Alexa K. Fox

Marketing active transportation to school to improve children’s health: Utilizing parental perspectives from an inner-city environment

ABSTRACT Thirty years ago, nearly half of the children in the United States walked or rode their bikes to school. Today, less than 15% of children actively commute to school. With the growing obesity epidemic, encouraging children to walk or bike to school has become a national priority. This research examines factors that influence parental decisions allowing their children to walk to school in an urban environment to identify effective marketing and communication strategies to reach those parents. Results indicate differences in parental perspectives across populations; suggestions for effectively marketing the Safe Routes to School program to minority populations are provided.

The face of contagion: consumer response to service failure depiction in online reviews

Online consumer reviews (OCRs) have emerged as a particularly important type of user-generated information about a brand because of their widespread adoption and influence on consumer decision-making. Much of the existing OCR research focuses on quantifiable OCR features such as star ratings and volume. More research that examines the influence of review elements, aside from numeric ratings, such as the verbatim text, particularly in services contexts is needed. The purpose of this research is to investigate the impact of service failures on consumer arousal and emotions.,The authors present three behavioral experiments that manipulate service failure and linguistic elements of OCRs by using galvanic skin response, survey measures and automated facial expression analysis.,Negative OCRs lead to the greatest levels of arousal when consumers read OCRs. Service failure severity impacts anger, and referential cohesion, an observable property of text that helps a reader better understand ideas in the text, negatively moderates the relationship between service failure severity and anger.,The authors are among the first to empirically test the effect of emotional contagion in a user-generated content context, demonstrating that it can occur when consumers read such content, even if they did not experience the events being described. The research uses a self-report and physiological measures to assess consumer perceptions, arousal and emotions related to service failures, increasing the robustness of the literature. These findings contribute to the marketing literature on OCRs in service failures, physiological measures of consumers’ emotions, the negativity bias and emotional contagion in a user-generated content context.

Selfie-marketing: exploring narcissism and self-concept in visual user-generated content on social media

Purpose The present research examines selfie-marketing from a consumer behavior perspective. Creating and sharing selfies is gaining popularity among millennials. The authors seek to understand how this popularity relates to classic research on narcissism and self-concept, and to determine the effectiveness of selfie-marketing in visual user-generated content. Design/methodology/approach A mixed methods approach is used across two studies. Study 1’s qualitative exploration uses the grounded theory method by analyzing semi-structured interviews with millennials. The findings produce three research propositions. These propositions are further developed into testable hypotheses in Study 2’s quantitative investigation, featuring analysis of the variance of online survey data collected from millennials. Findings The findings suggest that narcissism positively relates to millennials’ attitudes toward and intent to participate in selfie-marketing on visual content-sharing apps. Results also demonstrate that mill...

Risks, Benefits, and Competitive Interference: Consumer Perceptions of Prescription Drug Versus Dietary Supplement Advertising

ABSTRACT Direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs has been a controversial topic ever since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) modified the advertising regulations for such products. The controversy generally surrounds the risk/benefit ratio and whether or not the practice helps or hurts consumers. Consumers often have nonpharmaceutical options that purportedly solve similar problems as prescription drugs. These may include a class of products labeled “dietary supplements.” Supplements are a distinct product category, and advertisements for these products are not held to the same regulatory standards as prescription drugs. The current research begins by outlining the regulatory standards for both prescription drugs and dietary supplements. We then focus on one particular category (erectile dysfunction) of drugs to determine how consumers perceive the risks and benefits provided in the advertising. This research also investigates the potential influence of competitive interference in advertising on consumer perceptions. Results indicate that male consumers do perceive the risks associated with the use of a prescription drug (Viagra). Moreover, findings suggest that competitive interference may play a role in consumer perceptions of the prescription drug and the dietary supplement. Implications are discussed and future research directions are offered.

PRIVATE INFORMATION IN A SOCIAL WORLD: ASSESSING CONSUMERS’ FEAR AND UNDERSTANDING OF SOCIAL MEDIA PRIVACY

As companies connect with consumers on social media, privacy becomes a significant area of concern. This research assesses consumers’ understanding of social media privacy policies (CUSPP) and fear related to those policies. Study one develops a scale to measure CUSPP. Study two examines the influence of text, audio, and pictorial cues used in social media privacy policies, on consumers’ CUSPP and physiologically-measured fear. Results suggest presentational cues affect CUSPP and fear of social media privacy policies. This research is among the first to use self-report and physiological measures to assess consumer understanding and emotional reactions in a social media context.

Intercollegiate Social Media Education Ecosystem

The popularity of social media among students and practitioners has encouraged marketing educators to find ways to incorporate social media into their classrooms. We offer results from an intercollegiate collaboration that provides an innovative learning environment through a social media education ecosystem. Participating students discuss current marketing topics with peers, marketing practitioners, and faculty to reinforce course concepts, improve learning perceptions, and increase professional communication skills and networking opportunities. An initial exploratory study provides a snapshot of Twitter analytics, illustrating the reach of students’ marketing-related discussions. Next, survey data collected from students show increased learning satisfaction and favorable behavioral intentions. Finally, tweets from the 12-week project were analyzed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. Results suggest that participants improved their professional communication skills while using language that provokes greater cognitive processes. Implications for marketing educators and future directions for the project are also provided.

I Don’t Think It’s Real: Exploring the Genres of Reality Programming: An Abstract

Various issues regarding television viewership have been studied in the marketing literature, including media violence (i.e., Shanahan et al., 2003), children’s programming (i.e., Wright et al., 2005), and advertising regulation (i.e., Calfee & Ringold, 1994). Viewers have increasingly turned their attention to a new genre of television entertainment – reality television (“TV”). Reality TV is characterized by the concept that ordinary people, as opposed to professional actors, serve as the main characters of a television program (Reiss & Wiltz, 2004).

Structured Abstract: All Online Complaints Are Not Created Equal, Corporate Social Media Pages as Customer Service Channels

Online complaint sharing has grown increasingly popular in recent years, and researchers have chosen to frame such complaints within the negative word-of-mouth domain instead of the customer service domain. The reason for this is quite logical, when considering the type of the Internet sites that researchers examine, such as online review sites, anti-brand sites, or blogs (e.g., Gregoire et al. 2010; Hennig-Thurau et al. 2004; Ward and Ostrom 2006). These types of sites are non-firm-managed online environments (i.e., neutral third-party sites), which foster consumer-to-consumer communication. Reasons why consumers complain on such sites include warning other consumers, altruism, venting negative feelings, or seeking revenge against a firm by sharing negative experiences with others (Gregoire et al. 2009; Hennig-Thurau et al. 2004; Sparks and Browning 2010), which are appropriate to classify as word-of-mouth activities.

Milk, juice, or cola? Exploring the effect of product placement on children’s attitudes and behavior

ABSTRACT Childhood obesity is a significant public health concern, and scholars and academicians have proposed the use of successful marketing and advertising tactics as a means of influencing healthy behaviors. This research investigates product placement to assess its potential effects on attitudes and behavior when utilized in an animated children’s television show. Results from an experiment suggest that multiple product placements may affect children’s attitudes toward certain drinks, but also suggest that a child’s existing favorite drink is a stronger predictor of actual beverage choice. Implications are provided.

Cross-Cultural Issues in Sales Behavior Research

Sales researchers and managers have long sought to identify and promote effective selling practices that improve firm performance. One prominent stream of relational sales research has dealt with the concept of adaptive selling behavior (ASB). A meta-analysis of over 31,000 salespeople by Franke and Park (2006) identified antecedents and outcomes of ASB, but focused largely on U.S. salespeople. Thus, relatively little is known about such sales practices in alternative cultural contexts.