Emma K. Macdonald

Brand Awareness Effects on Consumer Decision Making for a Common, Repeat Purchase Product:: A Replication

This article is a replication of a study of Hoyer and Brown that used a controlled experiment to examine the role of brand awareness in the consumer choice process. The replication used the same methods, but with a different (but similar) product category, a larger sample, and a sample group that included experienced as well as inexperienced consumers. Results support the original studys findings that brand awareness is a dominant choice tactic among awareness group subjects. Subjects choosing from a set of brands with marked awareness differentials showed an overwhelming preference for the high awareness brand, despite quality and price differentials. They also made their decisions faster than subjects in the nonawareness condition and sampled fewer brands. In a surprising finding, respondents use of the awareness choice heuristic did not seem to decline steadily over repeated choice trials, but rather showed something of a U-shaped pattern, with subjects returning to the high awareness brand in the latter choice trials. Little support was found for Hoyer and Browns finding that subjects in the no brand awareness conditions chose the quality brand on the final trial more often that those in the awareness differential conditions. In summary, awareness differentials seem to be a powerful influence on brand choice in a repeat purchase consumer product context. Consumers show a strong tendency to use awareness as a heuristic and show a degree of inertia in changing from the habit of using this heuristic.

How Business Customers Judge Solutions: Solution Quality and Value in Use

Many manufacturers look to business solutions to provide growth; however, success is far from guaranteed, and it is unclear how such solutions can create superior perceived value. This article explores what constitutes value for customers from solutions over time—conceptualized as “value in use”—and how this arises from quality perceptions of the solutions components. The authors develop a framework for solution quality and value in use through 36 interviews combining repertory grid technique and means-end chains. The findings significantly extend the extant view of quality as a function of the suppliers products and services, and show that customers also assess the quality of their own resources and processes, as well as the quality of the joint resource integration process. The authors report that value in use corresponds not just to collective, organizational goals but also to individuals’ goals, a finding that strongly contrasts with prior research. Four moderators of the quality–value relationship demonstrate customer heterogeneity across both firms and roles within what the authors term the “usage center.” When shifting toward solutions, manufacturers require very different approaches to market research; account management; solution design; and quality control, including the need for value-auditing processes.

Consumer savvy: conceptualisation and measurement

The notion of savvy consumers increasingly appears in the e-marketing and e-management literatures, usually in discussions about the importance of consumer-centricity. A synthesis of the literature identifies six broad characteristics of these savvy consumers: they are enabled by competencies in relation to technological sophistication, interpersonal networking, online networking and marketing/advertising literacy, and they are empowered by consumer self-efficacy and by their expectations of firms. This understanding of consumers is formalised by developing a SAVVY scale. Standard scale development procedures are applied using a sample from an online panel of consumers. As part of the process of validating the new scale, comparisons are made with related, established scales – focusing on measures of consumer advantage (persuasion knowledge and market mavens) and consumer disadvantage (confusion arising from over-choice and vulnerability at the shopping interface). Our findings show the value of formal, empirically-grounded measures of consumer savvy, something that has been absent from many previous commentaries on the characteristics of savvy new consumers.

Measuring communication channel experiences and their influence on voting in the 2010 British General Election

Abstract This article describes how a unique research approach was used to evaluate how different communication channel experiences influenced floating voters during the campaign period of the 2010 British general election. Most previous research focuses on voting behaviour as a single cross-sectional phenomenon, and on self-assessments of the relative importance of marketing communications – during, or more typically after, the campaign. This study outlines the influence of different marketing communications (including word-of-mouth and PR through mediated communications) over time using a longitudinal panel of floating voters and a real-time tracking approach. Results indicate the relative importance of the debates, used in 2010 for the first time in the UK, and more surprisingly the relative importance of party election broadcasts and posters.

How organisations generate and use customer insight

Abstract The generation and use of customer insight in marketing decisions is poorly understood, partly due to difficulties in obtaining research access and partly because market-based learning theory views knowledge as a fixed asset. However, customer insight takes many forms, arrives at the organisation from increasingly diverse sources and requires more than mere dissemination if it is to be useful. A multiple case study approach is used to explore managerial practices for insight generation and use. Multiple informants from each of four organisations in diverse sectors were interviewed. Findings reveal the importance of value alignment and value monitoring across the insight demand chain, to complement the information processing emphasis of extant research. Within the firm, the study suggests the importance of customer insight conduct practices including insight format, the role of automation and insight shepherding, to complement the much-researched process perspective. The study provides a basis for assessing the effectiveness of insight processes by both practitioners and scholars.

Tracking the impact of media on voter choice in real time: A Bayesian dynamic joint model

ABSTRACT Commonly used methods of evaluating the impact of marketing communications during political elections struggle to account for respondents’ exposures to these communications due to the problems associated with recall bias. In addition, they completely fail to account for the impact of mediated or earned communications, such as newspaper articles or television news, that are typically not within the control of the advertising party, nor are they effectively able to monitor consumers’ perceptual responses over time. This study based on a new data collection technique using cell-phone text messaging (called real-time experience tracking or RET) offers the potential to address these weaknesses. We propose an RET-based model of the impact of communications and apply it to a unique choice situation: voting behavior during the 2010 UK general election, which was dominated by three political parties. We develop a Bayesian zero-inflated dynamic multinomial choice model that enables the joint modeling of: the interplay and dynamics associated with the individual voters choice intentions over time, actual vote, and the heterogeneity in the exposure to marketing communications over time. Results reveal the differential impact over time of paid and earned media, demonstrate a synergy between the two, and show the particular importance of exposure valence and not just frequency, contrary to the predominant practitioner emphasis on share-of-voice metrics. Results also suggest that while earned media have a reducing impact on voting intentions as the final choice approaches, their valence continues to influence the final vote: a difference between drivers of intentions and behavior that implies that exposure valence remains critically important close to the final brand choice. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Customer Experience Management Practices: A Systematic Literature Review (Abstract)

What is the firm’s role in influencing their customer’s experience? Despite its prominence and popularity in practice, it is unclear what customer experience management (CEM) as an overall business focus means or entails. To establish what is known about CEM and conceptualize a construct for it, we systematically and critically review existing empirical evidence. This study identifies 37 studies that explicitly research CEM within a business-to-consumer (B2C) context, and from a firm’s point of view. The authors find 26 CEM practices, each falling within 3 types of CEM: (1) strategizing, (2) operating, and (3) enabling the customer experience. Emerging from our study is the emphasis on studying and designing experience journeys and fostering an experience-centric organizational orientation. Implications for marketing management strategy emphasize the need to focus on experience quality and not just product, channel, or service quality.

A Systematic Literature Review of Practices in Customer Experience Management: An Abstract

What is the firm’s role in influencing their customer’s experience? Despite its prominence and popularity in practice, it is unclear what customer experience management (CEM) as an overall business focus means or entails. To establish what is known about CEM and conceptualize a construct for it, we systematically and critically review existing empirical evidence. This study identifies 37 studies that explicitly research CEM within a business-to-consumer (B2C) context and from a firm’s point of view. The authors find 26 CEM practices, each falling within three types of CEM: (1) strategizing, (2) operating, and (3) enabling the customer experience. Emerging from our study is the emphasis on studying and designing experience journeys and fostering an experience-centric organizational orientation. Implications for marketing management strategy emphasize the need to focus on experience quality and not just product, channel, or service quality.

An Integrated Model of the Antecedents and Consequences of Touchpoints: An Abstract

The view has emerged that customers base their choice decisions on their holistic customer experience with different brands across diverse touchpoints, from advertising to peer recommendation. These touchpoints have mainly, however, been studied separately, raising the question how they combine in influencing choice. Furthermore, most research assumes the touchpoints themselves to be independent variables. To address these weaknesses, this paper develops a conceptual model integrating antecedents and consequences of touchpoints into an attitude-based behavioural intention model, also incorporating competitive effects. The paper examines how touchpoints are shaped by the prior experiences and the customer’s prior attitudes. Furthermore, it analyses the influence of touchpoint encounters on brand attitudes and behavioural intentions, both directly and indirectly through the mediator of attitude towards the touchpoint. The model is empirically tested through partial least squares structural equation modelling with a real-time experience tracking dataset. The paper finds support for the notion that customers’ affective reactions to touchpoint encounters are based on their prior brand attitude. Moreover, touchpoints are shown to influence brand attitudes and behavioural intention, both directly and indirectly through their influence on attitudes towards the touchpoint as hypothesised. In addition, touchpoints within and outside the organisation’s control are shown to exert differential effects on both attitudes and intentions. Lastly, brand attitudes are confirmed to be the main driver of behavioural intention, with the inclusion of competitive effects significantly increasing the predictive validity of the model. The research thereby extends and integrates previous work on advertising, store experiences, earned media and user-generated content. It provides marketers with a rational basis for resource allocation and experience design.

Consumer Engagement: Metric or Mantra? Scale Development, Validation and Application (An Abstract)

Practitioner adoption of consumer engagement as a metric remains problematic. Just as the scholastic world has begun to regard engagement as a critical construct that can lead to consumption, brand-supporting behaviours and ultimately purchases, practitioner discourse has grown pessimistic if not disdainful towards it—a view encapsulated in Martin Weigel’s influential description of engagement as a verb, not a metric and ‘fashionable but bankrupt’ (Weigel 2010). To marketers, engagement remains a handy ‘mantra’ to legitimise a marketing strategy or embellish the provenance of a digital technology. The behavioural algorithms of programmatic buying are the preferred practitioner indicators of performance or ROI. There are, however, excellent conceptual reasons for believing engagement to be an important construct in shaping consumer behaviour (Mollen and Wilson 2010; Hollebeek et al. 2016). The motivation for this study is, therefore, to establish consumer engagement as a sustainable metric, demonstrably capable of widespread adoption. We selected Website Publisher engagement as a context. A systematic literature review generated a preliminary scale of 150 items representing five core dimensions. This was reduced to 60 items using an academic and practitioner expert panel. A survey of 12,000 consumers across 14 websites under the BSkyB umbrella was used to refine the scale into a parsimonious 12 items, grouped into four dimensions: cognitive processing, temporal needs, self-congruence and social identity. In two smaller studies, the scale was tested against advertising performance metrics, namely, ad and brand awareness, message recall and brand attitudes. Finally, the scale was applied, through a survey of 3000 consumers, across a broad range of websites representing a spread of content genres, to establish nomological validity and investigate further consequences of consumer engagement. Results suggest that (1) outcomes of engagement include website trust, satisfaction, loyalty and WOM and (2) a relationship between the cognitive–affective engagement construct and engagement behaviour exist, but customer heterogeneity is present in this relationship. The study supports the scholastic view that consumer engagement is a critical measure, central in its relationship to key predictors of marketing return (Calder et al. 2015). However, the implication for practitioners, as a result of the investigation into the experiential–behavioural axis, is that the current practice of reliance on behavioural and temporal proxies for CE is not robust. An engagement score is proposed that practitioners can use supplement existing measures and substantively improve their brand and media auditing—an exercise that may ameliorate practitioner antipathy to experiential metrics and effect a productive reconciliation with academic opinion. Further research is called for to explore whether such a standardised score can indeed be used as a universal measure, or whether context-specific measures are required.