Andreas M. Kaplan

Consumer Use and Business Potential of Virtual Worlds: The Case of “Second Life”

Abstract Several months ago, the virtual social world “Second Life” (SL) received considerable interest in both the popular and business press. Based on a series of 29 qualitative, in-depth interviews, this article investigates what types of behaviors consumers show within this environment and what business opportunities it offers for companies. The results indicate that users do not consider SL as a mere computer game but as an extension of their real lives. This has implications for how marketing managers can use this online application that go beyond those known from traditional computer or online games.

Flagship Brand Stores within Virtual Worlds: The Impact of Virtual Store Exposure on Real-Life Attitude toward the Brand and Purchase Intent

Virtual hyperrealities, also referred to as virtual social worlds, have experienced increasing managerial interest in recent years. Although they have also received some attention in the academic literature, the extent to which corporate presences within such environments can influence attitude toward the brand and purchase intent in real life remains unclear. Based on a survey conducted among 580 Second Life residents, we show that exposure to flagship brand stores within virtual worlds positively influences attitude toward the associated brand and real life purchase intent. We furthermore show that a users purchase experience (shopping frequency, purchase frequency, spending per purchase) and the gratification derived from the use of their purchases have a significant moderating effect on these relationships. Our results are of managerial and theoretical importance as they provide empirical evidence for spill-over effects between virtual worlds and real life and help to develop recommendations on optimal store design within virtual social worlds.

An Empirical Analysis of Attitudinal and Behavioral Reactions Toward the Abandonment of Unprofitable Customer Relationships

The management of unprofitable customer relationships and in particular their abandonment is a topic that has received increasing interest in both managerial decision making and academic research. However, little is known about the attitudinal and behavioral reactions that companies should expect from current and potential customers in response to such strategies. Based on an online study of 773 customers, we show that the majority of current/potential customers react with affective or cognitive responses toward unprofitable customer abandonment, whereas salient behavioral attitude components are less frequent. In addition, we show that different attitude components lead to different consequences for the abandoning firm and that the salience of behavioral attitude components tends to be associated with more negative reactions. Finally, we show that the potential negative consequences of unprofitable customer abandonment for current customers can be compensated for by improvements in core service quality.

The impact of unprofitable customer abandonment on current customers' exit, voice, and loyalty intentions: an empirical analysis

Purpose – The management of unprofitable customer relationships and particularly their abandonment is a topic that has received increasing interest among practitioners and researchers over recent years. Within this manuscript, the authors aim to analyze the impact of unprofitable customer abandonment on the abandoning firms current customers, specifically their exit, voice, and loyalty intentions toward the abandoning firm.Design/methodology/approach – The study is based on an online experiment conducted among 385 US customers. Respondents were allocated randomly to one of ten conditions (five levels of tie strength x two types of abandonment strategy) and exposed to a scenario describing a customer abandonment decision implemented by a mobile phone provider. The resulting data were analyzed using a combination of analysis of variance (ANOVA) and structural equation modeling.Findings – The study shows that current customers are significantly more likely to respond actively to unprofitable customer abando...

The Influence of Observed Heterogeneity on Path Coefficient Significance: Technology Acceptance Within the Marketing Discipline

The technology acceptance model (TAM) is arguably one of the most widely used models for studying user adoption in the information systems discipline and has started to be used increasingly within the marketing area. While two of its three main hypotheses have received consistent empirical support, the same is not true for the remaining relationship (i.e., the influence of perceived ease of use on the behavioral intention to adopt a system; PEOU-BI). Previously, this empirical contradiction has been explained by introducing the concept of task motivation borrowed from Davis, Bagozzi, and Warshaw (1992). Our paper provides a different explanation. We show that for the same task (and, hence, the same task motivation), the significance can also depend on observed population heterogeneity. We do this by applying partial least squares (PLS) structural equation modeling (SEM) to data stemming from a survey among approximately 2,000 individuals regarding their intention to adopt a customized newspaper. Our findings result in the following three contributions: first, our results provide an alternative explanation for the inconsistent empirical support of the PEOU-BI link within the TAM. Second, we provide a methodological contribution by proposing an approach to control for gamma change when analyzing moderating effects using PLS analysis. Third, our study highlights the importance of conducting a statistical power analysis in order to determine critical t-values in the context of a PLS path analysis.

User Participation Within Virtual Worlds

This chapter’s objective is to highlight the potential that virtual worlds and their best known ambassador Second Life offer in the area of mass customization. After an introduction to virtual worlds in general, three case studies of companies (Dell, Philips, and Sears) applying mass customization and related techniques in virtual worlds will provide an overview of the potential of this new medium. Results show that both company representatives and virtual world consumers are excited about the idea of virtual mass customization, but that several problems and limitations still have to be overcome.

Social Media, the Digital Revolution, and the Business of Media

Social media, defined as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content” (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010, p. 61), have been a game-changing development for corporations and individuals alike (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2010). Such applications as Twitter (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2011), Instagram, or Foursquare (Kaplan, 2012), which did not even exist a decade ago, form an essential part of today’s media and communications landscape. Wikipedia (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2014), created in 2001, now comprises approximately 35 million articles in 288 different languages. Facebook, launched in 2004, connects more than 1.4 billion active members all over the world, a user base that is larger than the populations of Europe and North America combined. YouTube, founded in 2005, processes more than 3 billion searches per month, making it the second largest search engine behind industry giant Google (which happens to own YouTube). All of this means that social media are no longer simply a form of amusement for younger generations. They affect everyone, consumers as well as organizations. Business executives, consultants, and decision makers alike all struggle with understanding and decrypting how to best make use of the various social media applications that are available in the marketplace. Notably, this process involves not only managing one’s online presence but also handling the increasing availability of data from social media applications (Peters, Chen, Kaplan, Ognibeni, & Pauwels, 2013), such as corporate or user-generated content, user profiles, and habits, as well as information, such as geo-locations. Access to such data has provided firms with a variety