The effects of audio-visual and visual-only cues on consumers' responses to co-branded advertising

Co-branded advertising (two brands featured in the same ad) is a relatively new and under-researched area of advertising that offers advertisers the opportunity to share advertising costs and leverage brand equity. Despite its growing popularity, few research studies have examined the potential benefits and/or limitations of this executional strategy, and particularly a strategy in which one brand (a focal brand) is paired with another, but less emphasized (peripheral) brand. This study reports the results of an empirical investigation that examines how modifying reference to the peripheral brand (visual-only versus simultaneous visual and audio references) influences consumers' perceived associations of the advertised brands, as well as their attitudes toward the advertisement and intentions to purchase either brand. Employing a convenience sample of undergraduate students on a university campus in the United States, the results of this study indicate that audio-visual cues enhance brand association and purchase intentions. However, additional analyses reveal that attitude toward a co-branded advertisement mediates the brand association effect on purchase intentions toward the focal brand, whereas brand association has a direct effect on purchase intentions toward the peripheral brand.     

Directors' attributes and corporate governance effectiveness in Hong Kong

The purpose of this study is to examine the perceptions of Hong Kong (HK) legal practitioners on how the major attributes of knowledge, continuous education, and qualification among directors in HK relate to their board of directors' corporate governance effectiveness. The results revealed that the respondents perceived directors' attributes in HK to be not good enough for discharging their legal obligations to their companies. The results also suggested that a company was more effectively governed if its directors were more qualified for their jobs and more familiar with company law and/or corporate governance.     

The effects of eWOM characteristics on consumer ratings: evidence from TripAdvisor.com

Abstract

Given the rise of online review communities, the management of consumer ratings has gained much attention in the recent years. In this study, we use data from Tripadvisor.com and examine the number of stars that a review receives. Specifically, we address how a star rating is determined by the components in the focal review as well as the preceding reviews of other consumers. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses provide interesting findings as follows. A star rating has a positive relationship with the focal review’s valence. That is, the more positive a review is, the greater number of stars a review receives. The reviews of other consumers also play a role in determining a star rating of the focal review suggesting social influence among consumers. Interestingly, a review with lengthy content leads to a lower star rating only when using smartphones. We conclude with theoretical and managerial implications.     

Highlighting the Darker Side of Liberal Internationalism for a Counter-Colonizing Consumerism

By embracing counter-colonialism at large, this article challenges the subordination and eventual complicity of management and marketing studies with the dark(er) side of liberal internationalism pasts. We show how the official history of consumerism in marketing overlooks important events related to the US liberal internationalism project during and before the Cold War period, which are closely associated by other areas of knowledge in the United States with the hegemonic plans of the United States in becoming the sole global power in the post-World War II, at the expense of the Third World movement that aimed to bring independence to the Global South.     

Growth paths and survival chances: An application of Gambler's Ruin theory

This paper links new firm survival with growth, with a focus on the patterns in firms' growth paths. We theorise a Gambler's Ruin framework by arguing that new firm performance is best modelled as a random walk process, but that survival is nonrandom and depends primarily on the stock of accumulated resources. A firm's resources are either there when the business begins or are generated by successful periods — ‘wins’. The empirical section tracks, over six years, the sales and survival/non-survival of 6247 UK start-ups which all began trading in the same quarter of 2004. We do not find strong evidence in favour of a taxonomy of growth paths, because we observe that every possible growth path seems to occur with roughly equal probability. However, we observe that growth paths influence subsequent survival. Controlling for lagged size, we observe that longer lags of growth, and even start-up size, have significant effects on survival.     

How much does an Illegal Insider Trade?

This paper examines the choice of trade size by an illegal insider. Previous literature (i.e. Meulbroek 1992) tends to focus on the price impact of such a trader. Using a unique data set hand‐collected from the litigation reports of the Securities and Exchange Commission and court cases, we provide evidence, which suggests that the size of an illegal insider's trade is a function of the value of his private information, the probability of detection and the expected penalty if detected. Our results have important implication for security market regulators.     

Group service recovery strategies effectiveness: The moderating effects of group size and relational distance

The extant service recovery literature focuses on consumers' responses to individual failures. However, group service failures are in fact common, but they have received insufficient research attention. This study contributes to theory and practice by applying social impact theory to explain the social nature of group failures. Findings from two studies show that group size and relational distance substantially affect consumers' response to group service recovery strategies. Specifically, private economic recovery creates less consumer satisfaction as group size increases, whereas consumers with a distant social relationship are more satisfied with public recovery for both economic recovery and social recovery. However, consumers with close relationships are more satisfied with public economic recovery and private social recovery. Apart from offering practical insights, this study expands the theoretical understanding of service failures, suggesting that they occur in a complex social ecology instead of relatively simple dyadic interactions between service providers and consumers.     

Storytelling during retail sales encounters

Many researchers have emphasized the importance of communication in personal selling. Psychologists and researchers in management and advertising have recognized the importance of communication via stories, but this has not extended to research in sales. This paper uses a framework developed from exploratory field work and the literature on stories to investigate storytelling by retail salespeople in three similar experimental studies. The experiments manipulate personal versus business stories across three different topic areas: entity, product, and digression. The results suggest that product stories told from a business point of view may be most effective in enhancing consumers’ purchase intentions in onetime sales encounters.