What motivates professional service firm employees to nurture client dialogues?

Dialogues between professionals and their clients are at the core of relationship marketing of professional service firms. To nurture dialogues, professionals need to extend the scope of the dialogue to new issues that impact the client organization's performance. We develop and examine (N?=?431) a model grounded in the theory of planned behavior to highlight factors that impact the willingness of professionals to initiate the extension of client dialogues. Three main results are found. First, affective and instrumental attitudes are distinct and different motivational antecedents that simultaneously impact willingness. Second, affective and instrumental attitude are intermediate psychological considerations shaped by extrinsic rewards, reciprocal relationships, and client relationship quality. Third, organizational pressure operates indirectly by instilling a personal professional norm to extend client dialogues.     

Electronic word-of-mouth via consumer-opinion platforms: What motivates consumers to articulate themselves on the Internet?

Through Web-based consumer opinion platforms (e.g., epinions.com), the Internet enables customers to share their opinions on, and experiences with, goods and services with a multitude of other consumers; that is, to engage in electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) communication. Drawing on findings from research on virtual communities and traditional word-of-mouth literature, a typology for motives of consumer online articulation is developed. Using an online sample of some 2,000 consumers, information on the structure and relevance of the motives of consumers’ online articulations is generated. The resulting analysis suggests that consumers’ desire for social interaction, desire for economic incentives, their concern for other consumers, and the potential to enhance their own self-worth are the primary factors leading to eWOM behavior. Further, eWOM providers can be grouped based on what motivates their behavior, suggesting that firms may need to develop different strategies for encouraging eWOM behavior among their users.     

What motivates Hong Kong's hotel employees?

“Show me the money” is not the only message from Hong Kong's hotel employees. “Show me some respect” is also high on the list.     

Consumer brand engagement and its social side on brand-hosted social media: how do they contribute to brand loyalty?

ABSTRACT

Social media offer brands new opportunities to interact with their customers. This paper focuses on consumer brand engagement (CBE) and its social facet in the context of brand-hosted social media. It highlights that CBE (consumer–brand interactions encompassing cognitive, affective and behavioural dimensions) and brand-based consumer–consumer interactions (social brand engagement (SBE)) lead to brand loyalty intentions. Brand customers were surveyed about their favourite brands on Facebook. Results indicate that self-brand connections and SBE are two drivers of CBE, and that CBE is the key element in inducing brand loyalty. In addition, configural analysis shows that high brand loyalty can be achieved through several combinations of social and CBE with various levels of cognitive, affective and behavioural engagement.     

Social media celebrities and new world order. What drives purchasing behavior among social media followers?

Social media celebrities (SMCs) and social media platforms (SMPs) have become indispensable in today's business and marketing settings. Drawing on the celebrity influence model (CIM), this study examines the impact of SMCs on their followers' purchase intention and the moderating influence of SMP usage on the relationships between (a) SMCs and their followers' purchase intention, (b) para-social relationships (PSR) and purchase intention, and (c) identification and purchase intention. We collected 665 valid responses via an online questionnaire in China and then employed partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to examine the proposed relationships between the variables. The findings revealed that SMCs do not significantly influence their followers' purchase intention directly; however, they do exert such influence through PSR and identification. The results further indicated that SMP usage moderates the effect of PSR and identification on purchase intention. Our study offers both theoretical and managerial contributions. Theoretically, the incorporation of CIM into this study's model augments the PSR and identification literature in the context of SMCs. Again, the moderating effect of SMP usage that we reveal is novel in the social media literature. In practice, marketers in China should consider the credibility and rapport a particular social media celebrity has with his or her followers before contracting that particular celebrity to endorse their products.     

Do you want me to watch this ad on social media?: The effects of norms on online video ad watching

This study examines the influences of norms on consumers’ intentions to watch online video ads on social media. The social norms approach and the theory of reasoned action (TRA) were adopted as theoretical frameworks. In addition, the effects of interpersonal and social influences on the three personal-level norms were examined as the antecedents of normative perceptions. To test the hypothesized model, an online survey was conducted with 313 undergraduate students. A confirmatory factor analysis was used to validate the measurement constructs of the model, and a structural equation modeling was used to identify the relationships among constructs in the model. Findings indicate that personal injunctive norms and subjective norms were positively related to consumers’ intention to watch online video ads. Interpersonal and social influences were positively related to three normative perceptions regarding online video ad watching. The findings of this study contribute to the research stream on social norms approach and TRA and provide practical implications for advertising and marketing practitioners.     

What motivates employees? Workers and supervisors give different answers

Which do workers value more: interesting work or good wages? Supervisors think they know the answer, but forty years of survey results prove that they don't.     

Digital marketing and social media: Why bother?

Changes in consumer behavior require firms to rethink their marketing strategies in the digital domain. Currently, a significant portion of the associated research is focused more on the customer than on the firm. To redress this shortcoming, this study adopts the perspective of the firm to facilitate an understanding of digital marketing and social media usage as well as its benefits and inhibitors. The second generation of Internet-based applications enhances marketing efforts by allowing firms to implement innovative forms of communication and co-create content with their customers. Based on a survey of marketing managers, this article shows that firms face internal and external pressures to adopt a digital presence in social media platforms. Firms’ digital marketing engagement can be categorized according to perceived benefits and digital marketing usage. To improve digital marketing engagement, marketers must focus on relationship-based interactions with their customers. This article demonstrates how some firms are already accomplishing just that.     

Who's behind the screen? Segmenting social venture consumers through social media usage

With the growing popularity of social media as a tool for marketing social causes and the increasing significance of social ventures in today's market economy, it is important to understand the heterogeneous nature of social venture consumers in regard to their social media usage. Using cluster analysis of survey responses from 305 consumers of various social ventures, four distinct segments of consumers who support social ventures were identified – social observers, active contributors, social connectors, and moderate contributors – based on three dimensions of social media site usage: creating content, connecting with others, and control over the user experience. Further analysis of survey results revealed that these four segments of consumers show significant differences in supporting behaviors     

What type of purchase do you prefer to share on social networking sites: Experiential or material?

Social networking sites (SNSs) have greatly changed individual lifestyles and the means of sharing information. They encourage users to participate in sharing activities and have led to a boost in user-generated content. To gain a deep insight into users' information sharing behaviors on SNSs, this study investigates what type of purchase (material or experiential) users prefer to share on SNSs. Three experiments were conducted, and the results revealed that experiential purchases were more likely to be shared through SNSs than were material ones. This disparity stemmed from the users' perceived social approval of the purchase. Additionally, the users' self-monitoring moderated the impact of the purchase type on the sharing intention. Together, our findings help to explain users’ information-sharing behaviors on SNSs and enrich the research on purchase-type comparisons. Further, the results provide practitioners with proper marketing strategies based on the product type.     

Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media

Traditionally, consumers used the Internet to simply expend content: they read it, they watched it, and they used it to buy products and services. Increasingly, however, consumers are utilizing platforms—such as content sharing sites, blogs, social networking, and wikis—to create, modify, share, and discuss Internet content. This represents the social media phenomenon, which can now significantly impact a firm's reputation, sales, and even survival. Yet, many executives eschew or ignore this form of media because they don’t understand what it is, the various forms it can take, and how to engage with it and learn. In response, we present a framework that defines social media by using seven functional building blocks: identity, conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, and groups. As different social media activities are defined by the extent to which they focus on some or all of these blocks, we explain the implications that each block can have for how firms should engage with social media. To conclude, we present a number of recommendations regarding how firms should develop strategies for monitoring, understanding, and responding to different social media activities.     

Business performance and social media: Love or hate?

The social media space has become a common place for communication, networking, and content sharing. Many companies seek marketing and business opportunities via these platforms. However, the link between resources generated from these sites and business performance remains largely unexploited. Both managers and financial advisors can profit from the lessons learned in this study. We conceptualize four channels by which social media impacts financial, operational, and corporate social performance: social capital, customers’ revealed preferences, social marketing, and social corporate networking. An empirical test of our framework shows that ‘followers’ and ‘likes’ positively influence a firm's share value, but only after a critical mass of followers is attained. Our estimates suggest that Twitter is a more powerful tool to enhance business performance than Facebook.     

How do alternative strategic orientations influence social media performance?

Increasingly organisations are using social media due to its advantages over traditional media however, its successful implementation has been problematic. To address this issue this study drew from the organisational orientation literature to examine alternate frameworks for implementation. Survey data were obtained from senior marketers from various Australian industries and structural equation modelling was used to test the hypothesised relationships. The study identified the components of alternate strategic orientations which were positively or negatively related to social media performance. The contribution of the study is to identify how the different emphasis within market, entrepreneurial and e-marketing orientations impact social media performance in terms of customer retention and customer acquisition. Implications for theory and practice are provided. Finally, research limitations and future research suggestions are presented.     

Tweeting like Elon? Provocative language,new-venture status,and audience engagement on social media

This article theorizes and empirically investigates how status and provocative language influence audience engagement with new-venture posts on social media platforms. Using venture capital funding as a status proxy, we analyzed 369,142 Twitter posts by 268 new ventures. We found that status (1) increases engagement with ventures' tweets, and that it (2) moderates the effect of provocative language on audience engagement so that provocative language has a negative effect for low-status ventures but a positive effect for high-status ventures. Post-hoc analyses provide a basis for pragmatic theorizing and explore the effects of status tiers and subdimensions of provocative language.     

Judging a book by its cover? The role of unconventional appearance on social media influencers effectiveness

Social media influencers (SMI) have gained undeniable importance as brands endorsers. However, although their credibility can be affected by the way they look, no known studies have applied appearance stereotypes to SMI's perceived attractiveness, trustworthiness, and expertise, particularly when that appearance is unconventional (e.g., use of body tattoos). Therefore, building on extant endorsement research and the Stereotype Content Model (SCM), the study examines how the use of tattoos impacts SMI's credibility, attractiveness, and effectiveness. Based on a sample of 260 young adults, a 2 x 2 x 2 (SMI gender x tattoo x domain) experimental design was conducted. Results indicate a tattoo premium effect, regardless of SMI's domain. By extending the SCM framework to the influencer marketing literature, this study contributes to both research fields, while providing valuable insights to brands and SMI.     

Going digital? The impact of social media marketing on retail website traffic,orders and sales

Given the rapid proliferation of digital technology, social media has become a key digital marketing strategy to promote business products, with the ultimate aim of maximising profits. Yet, empirical evidence on the impact of social media as a marketing tool remains underexplored. Using unique data over a 12-month period from a major online retailer, this paper examines the impact of daily social media activity on daily business outcomes: website traffic, orders and sales. Key findings reveal that social media leads to increased web traffic, but it does not produce a significant rise in product orders and sale income. Though, larger social media campaigns tend to result in significantly higher number of orders and sale income, and Facebook emerges as the most effective channel. Our results also reveal that the effectiveness of social media marketing varies across products depending on their complexity, cost and brand status. Taken together, these results offer a better understanding of the ways social media marketing impact businesses and provide intelligence on how to allocate resources to develop marketing campaigns.     

Employee voice: Untapped resource or social media time bomb?

The venues by which employees can voice satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and their experiences with the organization have traditionally been limited to internal communication systems that are orchestrated and sanctioned by the organization. However, social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as blogs and instant messaging, now enable employees to deliver messages to hundreds or even thousands of people with a few keystrokes. . .messages that may or may not be desirable to or sanctioned by the organization. Under these circumstances, employee voice can be an untapped resource for enhancing the organization's public image or a bomb waiting to explode with devastating impact on the firm's reputation. Effective management of employee voice begins with understanding its purposes: contribution to management decision making, demonstration of partnership, articulation of individual dissatisfaction, and expression of collective bargaining. These expressions of voice can be guided and managed to a strategic advantage when organizations provide a proper organizational context along with the appropriate mechanisms for employees.     

What (de) motivates customers to use AI-powered conversational agents for shopping? The extended behavioral reasoning perspective

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered conversational agents have become ubiquitous tools in the digital transformation of conventional customer-company interactions. Despite the widespread implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered conversational agents, there is still a limited understanding of how customers use and resist these technologies for shopping. To address this gap, this study investigates factors that influence the usage and resistance of AI-based conversational agents for shopping using the extended behavioral reasoning theory (BRT) and partial least squares-based structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). To test the proposed framework, this study conducted two empirical studies in South Korea. Study 1 focused on text-based chatbots with a sample of 232 participants, while Study 2 examined voice-based chatbots with a sample of 234 participants. The results of the both studies mainly supported the hypotheses driven by the extended BRT. Theoretically, this study contributes by offering a comprehensive understanding of customer motivation, attitudes, and behavioral intentions toward the use of AI-powered conversational agents in shopping. Managerially, this study provides important insights for retail managers and developers of AI-powered conversational agents for shopping. By understanding the factors that drive customer usage and resistance, managers, and developers can better design and deploy these innovative technologies to enhance the customer experience and improve business outcomes.     

“Don't pretend to be my friend!” When an informal brand communication style backfires on social media

Social media are now essential platforms for marketing communications, and the volume of consumer-brand interactions on these platforms is exploding. Even so, it remains unclear how brands should communicate with consumers to foster relationships and, in particular, to gain their trust. A fundamental decision in this regard is the choice of a communication style, specifically, whether an informal or a formal style should be used in social media communications. In this paper, we investigate how adopting an informal (vs. formal) communication style affects brand trust and demonstrate that using an informal style can either have a positive or negative effect on brand trust, depending on whether consumers are familiar with the brand or not. We further show that these effects occur because consumers expect brands to behave according to social norms, such that the use of an informal style is perceived to be appropriate for familiar brands and inappropriate for unfamiliar ones.