Andrew T. Stephen

Customer-to-Customer Interactions: Broadening the Scope of Word of Mouth Research

The increasing emphasis on understanding the antecedents and consequences of customer-to-customer (C2C) interactions is one of the essential developments of customer management in recent years. This interest is driven much by new online environments that enable customers to be connected in numerous new ways and also supply researchers’ access to rich C2C data. These developments present an opportunity and a challenge for firms and researchers who need to identify the aspects of C2C research on which to focus, as well as develop research methods that take advantage of these new data. The aim here is to take a broad view of C2C interactions and their effects and to highlight areas of significant research interest in this domain. The authors look at four main areas: the different dimensions of C2C interactions; social system issues related to individuals and to online communities; C2C context issues including product, channel, relational and market characteristics; and the identification, modeling, and assessment of business outcomes of C2C interactions.

The Effects of Traditional and Social Earned Media on Sales: A Study of a Microlending Marketplace

Marketers distinguish between three types of media: paid (e.g., advertising), owned (e.g., company website), and earned (e.g., publicity). The effects of paid media on sales have been extensively covered in the marketing literature. The effects of earned media, however, have received limited attention. This paper examines how two types of earned media, traditional (e.g., publicity and press mentions) and social (e.g., blog and online community posts), affect sales and activity in each other. Fourteen months of daily sales and media activity data from a microlending marketplace website are analyzed using a multivariate autoregressive time series model. The authors find that (i) both traditional and social earned media affect sales, (ii) the per-event sales impact of traditional earned media activity is larger than for social earned media, (iii) however, because of the greater frequency of social earned media activity, after adjusting for event frequency social earned media’s sales elasticity is significantly greater than traditional earned media’s, and (iv) social earned media appears to play an important role in driving traditional earned media activity.

Intrinsic vs. Image-Related Utility in Social Media: Why Do People Contribute Content to Twitter?

We empirically study the motivations of users to contribute content to social media in the context of the popular microblogging site Twitter. We focus on noncommercial users who do not benefit financially from their contributions. Previous literature suggests that there are two main types of utility that motivate these users to post content: intrinsic utility and image-related utility. We leverage the fact that these two types of utility give rise to different predictions as to whether users should increase their contributions when their number of followers increases. To address the issue that the number of followers is endogenous, we conducted a field experiment in which we exogenously added followers or follow requests, in the case of protected accounts to a set of users over a period of time and compared their posting activities to those of a control group. We estimated each treated users utility function using a dynamic discrete choice model. Although our results are consistent with both types of utility being at play, our model suggests that image-related utility is larger for most users. We discuss the implications of our findings for the evolution of Twitter and the type of value firms may derive from such platforms in the future.

Are Close Friends the Enemy? Online Social Networks, Self-Esteem, and Self-Control

Online social networks are used by hundreds of millions of people every day, but little is known about their effect on behavior. In five experiments, the authors demonstrate that social network use enhances self-esteem in users who are focused on close friends (i.e., strong ties) while browsing their social network. This momentary increase in self-esteem reduces self-control, leading those focused on strong ties to display less self-control after browsing a social network. Additionally, the authors present evidence suggesting that greater social network use is associated with a higher body mass index and higher levels of credit card debt for individuals with strong ties to their social network. This research extends previous findings by demonstrating that social networks primarily enhance self-esteem for those focused on strong ties during social network use. Additionally, this research has implications for policy makers because self-control is an important mechanism for maintaining social order and well-being.

Which Products Are Best Suited to Mobile Advertising? A Field Study of Mobile Display Advertising Effects on Consumer Attitudes and Intentions

Mobile advertising is one of the fastest-growing advertising formats. In 2013, global spending on mobile advertising was approximately

Microfinance Decision Making: A Field Study of Prosocial Lending

16.7 billion, and it is expected to exceed

A Thematic Exploration of Digital, Social Media, and Mobile Marketing: Research Evolution from 2000 to 2015 and an Agenda for Future Inquiry

62.8 billion by 2017. The most prevalent type of mobile advertising is mobile display advertising (MDA), which takes the form of banners on mobile web pages and in mobile applications. This article examines which product characteristics are likely to be associated with MDA campaigns that are effective in increasing consumers’ (1) favorable attitudes toward products and (2) purchase intentions. Data from a large-scale test-control field experiment covering 54 U.S. MDA campaigns that ran between 2007 and 2010 and involved 39,946 consumers show that MDA campaigns significantly increased consumers’ favorable attitudes and purchase intentions only when the campaigns advertised products that were higher (vs. lower) involvement and utilitarian (vs. hedonic). The authors explain this finding using established theories of information processing and persuasion and suggest that when MDAs work effectively, they do so by triggering consumers to recall and process previously stored product information.

Explaining the Power-Law Degree Distribution in a Social Commerce Network

Prosocial lending in the form of micro-financing, small uncollateralized loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world, has recently emerged as a leading contender as a cure for world poverty. Our research investigates, in a field setting with real world and consequential data, the characteristics of borrowers that engender lending. We observe that lenders favor individual borrowers over groups or consortia of borrowers, a pattern consistent with the identifiable victim effect. They also favor borrowers that are socially proximate to themselves. Across three dimensions of social distance (gender, occupation, and first name initial) lenders prefer to give to those who are more like themselves. Finally, we discuss policy implications of these findings.

Consumers’ Trust in Feelings as Information

Over the past 15 years, digital media platforms have revolutionized marketing, offering new ways to reach, inform, engage, sell to, learn about, and provide service to customers. As a means of taking stock of academic works ability to contribute to this revolution, this article tracks the changes in scholarly researchers’ perspectives on three major digital, social media, and mobile (DSMM) marketing themes from 2000 to 2015. The authors first use keyword counts from the premier general marketing journals to gain a macro-level view of the shifting importance of various DSMM topics since 2000. They then identify key themes emerging in five-year time frames during this period: (1) DSMM as a facilitator of individual expression, (2) DSMM as decision support tool, and (3) DSMM as a market intelligence source. In both academic research to date and corresponding practitioner discussion, there is much to appreciate. However, there are also several shortcomings of extant research that have limited its relevance and created points of disconnect between academia and practice. Finally, in light of this, an agenda for future research based on emerging research topics is advanced.

Lower Connectivity Is Better: The Effects of Network Structure on Redundancy of Ideas and Customer Innovativeness in Interdependent Ideation Tasks

Social commerce is an emerging trend in which online shops create referral hyperlinks to other shops in the same online marketplace. We study the evolution of a social commerce network in a large online marketplace. Our dataset starts before the birth of the network (at which points shops were not linked to each other) and includes the birth of the network. The network under study exhibits a typical power-law degree distribution. We empirically compare a set of edge formation mechanisms (including preferential attachment and triadic closure) that may explain the emergence of this property. Our results suggest that the evolution of the network and the emergence of its power-law degree distribution are better explained by a network evolution mechanism that relies on vertex attributes that are not based on the structure of the network. Specifically, our analysis suggests that the power-law degree distribution emerges because shops prefer to connect to shops with more diverse assortments, and assortment diversity follows a power-law distribution. Shops with more diverse assortments are more attractive to link to because they are more likely to bring traffic from consumers browsing the WWW. Therefore, our results also imply that social commerce networks should not be studied in isolation, but rather in the context of the broader network in which they are embedded (the WWW).