E-Commerce and Consumer Protection in India: The Emerging Trend

Journal of Business Ethics - Given the rapid growth and emerging trend of e-commerce have changed consumer preferences to buy online, this study analyzes the current...     

Segmenting and Profiling the Chocolate Consumer: An Emerging Market Perspective

Psychographic segmentation has found higher merit among marketing scholars and practicing managers in designing effective marketing strategies to target and deliver better—especially for indulgence food such as chocolates. Hence, adopting a mixed method approach, 17 attitudinal statements were generated through focus group discussions and were used to segment a sample of 301 urban chocolate consumers. The survey data was subjected to a K-means cluster analysis, and it revealed the existence of three distinct clusters: the innovative national; the conservative patriot; and the global seeker. Chi-square analysis was conducted to profile the three groups. Though the study was exploratory in nature, the clusters exhibited such distinct buying patterns that the results hold tremendous value not only from an academic perspective but also for chocolate manufacturers and retailers. All three groups were buying chocolates for gifting purpose, while the young innovators liked to buy for self-gifts as well. Point of sales display had maximum impact on their purchase decision. The global seeker was buying more foreign brands versus the other two, who bought chocolate brands of national origin.     

Home Warranties: An Analysis of an Emerging Development in Consumer Protection

Although warranty coverage on consumer products is a universally accepted form of protection, the extension of similar coverage to buyers of new and used homes is a developing practice. Home warranties serve a dual purpose: they reduce a homebuyer's risk of substantial financial loss, and protect the builder, seller or real estate vendor from legal liability should undisclosed material defects occur after a sale. In an effort to examine consumer reactions to home warranties, a mail survey was conducted of recent purchasers residing in four central counties of New York State. It was found that two-thirds of the 571 single-family homeowners who responded were aware of warranties on new housing and 97 percent were in favor of such coverage. Only 22 percent were aware of warranties for resale homes and 56 percent favored such coverage. Unexpected defects costing more than $100 were experienced by 55 percent of the sample. However, only 27 percent of the sample had defects which were warrantable under most current warranty programs.     

The Effects of Consumer Education on Consumer Search

This paper reports the results of an empirical investigation of the relationship between selected consumer and marketplace characteristics—focusing on participation in consumer education activities—and consumers’ prepurchase information search behavior. A need exists for further study of the counteractive effects that consumer education is likely to have with respect to preferences for search and to the efficiency with which consumers conduct search.     

Changing Consumer Preferences in Emerging Markets: Food Market Challenges in Central Mexico

As incomes in emerging markets grow, consumers’ ability to break from former food consumption patterns and introduce new foods or conveniences grows as well. While this general principle is widely accepted, the path of such introductions is not identical worldwide. In this study, we explore how consumers in an advanced emerging market have identified with their current food options, including open-air markets v. supermarkets, and simple v. processed alternatives. Using focus groups, we find that Mexican consumers have strong ties to traditions in food preparation while also showing interest in modern food conveniences. Using product adoption theory, we show that consumers exhibit expected traits of innovation resistance, social contagion influence, and consumption innovativeness, but with specific local variation, including problems with trust, expectations of government action (paternalismo), and considerable definitional confusion. Foreign marketers wishing to access the growing Mexican market should account for these differences from broader product adoption theory.     

消费教育中的"消协":职能、问题与改进思路

在与厂商的竞争中,消费者处于弱势地位,而消费者弱势的集中表现是信息不足.因此,消费教育的核心任务,就是通过种种途径和方法,增加消费者的知识和信息,提高消费质量,增强消费者的维权能力,降低消费风险.作为正式组织的消费者协会(或委员会),承担着重要的职责,在消费教育中的地位不可替代.     

The Effects of Cognitive Style,Shopping Experience and Consumer Demographics on Consumer Reactions to Quantity Surcharges

Quantity surcharges occur when large quantities of a product are sold at a higher unit price compared to smaller quantities. As such, quantity surcharges violate consumer beliefs that one should receive a discount for having purchased larger amounts of a product. Much of the existing research in this area has focused on the incidence of quantity surcharges, and less focus has been given to consumer reactions to quantity surcharge offers. Utilizing a national survey of 318 consumers, this paper explores the effects of quantity surcharges on consumer perceptions of sellers, and examines how these perceptions are affected by consumers' cognitive style, shopping experience and demographics.     

The Cognitive Consumer Education Knowledge of Prospective Teachers: A National Assessment

A nationwide assessment of the cognitive consumer education knowledge of prospective teachers being trained for all academic disciplines included 84 institutions of higher education and provided usable data on 4,309 respondents. The sample scored less than sixty percent correct on the Test of Consumer Competencies. Prospective teachers were most knowledgeable in the areas of Recreation, Clothing, and The Individual in the Marketplace; they scored lowest in the areas of Taxes, Food, and Savings and Investment. Those majoring in Social Studies, History or Geography, Science, and Home Economics scored highest on the average while those majoring in Physical Education, Art and Music, and Special Education scored lowest. The prospective teachers who had completed a consumer education related course, approximately twelve percent of the total, scored higher than those who had not.     

Consumer Brand Marketing through Full- and Self-Service Channels in an Emerging Economy

A unique characteristic of emerging economies is the wide variety of dominant channel formats. We evaluate the influence of a brand's marketing mix on channel partners and consumer sales in both full and self-service channels in one emerging economy (Brazil). We use monthly stock-keeping-unit (SKU) level sales, and marketing mix data from the beverage category in southeastern Brazil spanning more than four years. In this study, we specify a panel vector autoregression framework with error decomposition to account for endogeneity between sales and marketing mix, cross-sectional heterogeneity among SKUs, seasonality, and the different aggregation of marketing mix elements across the channels. The results show that structural differences in these channels cause differences in the responses to some of the manufacturers' marketing mix elements. Package size variety, price and merchandising have a greater long-term effect on sales in self-service than in full-service channels. Brands' channel relationship programs support price increases in self-service channels without a corresponding decrease in sales. Distribution gains are important in both channels. In the full-service channel, package size variety has the highest long-term effect among all of the modeled marketing mix elements. Our study highlights that marketing mix strategies popular in the self-service dominant channels of the developed economies are not as effective in the full-service formats that remain important in emerging economies.     

Country of Production Biases on Consumer Perceptions of Global Brands: Evidence From an Emerging Market

ABSTRACT

Globalization has created significant opportunities of cost reductions for players to take advantage of location specific benefits. Simultaneously, it has presented significant opportunities for countries, such as China, to actively participate in global trade, attract foreign direct investment, and improve the economic wealth of their nations. However, literature cautions marketers about consumers’ biased evaluations of products based on their country of production. Moving production to low-cost countries could potentially harm brand trust, quality evaluations, and purchase intentions due to unfavorable biases for the country of production. The objective of this study is to investigate country of production biases of Turkish consumers for two global brands, Philips and Adidas. Data for the study (N = 1,608) were collected using mall-intercepts from the 17 largest cities of Turkey. Study findings show that brand trust, perceived quality, and purchase intentions declined sharply for both brands when consumers learned that the product was manufactured in China.     

Cautions and Concerns in Experimental Research on the Consumer Interest

Most published consumer research presents data from surveys or other data analyses that, at best, report that certain things tend to happen at the same time. However, correlation does not mean causation; cause and effect relationships can only be concluded from controlled experiments. A key problem is that the use of experimental designs calls for various conceptual and pragmatic trade‐offs that cannot be ignored.     

Value Creation in the Video Game Industry: Industry Economics,Consumer Benefits,and Research Opportunities

In the past twenty years, the video game industry has established itself as a significant contributor to the global entertainment economy. Compared to more established entertainment industries such as movies and music, limited scholarly research in marketing has addressed the processes that create value for companies and consumers in the context of video games which are now available on multiple devices (e.g., consoles, portables, mobile devices) and through multiple channels (e.g., retail and online). The authors therefore develop a conceptual framework of value creation through video games, highlight important findings from extant research in marketing and other disciplines, and apply the framework to derive future research opportunities.     

Linking Consumer Research and Marketing Communication:

Contributions of consumer research to the design and evaluation of marketing communication programs are discussed in the context of advertising research conducted for a large Northeast electric utility to develop a promotional campaign for a voluntary residential time-of-use electric rate. Utility customers were surveyed regarding the credibility of the utility as an information source, the effectiveness of different promotional themes and messages, and media usage habits. A media test measured the relative effectiveness of bill inserts and direct mail and the use of follow-up contacts in creating awareness and producing readership, understanding, positive intentions, and responses to promotions.     

The Intertextual Construction of Emerging Consumer Culture in China as Observed in the Movie Ermo

Summary

The rapid development of consumer culture in China is chronicled and caricatured in particularly revealing ways in the movie Ermo. It concerns the story of a rural Chinese woman, Ermo, who undergoes a metamorphosis in seeking to make enough money to buy a television set. Since popular culture texts, such as movies, often serve to mirror a culture back to itself, we conducted a discourse analysis of this film. We found that cultural intertextuality, that is the hybridizing construction of global and local meanings, was central. This intertextu-ality had two emergent themes: (1) longstanding versus postmodern narratives and (2) a Sinicization or Chinese indigenization of meanings. Managerial and research implications are drawn which direct marketing efforts toward the needs of Chinese consumers embodied in their indi-genized and particular local expression of new postmodern lifestyles.