on Instagram

Color psychology plays important roles in product packaging, the retail environment, and online marketing. This study analyzed current practices related to color composition in tourism-related photographs on Instagram. Data mining and pictorial content analysis were adopted to investigate how lightness, chroma, and hue may influence Instagram posts' popularity. Generally, individuals appeared more likely to respond to brighter and more saturated destination pictures. Orange, yellow, blue, and violet contributed significantly to post popularity based on different photographic typologies. Overall, color is a complex construct that functions within diverse dimensions and can enrich tourists’ destination-related perceptions. Based on brand post popularity and color theories, the study findings provide valuable implications for effective and efficient destination promotion via Instagram. Relevant limitations and future directions are also discussed.     

A penny saved is a penny earned? Differences in male and female savings and consumption tradeoffs on online retail platforms

Online retailers in Asia are increasingly offering interest paying accounts to their users. Based on temporal discounting theory, however, customers might consider tradeoffs in opportunities to save money (offered yield by the online retailer × the account balance) versus withdrawing money from the account for online purchases. Based on a sample of 1.95 million transactions from 24,591 customers, when short-term savings opportunities (7-day annualized yield × account balance) are greater, customers withdraw less money for purchase. Relative to females, males tend to withdraw less money for purchase from their account when long-term savings opportunities (1-year annualized yield × account balance) are higher. The findings have implications for temporal discounting behavior in online retail saving opportunities versus purchase transactions, and implications for online retailers who may cannibalize online sales by offering higher yields to online customers.     

Evaluating domestic bias on airline passengers’ ratings: The moderating effect of cultural value orientation

We explore differences in airline passengers’ online ratings toward domestic and foreign carriers. Using a dataset of more than 380,000 airline passenger reviews obtained from TripAdvisor, we show that on average passengers express higher satisfaction (as proxied by their overall rating) for airline service encounters with domestic carriers, exhibiting a form of domestic bias. Using Hofstede’s framework, we examine how cultural dimensions influence the strength of this bias and find support for the moderating impact (positive and negative) of passengers’ cultural dimensions on their provided ratings toward domestic airlines. The study has theoretical and practical implications for international marketing researchers and airline operational planners.