Xianghua Lu

Critical success factors of inter-organizational information systems: a case study of Cisco and Xiao Tong in China

This paper reports a case study of an inter-organizational information system (IOS) of Cisco and Xiao Tong in China. We interviewed their senior managers, heads of departments and employees who have been directly affected in their work. Other sources of information are company documents and publicly available background information. The study examines the benefits of the IOS for both corporations. The research also reveals seven critical success factors for the IOS, namely intensive stimulation, shared vision, cross-organizational implementation team, high integration with internal information systems, inter-organizational business process re-engineering, advanced legacy information system and infrastructure and shared industry standard.

Leveraging O2O Commerce for Product Promotion: An Empirical Investigation in Mainland China

This research investigates how retail businesses may promote their products online to induce offline sales via social media-enabled online-to-offline (O2O) commerce. We focus on a country context where such an emerging e-commerce model is particularly prevalent, i.e., China. Key to leveraging this model is to attract consumer attention and stimulate their actions both online and offline, which may be achieved through information technology (IT)-enabled promotional approaches, such as administering banner adverts and digital coupons. The former focuses on communicating product attribute information, whereas the latter focuses on communicating incentives. Building on a collectivism cultural perspective, word-of-mouth (WOM) communication motives framework, and digital advertising literature, we hypothesize their different effects online (generating produce review) and offline (inducing sales). We first conducted a survey comparing consumers in China with their U.S. counterparts, and show that a cultural perspective is pertinent and valuable. We then collaborated with Chinas largest O2O social media website for restaurant reviews, and conducted a field investigation of consumer responses to the two promotional approaches. Our findings afford important insights for retail businesses seeking to leverage O2O commerce, and provide research implications to the areas of e-commerce and digital advertising.

The Role of Marketer- and User-Generated Content in Sustaining the Growth of a Social Media Brand Community

While recent research has increasingly indicated social media brand communities can bring about desired benefits for firms, the trade press has cautioned the unsustainable growth issue of such communities. Given that the realization of their benefits is contingent on sustained growth, this study investigates the role of two types of content central to sustaining these communities i.e., marketer-generated content (MGC) and user-generated content (UGC). Furthermore, we delineate between content of product-related (for product promotion) and social-related (for relationship building) nature. Our findings show that both social- and product-related UGC can promote growth over time, but only social-related MGC is effective in this regard. However, MGC regardless of their nature may stimulate UGC. Overall our findings suggest that sustaining the growth of a brand community requires a symphony of both marketer effort and consumer response, thus providing a more comprehensive and balanced view of their role.

Dr. Jekyll vis-à-vis Mr. Hyde: Personality variation between virtual and real worlds

Organizations use virtual-worlds to enhance group discussion; it allows an individual to decouple his or her rendered from actual behavior; resulting in others perceiving him or her to have two or more personalities. Building on self-regulation theory, we examined how satisfaction in the virtual-world was affected by these personality differences. A field study was conducted to attempt to understand this; it involved 297 students engaged in a virtual tutorial group using Second Life. We found that small variations in personality between the virtual and real world groups (such as being helpful, sociable, seeking recognition, or submissive) could lead to greater satisfaction of the discussion.

Building Online Trust in a Culture of Confucianism: The Impact of Process Flexibility and Perceived Control

The success of e-commerce companies in a Confucian cultural context takes more than advanced IT and process design that have proven successful in Western countries. The example of eBay’s failure in China indicates that earning the trust of Chinese consumers is essential to success, yet the process of building that trust requires something different from that in the Western culture. This article attempts to build a theoretical model to explore the relationship between the Confucian culture and online trust. We introduce two new constructs, namely process flexibility and perceived control, as particularly important factors in online trust formation in the Chinese cultural context. A survey was conducted to test the proposed theoretical model. This study offers a new explanation for online trust formation in the Confucian context. The findings of this article can provide guidance for companies hoping to successfully navigate the Chinese online market in the future.

Dynamic sales impacts of online physical product sampling

Abstract Recently, firms start to offer samples of physical products online to reach wider audience. However, literature has mostly examined offline product sampling or online sampling of digital products that differ from physical products. To address the gaps, we build on the theoretical logic of uncertainty reduction and signaling perspective to consider physical product characteristics in developing our hypotheses, and employed a unique dataset from an e-commerce platform for hypothesis testing. Our analysis reveals that online sampling could increase the physical product sales, while popular brands enjoyed greater advantages in terms of increase in both immediate and lagged sales.

Is Combining Contextual and Behavioral Targeting Strategies Effective in Online Advertising

Online targeting has been increasingly used to deliver ads to consumers. But discovering how to target the most valuable web visitors and generate a high response rate is still a challenge for advertising intermediaries and advertisers. The purpose of this study is to examine how behavioral targeting (BT) impacts users’ responses to online ads and particularly whether BT works better in combination with contextual targeting (CT). Using a large, individual-level clickstream data set of an automobile advertising campaign from an Internet advertising intermediary, this study examines the impact of BT and CT strategies on users’ click behavior. The results show that (1) targeting a user with behavioral characteristics that are closely related to ads does not necessarily increase the click through rates (CTRs); whereas, targeting a user with behavioral characteristics that are loosely related to ads leads to a higher CTR, and (2) BT and CT work better in combination. Our study contributes to online advertising design literature and provides important managerial implications for advertising intermediaries and advertisers on targeting individual users.