Jean-François Lemoine

The Impact of Culture on Creativity How Cultural Tightness and Cultural Distance Affect Global Innovation Crowdsourcing Work

This paper advances a new theoretical model to understand the effect of culture on creativity in a global context. We theorize that creativity engagement and success depend on the cultural tightness—the extent to which a country is characterized by strong social norms and low tolerance for deviant behaviors—of both an innovator’s country and the audience’s country, as well as the cultural distance between these two countries. Using field data from a global online crowdsourcing platform that organizes creative contests for consumer-product brands, supplemented by interviews with marketing experts, we found that individuals from tight cultures are less likely than counterparts from loose cultures to engage in and succeed at foreign creative tasks; this effect is intensified as the cultural distance between the innovator’s and the audience’s country increases. Additionally, tight cultures are less receptive to foreign creative ideas. But we also found that in certain circumstances—when members of a tight culture do creative work in their own or culturally close countries—cultural tightness can actually promote creativity success. This finding implies that some degree of convergent thinking as engendered by tight cultures could be beneficial for creativity, challenging the dominant view in creativity research that divergent thinking is a prerequisite for creative performance.

From the dichotomous paradigm of the shopping experience to the ubiquitous paradigm

As highlighted at a recent professional symposium on cross-channel commerce held by LSA (LSA, 2013), the trend in consumer habits is towards fragmentation, with consumers turning to increasingly varied channels and formats.1 New shopping habits (aiming at better cost control and resulting from more dispersed lifestyles) associated with the development of a ‘digital ecosystem’ (de Rosnay, 2013) prompts us to reconsider the traditional dichotomy – derived from that between commerce and e-commerce – that the business world and the academic community have observed between the ‘shopping experience’ and the ‘e-shopping experience’. The first reason for a discussion about the ‘dichotomous paradigm’ of the shopping experience stems from its segmented nature (having a shopping experience in a store vs. online). Indeed, the fragmentation of lifestyles,2 which causes consumers to commute and move about more and more and to consume on the go3 – the development of a ‘transit and takeaway society’ for Virilio (2009) – coupled with techno-commercial arrangements combining channels (cross-channel commerce) and/or formats (cross-format commerce4), tends to render a dichotomous and segmented perspective obsolete and replace it with an analysis in terms of flows, in terms of a ‘shopping peregrination’. For consumers, this entails optimizing trips (saving time, heightened efficiency) especially when one has a large number of activities to do (dropping off and picking up children, grocery shopping, leisure). For Gasnier (2007), shopping is now part of a complex chain that is meticulously organized and timed. The second reason to discuss the dichotomous paradigm concerns the notion of the attractiveness of a retail outlet or a commercial website. Indeed, as Pine and Gilmore (1999) have shown, shopping experience strategies appeared in the 1990s so that businesses could first build a reputation and attractiveness by providing their customers with highly hedonistic experiences (Filser, 1996), and then charge higher profit margins than they would be able to if they were just selling products or services. The same approach was then applied to websites. The aim of providing e-shopping experiences to online users, inspired by strategies used in brickand-mortar stores, was to increase differentiation and user traffic to websites (Belaud, 2011b ; Lemoine, 2008, 2012). In both cases, the strategy is to promote a shopping or an e-shopping experience by creating a (more or less) revisited destination. On the other hand, ‘in-transit’ shopping – such as bus and railway station retailing, which is fast expanding (Keller, 2009; Sabbah, 2011) as well as the possible use of mobile shopping apps for smartphones, called ‘Shazaming’ – the product offering Editorial: From the dichotomous paradigm of the shopping experience to the ubiquitous paradigm

Recruiting Individuals to a Crowdsourcing Community: Applying Motivational Categories to an Ad Copy Test

This study operationalizes different motivational categories to participate in crowdsourcing and tests them with a series of advertisements in different countries. We found that internalized extrinsic motivations were more appealing to individuals overall and that results differed across countries, which is novel in research about crowdsourcing.

Opportunities and risks of combining shopping experience and artistic elements in the same store: a contribution to the magical functions of the point of sale

ABSTRACT This article draws on the construct of store atmospherics to address one of the latest developments in that field, i.e. the strategy of incorporating artistic elements into the store. On the one side, incorporating artistic elements in store atmospherics constitutes an innovative way for retailers to differentiate their shopping experience. Such a hybrid retail strategy seeks to offer maximised hedonic gratification to store visitors, while adding symbolic value to the commercial offering. Store traffic and sales are thus stimulated. Incorporating artistic elements is also a magic way to conceal the store’s transactional purpose; through this association with the art world, the store is viewed as less mercantile. However, there is a risk that consumers will view the store as a ‘museum’ and visit without purchasing. Therefore we conduce a conceptual investigation of that experiential strategy in order to assess its effects on retailer’s commercial and marketing performance.

A Geography of Participation in IT-Mediated Crowds

In this work we seek to understand how differences in location effect participation outcomes in IT-mediated crowds. To do so, we operationalize Crowd Capital Theory with data from a popular international creative crowd sourcing site, to determine whether regional differences exist in crowd sourcing participation outcomes. We present the results of our investigation from data encompassing 1,858,202 observations from 28,214 crowd members on 94 different projects in 2012. Using probit regressions to isolate geographic effects by continental region, we find significant variation across regions in crowd sourcing participation. In doing so, we contribute to the literature by illustrating that geography matters in respect to crowd participation. Further, our work illustrates an initial validation of Crowd Capital Theory as a useful theoretical model to guide empirical inquiry in the fast-growing domain of IT-mediated crowds.

Les conseillers virtuels anthropomorphes et les réactions des internautes : une expérimentation portant sur la voix du conseiller

Les conseillers virtuels se sont fortement démocratisés sur les sites marchands. Compte tenu des bénéfices qu’ils offrent aux entreprises pour améliorer la navigation et l’interaction avec le consommateur, chercheurs et praticiens s’accordent sur l’intérêt de les doter de caractéristiques anthropomorphiques. Cette recherche s’intéresse particulièrement à l’effet de la voix du conseiller virtuel. Bien qu’il existe quelques recherches en interaction homme-machine sur la question, il n’existe pas de travaux traitant le sujet d’un point de vue marketing et comparant l’effet d’une voix humaine vs une voix de synthèse. Les résultats montrent que les consommateurs qui ont interagi avec un conseiller virtuel doté d’une voix humaine éprouvent un sentiment de présence sociale plus fort que ceux interagissant avec un conseiller doté d’une voix de synthèse. La voix humaine permet également de susciter plus de confiance envers le conseiller virtuel et de générer de meilleures intentions comportementales.

The Phygital Shopping Experience: An Attempt at Conceptualization and Empirical Investigation

The introduction of smartphones and the mobile web are changing the paradigm of marketing and retailing research, shifting from dichotomist to ubiquitous shopping experiences. The multichannel logic is giving way to an omnichannel one (Rigby, Harvard Business Review, 84:64–75, 2011), moving towards a closer intertwining of channels. Retailers, as they are dealing with a more liquid consumer, are witnessing a new form of omnichannel: connected or phygital stores. The phygital shopping experience consists in hybridizing the physical (the point of sale, its products, etc.) and digital components (touch screens, connected mirrors, NFC cards, etc.) at the same time and in the same place. The present inductive research presents an attempt at conceptualizing the latter, by confronting two research cases: a connected store and a screen-free store where phygital content is essentially produced by the clients. A hybridization continuum is proposed, with the related definitions. Space- and time-based, social, hedonic, sensorial and participative dimensions appear to be the most relevant. Finally, a table linking phygital objectives and the role of the retailer is presented.

The representation of shopping in children’s books

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify the representations, figures and processes of shopping/commerce in books published in France that are aimed at three to seven-year-olds. Design/methodology/approach A semiotic analysis of nearly 50 books published over the past 60 years. Findings These books reveal a broad diversity in the images of shops given to children (ranging from the traditional shop, a source of pleasure and creator of social ties, to the hypermarket/megastore, a symbol of stress and overconsumption) and the wealth of information that is given to children to help them assimilate the process of a shopping transaction. Originality/value The originality and richness of this research lies in its methodological approach. Indeed, it is perfectly aligned with a recent academic trend that calls on researchers to mobilise and compare new data collection tools to apprehend current and future consumer behaviour. Consequently this research is based on an immersion in children’s books that depict the world of commerce in one way or another.

The Impact of Recommendation Agents’ Type of Voice on Perceived Social Presence, Trust and Users Intentions on an Insurance Website

This paper aims to demonstrate the influence that recommendation agent type voice may have on users reactions. Through experimentation, we compare the effects of human and synthetic voice on perceived social presence, recommendation agent trust, website trust and behavioral intentions. The findings suggest that the human voice is likely to provide a higher level of social presence and recommendation agent trust. The structural equation model shows that social presence has a positive effect both on recommendation agent trust and behavioral intentions. In turn, recommendation agent trust influences website trust and behavioral intentions. Finally, results show that website trust positively impacts behavioral intentions.