Raymond R. Burke

Technology and the Customer Interface: What Consumers Want in the Physical and Virtual Store

For companies to realize the benefits of recent innovations in customer interface technology, they need to understand the value consumers place on technology as part of the shopping process. A national survey of 2,120 online consumers was conducted to explore how people want to shop in both online and in-store environments and determine how interactive and conventional media work together to move consumers through the purchase process. The study investigated 128 different aspects of the shopping experience, from common elements to recent innovations. The results indicated that consumers are generally satisfied with the convenience, quality, selection, and value provided by retailers today. They are less satisfied with the level of service provided, the availability of product information, and the speed of the shopping process. The findings suggest that new technologies can enhance the shopping experience, but applications must be tailored to the unique requirements of consumer segments and product categories.

Competitive Interference and Consumer Memory for Advertising

This article reports the results of three experiments that examine memory interference in an advertising context. In Experiment 1, consumer memory for a brands advertising was inhibited as a result of subsequent exposure to ads for other products in that manufacturers product line and ads for competing brands in the product class. Experiment 2 demonstrates analogous proactive interference effects. The results of Experiment 3 indicate that the presence of advertising for competitive brands changes the relationship between ad repetition and consumer memory. Repetition had a positive effect on recall only when there was little or no advertising for similar products.

Packaging communication: attentional effects of product imagery

This article provides a theoretical framework for understanding the communicative effects of product imagery on attention to the brand, specifically, the attentional effects of incorporating a picture or illustration of the product on the packaging of the product. Empirical results from a virtual reality simulation show that package pictures increase shoppers’ attention to the brand. However this effect is contingent, occurring only for low familiarity brands (private‐label brands) within product categories that offer a relatively high level of experiential benefits. These results suggest that package pictures may be especially useful for private label brands and/or lesser tier national brands whose strategic objectives are to improve consumers’ perceptions of the brand and enter the consideration set.

Expectation Processes in Satisfaction Formation A Field Study

Expectations of a novel restaurant dining experience were manipulated in a controlled field setting to test for the role and persistence of expectation and expectation-related effects within the expectancy disconfirmation and performance model. In an effort to ensure external validity, preconsumption expectations were manipulated via real-appearing reviews, actual service experience was recorded through protocol methods, and postconsumption perceptions were measured in the immediate postusage period. Results showed that the expectation manipulation and the expectations thereby created had an immediate but declining effect over the consumption period, that expectations acted as forward assimilation agents for performance, that retrospective expectations were partially influenced by performance observations in the manner of backward assimilation, that expectation-initiated performance comparisons (disconfirmation) and performance judgments were important satisfaction influences, and that the expectancy disconfirmation model is dimension-specific with regard to operation of its components. These findings shed insight into the operation of expectations, performance, and disconfirmation in service environments and illustrate some effects of consumption tracking.

Deception by Implication: An Experimental Investigation

A computer-based measurement procedure was developed to assess the deceptive effects of advertising claims. The study investigated various message forms identified in past research as having the potential to deceive the consumer by implying unrealistically high levels of brand attribute performance. Deception was assessed by comparing consumer responses to the questionable claims against responses to the presentation of no attribute information and true information. Results across a set of computer-constructed ads for hypothetical ibuprophen-based brands of pain reliever showed that expansions of literally true claims, and, to a lesser extent, qualified expansionary claims, increased false brand attribute beliefs, affect, and purchase intentions in comparison to the control conditions. Implications for the detection of deceptive advertising claims are drawn.

Behavioral Effects of Digital Signage

ABSTRACT Digital signs have become an important new channel for communicating with consumers in retail shopping environments. An analysis of academic and commercial experiments reveals that in-store advertising effectiveness depends on both the content of the message (appeal type and product category) and the context and quality of exposure (audience need state, traffic speed and direction, message frequency and duration). Shoppers are most responsive to messages that relate to the task at hand and their current need state, and least responsive to traditional brand messages.

The Third Wave of Marketing Intelligence

During the last 25 years, marketing research in retail settings has been transformed by technological change. The first wave of change occurred when retailers adopted point-of-sale (POS) systems with UPC barcode scanning. This provided companies with real-time data on purchase transactions and accurate estimates of product sales and market share. Retailers used this information in combination with shelf space allocation and product inventory information to measure the productivity of their stores. By modeling these data as a function of causal variables, such as product price, display activities, and feature advertising, marketers were able to assess the performance and profitability of their marketing investments (e.g., Blattberg and Neslin 1990). UPC scanning served as the foundation for syndicated research services such as A.C. Nielsen and Information Resources, and led to the development of brand and category management. Scanner data are in widespread use today and support many critical business decisions.

An Examination of Social Influence on Shopper Behavior Using Video Tracking Data

This research investigates how the social elements of a retail store visit affect shoppers’ product interaction and purchase likelihood. The research uses a bivariate model of the shopping process, implemented in a hierarchical Bayes framework, which models the customer and contextual factors driving product touch and purchase simultaneously. A unique video tracking database captures each shoppers path and activities during the store visit. The findings reveal that interactive social influences (e.g., salesperson contact, shopper conversations) tend to slow the shopper down, encourage a longer store visit, and increase product interaction and purchase. When shoppers are part of a larger group, they are influenced more by discussions with companions and less by third parties. Stores with customers present encourage product interaction up to a point, beyond which the density of shoppers interferes with the shopping process. The effects of social influence vary by the salespersons demographic similarity to the shopper and the type of product category being shopped. Several behavioral cues signal when shoppers are in a potentially high need state and may be good sales prospects.

Reasoning with empirical marketing knowledge

Abstract Expert system development typically requires that a researcher translate domain-specific knowledge into a set of abstract rules describing the relationships between knowledge elements. In marketing, this task has proven to be very difficult. Much of the marketing knowledge is in the form of empirical research rather than generally accepted theories or heuristics. The observed relationships often depend on the research context and these dependencies must be explicitly represented in the rule premises. An alternative approach, described in the present paper, is to represent empirical knowledge in its original context and dynamically abstract the knowledge to analogous new situations. This approach is illustrated with adduce , a frame-based system for reasoning about consumer response to advertising. The system infers how consumers will react to new ads by searching for relevant past advertising experiments and then generalizing research results across similar contexts.

A Nonspatial Methodology for the Analysis of Two-Way Proximity Data Incorporating the Distance-Density Hypothesis

This paper presents a nonspatial operationalization of the Krumhansl (1978, 1982) distancedensity model of similarity. This model assumes that the similarity between two objectsi andj is a function of both the interpoint distance betweeni andj and the density of other stimulus points in the regions surroundingi andj. We review this conceptual model and associated empirical evidence for such a specification. A nonspatial, tree-fitting methodology is described which is sufficiently flexible to fit a number of competing hypotheses of similarity formation. A sequential, unconstrained minimization algorithm is technically presented together with various program options. Three applications are provided which demonstrate the flexibility of the methodology. Finally, extensions to spatial models, three-way analyses, and hybrid models are discussed.