EC Competition Law After Modernisation: More than Ever in the Interest of Consumers

In this paper it is argued that even though the consumer cannot (anymore) be reduced to a homo oeconomicus, competition law is the cornerstone of consumer law and that the decentralised application of EC competition law since 1 May 2004 (pursuant to Regulation 1/2003) gives new opportunities for an effective application of the EC competition rules to the benefit of consumers. While the EC Treaty (and the future Constitution for Europe) aim to protect consumers in the framework of the internal market programme, as well as on the basis of a genuine consumer protection policy, it is submitted that an effective competition policy remains crucial for consumers in a market economy. Consumer interests are generally diffuse and therefore difficult to protect via legal procedures. Nevertheless a further development of remedies which are already available in Community law (nullity of restrictive agreements, claims for damages, actions for a cease and desist order, and so on) will contribute to an increased application of the competition rules in the interest of consumers.     

Stars and Stories: How Films Became Branded Products

Between 1890 and 1940, motion pictures changed from technologicalnovelties into heavily branded consumer products. The high sunkcosts and short "shelf-life" of movies led film producers toborrow branding techniques from other consumer goods industries.They tried to build audience loyalty around a number of characteristics,but eventually learned that stars and stories were the mosteffective "promotion machines," able swiftly to generate massivebrand-awareness and to persuade consumers to see a new film.Data from the United States, Britain, and France showing thedisproportionate distribution of income and fame among starsconfirm their role as persuaders. Ultimately, film producersextended the life of their products by licensing their instant,tradable brands to other consumer goods industries.     

Dichotomous Thinking and Ethical Consumerism: Overcoming the Negative Effects of Self-Interest Bias through Third-Person Narrative Persuasion

The authors examine consumer attitudes toward ethically labeled products and demonstrate that consumers who think dichotomously tend to favor their own self-interests over the social good by choosing mainstream noncertified products over products displaying ethical labels such as fair trade and Fair Wear. The authors further suggest that advertisers can use a third-person perspective to attenuate the negative effects of dichotomous thinking, increase purchase intentions, and encourage consumption of ethically certificated products. Findings from five studies on various ethically labeled products (such as food and clothing) with a diverse group of study participants (American consumers from a popular tourist spot, an online panel, and college students) provided convergent evidence supporting the hypotheses. Theoretical contributions and implications for marketers, policymakers, and consumers are addressed.     

Disclosing Celebrity Endorsement in a Television Program to Mitigate Persuasion: How Disclosure Type and Celebrity Credibility Interact

This experiment (N = 165) examined the effects of two aspects of in-program celebrity endorsement on brand attitudes and product claim acceptance: credibility of the celebrity and the effects of disclosure types. Although there is an increasing call for endorsement disclosures, the effects of these disclosures remained unstudied. This study, conducted in The Netherlands, showed that disclosure of the persuasive intent of in-program celebrity endorsements only resulted in reduced acceptance of product claims among viewers who did not perceive the celebrity in the endorsement as credible. This study has important implications for legislators.     

“三言”故事的叙事时间系统及其多重意义简析

“三言”文本系统的生成离不开单个篇目叙事时间的设定和安排。而这些设定本身便形成了具有自我阐发能力的符号系统。根据这一系统的指引,在“三言”研究路径的选择上获得了更大的自由度和更佳的宏观性。以此为观照基点,至少能够看到“三言”故事主题随时代演进而呈现出的伦理强化、故事朝代分布所蕴藏的时代气质以及明君典型创造中的民间参与。可以说,“三言”叙事时间系统作为“三言”研究新的增长点,具有巨大的开掘空间和发掘价值。     

How Work Gains Meaning in Contractual Time: A Narrative Model for Reconstructing the Work Ethic

The work ethic has been deeply challenged by two trends – the division of labor and the destruction of continuity in employment. Here a narrative model is proposed for reconstructing the work ethic. Narratives embody assumptions about the flow of time, and work becomes charged with meaning when "contractual time" is interrupted, when new functions are invented to cope with obstacles having to do human character and action. Content for this abstract model is provided by four historical movements in the U.S. having to do with the reorganization of work or work relations: scientific management, the human-relations movement, the human-potential movement, and early management thought.     

Retailer Categorization: How Store-Format Price Image Influences Expected Prices and Consumer Choices

Prior research indicates that consumers may base their retail decisions (e.g., store choice, purchase quantity) on price image, which has been defined as consumer perceptions “of the aggregate price level of a retailer” (Hamilton and Chernev 2013, p. 2). The present research shows that consumers associate different price images not only with specific retailers, but more broadly with various store formats — such as grocery stores, convenience stores, and specialty stores. Six studies provide evidence that store-format price image exerts influence on consumer price expectations and store choice decisions, and that these retailer categorization effects are distinct from the effects of retailer price image.     

Shopping Orientation and Mindsets: How Motivation Influences Consumer Information Processing During Shopping

This research examines the cognitive procedures that underlie experiential versus task‐focused shopping orientations. The authors propose that consumers with a task‐focused shopping orientation and consumers with an experiential shopping orientation apply different cognitive procedures during shopping. Studies 1, 2, and 3 show that consumers with a task‐focused shopping orientation are more likely to activate the cognitive procedures of an implemental mindset, whereas consumers with an experiential shopping orientation are more likely to activate the cognitive procedures of a deliberative mindset. Study 4 demonstrates a fit effect between activated cognitive procedures and shopping orientation. Activating a mindset that matches the shopping orientation increases the monetary value that consumers assign to a product. The studies extend previous research by linking shopping orientations to mindsets and by providing evidence for mindset fit. The findings suggest that marketers and retailers will benefit from addressing experiential and task‐focused shoppers via the mindsets that underlie their shopping orientation.     

How Advergame Content Influences Explicit and Implicit Brand Attitudes: When Violence Spills Over

Well-liked advergames foster favorable brand attitudes. Research has been conducted on games where the content offers positive associations (e.g., racing: speed) that may transfer to the brand. Yet games may offer negative associations (e.g., combat: violence). Using the affect transfer and associative-propositional evaluation models, we test the influence of game content (combat, racing) on implicit and explicit brand attitudes. Results of an experiment showed that negative content resulted in less favorable attitudes toward the game and the implicit (unfamiliar) brand attitudes. The relationship between content and explicit attitude toward the brand was mediated by attitude toward the game.     

John Meriwether and the Promethean Hero: A Cautionary Tale in Financial Ethics

Ethicists typically understand unethical actsto be those that either violate social normsand mores or that prevent people fromdeveloping the character needed to thrive. This paper looks to a classical source – the mythof Prometheus' creation of man – to explore analternative understanding of what it means toact unethically. On this classical view,acting in an evil fashion is less a matter of asingle violation of some norm or of developingan unwholesome character and more a matter ofworldview or outlook. Evil enters the worldwhen humans cease to understand themselves inrelation to the divine and cast themselves asgods. The rise and fall of the Long-TermCapital Hedge Fund (LTCM) and its legendaryfounder John Meriwether nicely illustrates thehuman attempt to supplant the gods and itsuntoward consequences.     

Make it Your Own: How Process Valence and Self‐Construal Affect Evaluation of Self‐Made Products

Self‐production, participation of consumers in the production process of products for their own consumption, leads to consumers’ enhanced evaluations of the self‐made products. Three experimental studies investigate how and why self‐production affects consumers’ product evaluations and reveal that not all production experiences create additional value for all consumers. In particular, Studies 1 and 2, using hypothetical stories and real experiences, show that only positive (vs. negative) production experiences enhance evaluations of self‐made products over products made by others. Positive (but not negative) experiences decrease the psychological distance between the self and the product and strengthen identification with it. Study 3 manipulates self‐construal (independent vs. interdependent) to investigate its role on evaluation of self‐made products and products made with close others as a group (i.e., group‐made). Consumers with independent self‐construal evaluate self‐made (vs. other‐made) products more favorably only if the process is positive. However, consumers with interdependent self‐construal evaluate self‐made products more favorably even if the process is negative. Additionally, consumers with interdependent (vs. independent) self‐construal exhibit more favorable evaluation of group‐made products. Finally, even if consumers know how another person feels while making a product, other people's process emotions do not affect consumers’ product judgments as strongly as their own experienced process emotions.     

How Purchase Type Influences Consumption-Related Posting Behavior on Social Media: The Moderating Role of Materialism

It is now common to see consumers post their own purchases on social media to communicate feelings and/or thoughts about the consumption items to their social media audience. The authors conducted two surveys with a student sample and an Amazon MTurk sample to investigate factors leading to such behavior. The results show that purchase type predicts the consumption-related posting behavior—experiential purchases are more likely to get posted than material purchases, and materialism serves as a moderator in the influence of purchase type on the posting behavior. Specifically, lower-materialism consumers are more likely to post experiential purchases on social media than material purchases, while higher-materialism consumers do not show such a pattern. This article pioneers in investigating consumption-related posting behavior and provides important implications to research on user-generated content, materialism, and purchase type.     

How Organizational Culture Influences Innovativeness,Proactiveness, and Risk‐Taking: Fostering Entrepreneurial Orientation in SMEs

The beneficial outcome of a firm's entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has been widely researched, but literature and empirical studies about factors and conditions that foster EO remain scarce. The Competing Values Model is used to investigate the relationships between key dimensions of organizational culture (group, hierarchical, developmental, and rational) and three dimensions of EO in small and medium enterprises. A study of 298 enterprises showed that developmental, group, and rational culture has a strong positive impact on EO, whereas the impact of hierarchical culture is negative. Thus, our results highlight the importance of an external orientation of organizations to foster EO.     

Perceptions of High Integrity Can Persist After Deception: How Implicit Beliefs Moderate Trust Erosion

Scholars have assumed that trust is fragile: difficult to build and easily broken. We demonstrate, however, that in some cases trust is surprisingly robust—even when harmful deception is revealed, some individuals maintain high levels of trust in the deceiver. In this paper, we describe how implicit theories moderate the harmful effects of revealed deception on a key component of trust: perceptions of integrity. In a negotiation context, we show that people who hold incremental theories (beliefs that negotiating abilities are malleable) reduce perceptions of their counterpart’s integrity after they learn that they were deceived, whereas people who hold entity theories (beliefs that negotiators’ characteristics and abilities are fixed) maintain their first impressions after learning that they were deceived. Implicit theories influenced how targets interpreted evidence of deception. Individuals with incremental theories encoded revealed deception as an ethical violation; individuals with entity theories did not. These findings highlight the importance of implicit beliefs in understanding how trust changes over time.     

Being Accepted or Ostracized: How Social Experience Influences Consumer Responses to Advertisements with Different Regulatory Focus

Social experience (i.e., social inclusion versus exclusion) is an important factor that influences consumer behaviors but has not been adequately examined in advertising research. To fill this gap, we conducted three experiments to investigate how consumers’ social experiences affect their responses to promotion-focused versus prevention-focused advertisements. Our findings indicated that consumers who experienced being included or being ignored responded more favorably to promotion-focused advertisements than prevention-focused advertisements. However, these effects were due to different underlying mechanisms. Consumers who experienced being rejected were indifferent to advertisements’ regulatory focus, but they preferred promotion-focused advertisements once they received a self-esteem boost. These findings are believed to provide meaningful contributions to both advertising research and practice.     

Gucci versus Old Navy: Interplay of Brand Personality and Regulatory Focus in Advertising Persuasion

The present research examines how brand personality and regulatory focus (promotion vs. prevention) interplay in affecting advertising message persuasiveness. In Experiment 1, the moderating role of brand personality with respect to regulatory focus is tested. The results show that a promotion‐framed advertising message is more persuasive for a fictitious exciting brand than is a prevention‐framed message, whereas a prevention‐framed (vs. promotion‐framed) message is more effective for a fictitious competent brand. To replicate Experiment 1 and further test the hypothesis, in Experiment 2, two real brands representing two additional brand personality dimensions (sophistication vs. sincerity) are tested and the influence of individuals’ self‐construal level is controlled. The findings reveal that individuals exposed to the sophisticated brand show a more positive attitude when the brand message is promotion framed. By contrast, individuals exposed to the sincere brand react more favorably when the brand is presented with a prevention‐framed advertising message.     

The Convergence of Mirroring and Empathy: Communications Training in Business-to-Business Personal Selling Persuasion Efforts

Purpose: This study assessed the value of training in mirroring combined with training in empathy in a personal-selling setting when these two supplement training in more conventional areas. To a large extent, this investigation is exploratory. Previous attempts to probe into this topic do not appear in the literature.

Methodology: Students in personal-selling classes acted as sales representatives in an attempt to sell a service (attendance at a seminar) to small retailers. One group was trained in mirroring and another in empathy. Yet another received instruction in both mirroring and empathy. Finally, control-group members received neither mirroring nor empathy training. Chi-square tests, t tests, Tukey k tests, and an analysis of variance were used. The hypotheses were that mirroring and empathy training, and especially mirroring combined with empathy, would perform better than no training in these areas.

Findings: The analysis revealed that those who were trained in mirroring were more successful in obtaining intent to purchase than were control-group members. Likewise, trainees in empathy were more successful than those without training. Both of these experimental groups performed at levels that did not diverge significantly. Members of the group with instruction in both mirroring and empathy contributed more effectively than any other group.

Originality, Value, and Contribution: This is the first published study that systematically examined the effectiveness of both mirroring and empathy training in a personal-selling setting. Previous writings have presented research relating to nonselling functions. Others have discussed the value of mirroring and empathy in narrative that was not supported by data. The findings of this study suggest that both of these topics of coverage have merit when acting as a supplement to more conventional training content. They reveal that sales managers may be more successful in training members of the sales force if mirroring and empathy training is employed. The investigation supplies support for the proposition that this form of instruction can be useful in both academic and practical applications.