Boris Bartikowski

Global megatrends and the web: convergence of globalization, networks and innovation

Proactive companies analyze global megatrends to anticipate and leverage future opportunities in the marketplace. Limited body of academic research ex-ists to facilitate global megatrends forecasting. The objective of this paper is to identify important global megatrends that are being facilitated by the rise of the World Wide Web. An attempt is also made to explore how these global megatrends are leading to the emergence of various global consumer trends. This thought-piece identifies three major global mega-trends, namely Globalization, Rise of Networks and Open Innovation, which are being facilitated by the global expansion of the web.

Attitude contagion in consumer opinion platforms: Posters and lurkers.

The study details why and how product reviews from consumer opinion platforms affect individual users’ brand buying behavior. Drawing on social theories, the authors predict that consumers’ perceptions of other consumers’ product reviews affect brand buying intentions through two intervening variables: product- and brand-related attitudes. Moreover, the authors investigate whether these relationships are contingent on user type (i.e., active posters or passive lurkers). The empirical results support a multiple mediation framework in which product- and brand attitudes mediate the effects of consumer product reviews on individual brand buying intentions. In addition, consumer product reviews appear to more strongly affect the brand-related attitudes of posters than lurkers. Lurkers, who make up the majority of opinion platform users, are much less influenced by the opinions of others than posters. Encouraging variations in poster- and lurker rates may be an effective means for companies to manage and control consumer-to-consumer communication.

How Online Consumer Reviews Influence Blog Users’ Product- and Brand Preferences: Diffrences Between Lurkers and Posters

The study investigates how consumer generated product reviews influence other consumers’ product and brand preferences. The authors build on the Theory of Reasoned Action and theories of self-identification to conceptualize how product-related opinions of a blog community relate to the individual blog user’s product- and brand attitudes, and ultimately to the blog user’s brand purchasing intentions. A study with 270 online blog users shows that the opinions of the blog community are positively related to brand intentions via two mediating variables, the blog user’s attitudes about the product and the brand. Moreover, the study shows that these mediated relationships are moderated by the type of blog users which may be active or passive. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Ethnic Minority Consumers as Brand Ambassadors: Culture, Adaptation, and Global Brand Advocacy of Chinese Migrants in Canada and France

Within most developed economies, population growth comes primarily through immigration from emerging economies, rather than through natural increase. The market potential of consumers emigrating from emerging markets is obviously enormous. What is less obvious is whether well-known (primarily Western) brands will continue to reap the lion’s share of their respective product-markets, given the relative ease of technology transfer, the increasingly sophisticated marketing know-how of emerging market competitors, and the proclivity for many immigrant consumers to champion their home-grown brands over host-country or foreign alternatives, a phenomenon that may be on the rise as groups reassert their identities in the face of rampant globalization. Whereas ethnic minorities have attracted much research attention, studies on how they may disseminate global brands is scarce. Immigrant consumers may fulfill a vital role as brand ambassadors, by encouraging a two-way interchange of information about brands from their home and host countries. This dynamic interchange has not yet been studied before. Brands play an important role in human life where they help consumers to express themselves or manifest their identity and place within social networks. Matters of identity may be especially salient for those consumers that migrate across international borders, as they are liable to be more conscious of their ethnic and cultural differences. This research focuses on migrant Chinese living in two countries (Canada and France), and in particular how their cultural dispositions—in terms of how Chinese ethnic identity, cosmopolitanism, and host acculturation—drive brand advocacy behaviors of Chinese home- and Canadian/French host-country brands. Global brands are defined as those brands within a given product category that are recognized as global, but also clearly associated with being from a particular nation (e.g., Apple, L’Oreal, Lenovo). We propose a research model regarding the direct and indirect roles played by cultural dispositions in promoting and adopting home and host-country brands, respectively. We first validate the presupposition that ethnic identity directly drives the advocacy of global brands that originate from the home-country. Scrutinizing the connection between cosmopolitanism and brand advocacy towards host-country brands, we demonstrate that this linkage is mediated by the degree of acculturation to the host culture. These relationships are contrasted for the two host countries, which differ in terms of their immigration policies on the one hand and on the relative density of fellow ethnic-group members on the other. We also considered that the duration of immigrants’ stay in the host country may shape the aforementioned relationships. Hypotheses were tested with data drawn from short-term Chinese sojourners living in France/Canada, as well as from Chinese that are more permanently settled. The results reveal asymmetries in the functioning of the antecedents of brand advocacy behavior between short-term sojourners and long-term immigrants. Lastly, we explored category differences for Chinese and Canadian/French global brands from eight product categories.

Conceptualizing Effects of Cultural Web Site Adaptation on Consumers’ Online Trust

The global online population has now surpassed 1.2 billon users and about seventy percent of these are not English speakers (internetworldstats.com, 2007). While English is still the language with the highest penetration rate on the Internet, other language Web sites show much greater usage growth rates (Internetworldstats.com). According to a recent survey across eight nations, more than half of consumers buy only from Web sites that present information in their local language (DePalma et al., 2006). Extending online business success beyond the national level may require online marketing adaptation to the needs and wants of culturally different target populations. A recent survey found that more than 88 percent of Internet executives of multinational companies think Web site cultural adaptation is important or somewhat important to their company, and most of them see it as an important strategic priority (Petro et al., 2007). A business example advocating a Web site localization strategy is that of Microsoft Network’s (MSN’s) UK Web sites which could not be internationally distributed because of its local British flavor (Ferranti 1999).