Gavin Northey

The Role of M-Commerce Readiness in Emerging and Developed Markets

Although mobile commerce (m-commerce) growth provides ample potential for retailers around the globe, several studies have shown that it has failed to attract potential customers across different countries. This study advances the literature by comparing m-commerce customers’ behavioral intentions and actual behaviors using data from 812 m-commerce users across four countries (Australia, India, the United States, and Pakistan). This context offers a unique opportunity for understanding how m-commerce consumers’ behaviors differ across disparate national markets. The authors propose a conceptual framework linking m-commerce users’ behaviors (intentions and actual usages) to key drivers (ubiquity and habit), and they develop hypotheses about the moderating roles of m-commerce readiness and habit in these linkages. The results reveal important asymmetries between m-commerce readiness stage and between habit: users at an early m-commerce readiness stage assign more importance to ubiquity relative to habit in influencing purchase intentions, whereas the opposite is true for the users who are at an advanced stage. Habit moderates the influence of ubiquity such that its importance in determining intention decreases as the behavior in question takes a more habitual nature. The authors outline how m-retailers operating across developed and developing countries should adapt their marketing strategies to customers at different m-commerce readiness stages.

Iceland: how social mechanisms drove the financial collapse and why it’s a wicked problem

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to extend the macro-social marketing approach by detailing a framework to better understand the driving forces of wicked problems. Design/methodology/approach This is a conceptual paper that uses the financial crisis in Iceland as a demonstrative example to show how social mechanism theory can help social marketers and policy makers overcome complexity and strive for the social transformation they seek. Findings This paper suggests the utility of social mechanism theory for understanding wicked problems, how they came to be and how social marketing practices can be applied to resolve market complexities. Research limitations/implications Social marketers need to identify what is driving what, to plan and implement interventions that will lead to the social change desired. This paper presents a framework that guides the analyst through this social change process. Originality/value This work provides social marketers with the means to understand the “moving parts” of a wicked problem to identify where an intervention is required to achieve the social change sought.

Consumer attitudes towards bloggers and paid blog advertisements: what’s new?

Reports show that 6.77m people published blogs on blogging websites and more than 12m people write blogs using their social network. However, few studies have explored consumer attitudes toward bloggers and their advertising. Therefore, an effort to discover how paid blog advertisements influence consumer attitudes toward bloggers and the products they advertise will help marketers gain an understanding of how to use bloggers as paid sponsors to influence consumer purchase intent. Using online survey approach, a study recruited participants (n=210) through an online survey platform (MTurk). The results indicated that the similarity between the consumer and the ad creator is an important psychological reason why consumers are more likely to perceive advertisements as more authentic, more affective, less deceptive and more credible, and they are thus more likely to trust the blogger. On the other hand, the importance of ad attribute (authenticity) does not significantly influence consumers’ intention to purchase products advertised by a blogger. As consumers are becoming more skeptical of advertisements, blogs need to be entertaining and a pleasure to view. Not only does the content need to be interesting, the design, flow and clarity of the blogs must also be considered important factors. In addition, advertising needs to be believable, credible and honest. In the online world, trust and credibility are still paramount in attracting consumers’ engagement; hence, promoting companies’ products and services through blogs can be an effective strategy to lower consumer skepticism barriers. The paper aims to discuss these issues.,Participants answered questions about their attitudes toward bloggers and their advertising when purchasing products in an online retail environment. Furthermore, participants also answered questions about their perceived trust in the bloggers themselves as well as the authenticity and credibility of the brand-related communication received from bloggers. Moreover, they reported on their attitudes toward how deceptive they considered bloggers and their advertising to be. Finally, participants reported how paid blog advertisements influence their purchase intent.,Similarity toward the ad creator is an important psychological reason behind consumers’ attitude toward blogs. Consumers who follow a blog often have the same interests and are thus more likely to support bloggers. This idea can be used as a segmentation strategy to reach particular consumers. Consumers who perceive similarity with the ad creator are more likely to recognize the ads as more authentic, affective, credible and trustworthy as well as less deceptive, regarding the blogger. Blogs need to be entertaining and a pleasure to view. Not only does the content need to be interesting but the design, flow and clarity of the blog are also important factors. Blog advertising needs to be believable, credible and honest. In the online world, trust and credibility are still paramount in attracting consumers’ engagement with the website, bloggers or social media.,Trust in the blogger did not influence consumers’ purchase intent; however, it did influence their attitude toward how similar they are with the blogger. In an online shopping environment, the human touch and personal contact between consumers and retailers has been lost. Consumers often leave the online transaction due to a lack of trust. Therefore, bloggers can be replacements for the missing “salesperson” in online interactions. Companies can use bloggers as the mediating person to reach their intended audiences, bridging the gap between the company and consumers.

The Cross-Modal Effects of Colour in Food Advertising: An Abstract

In 2015 global expenditure on food items was expected to exceed

Perceptions of others, mindfulness, and brand experience in retail service setting

US7 trillion (IFC, 2014). As such, every day around the world, consumers make a large number of decisions about food choices. In many of these decisions, the visual appearance of the food, in particular the product colour, will be the primary choice determinant. This is because the colour of a food product presents the consumer with critical information related to edibility, as well as the identity and intensity of flavour (Shankar et al., 2010). Many of the associations between food colour and its potential edibility or quality are learned from experience. However, evidence also suggests colour influences human perception at an innate, biological level (Labrecque et al., 2013). Importantly, colour – a purely visual stimulus – has the potential to influence other sensory modalities, for example, situations where colour influences perceptions of taste, smell and texture (for a review, see Spence et al., 2010). However, it would appear that the link between colour and physical reactions in other sensory modalities has mostly been restricted to situations involving food consumption. As a result, there is limited research demonstrating these cross-modal effects in situations where consumption does not take place, for example, in advertising, where much of consumer decision making is based on ‘expectations’ of consumption. The current study addresses this gap in the extant literature by examining the cross-modal relationships between vision (colour) and touch (food texture) in food advertising. This study examines the cross-modal influence of colour on consumer ‘expectations’ of product texture (creaminess/crunchiness) as a result of food advertisements. The study also examines the moderating effects of advertising copy and an individual’s sensory sensitivity, as well as the resulting influence on various marketing metrics. Findings demonstrate that the cross-modal effects of colour on expectations of creaminess and crunchiness are conveyed through advertising, that a form of Stroop interference moderates the effect when ad copy is included and that a person’s sensory sensitivity (using ‘need for touch’ as a proxy) causes a moderated moderation. The cross-modal effects are tested against marketing metrics, with findings demonstrating that the influence of colour on expectations of quality, purchase intent, pleasure and likability is mediated by an individual’s expectations of product creaminess, for those consumers who have a low ‘need for touch’ (Peck & Childers, 2003), creating a moderated mediation effect.