Lots of companies and private persons struggle to attract attention to their products, services or artistic activity on the internet. The concept of ROI has been modified. It’ll not be profit understood by gain in cash, but rather popularity increase like growing fan base, more people devoted to a specific case, stronger impact on the Internet community. Academic literature focuses mainly on applying various online marketing techniques to help companies establish their online presence and increase visibility. There are studies that provide entrepreneurs and business owners with ideas on how to attract more visitors to their websites and improve their search engine ranking. However, there is still a gap in academic literature when it comes to promoting non- profit art websites. In-depth interviews with 7 participants were performed to analyze their impressions on the web comic. 119 Internet users participated in the survey designed to get insights on their perceptions of web comics in order to identify areas for improvement. On the basis of the research carried out on the topic of a website visibility, this paper provides an insight into the possible causes of the problems of web comic with visibility. They lay within three areas related to each other: The quality of content, the website and promotional activities.

This study about hotel bookings in Spain analyzes the influence of three low price signals and the type of distribution channel on perceived value and behavioral intentions: Positive influences on perceived value and buying intention were found for price beating guarantee and for always low price signals but the distribution channel was only found to have an effect on behavioral intentions. Finally, it has been detected that gender plays a moderating role on both perceived value and buying intention.

The objective of this study is to examine the effect of food scandals on trust towards the corporate brand and purchase intention in Japan. Drawing on Mayer, Davis and Schoorman’s Model of Organizational Trust (1995) this study explores the effects of perceived trustworthiness, trust, and perceived risk on a consumer’s intention to purchase. In Japan, consumers were outraged when some top hotels and department stores were found to have mislabeled foods, selling cheaper alternatives instead of the expensive foods offered on the menu and using expired products (Grace, 2007; Japan Today, 2013; Kageyama, 2007; Onishi, 2007; Spitzer, 2013). The various food scandals have led to product shunning, fear, distrust and suspicion among consumers (Garretson & Burton, 2000; Niewczas, 2014; Smith & Riethmuller, 1999; Yeung & Morris, 2001). Thus this research was conducted to identify the influence of food scandals involving well-established Japanese supermarkets on consumer trust and risk perception. The influence of culture in shaping purchase intention was also explored. Trust itself is a concept that is elusive with myriad definitions ranging from Luhmann’s (1979) sociological theory of trust that looks as trust being a function of high perceived risk and experience to Deutsch (1973) who defines it as the willingness to be dependent on others in the belief that the other party will not disappoint intentionally. Luhmann (1979) argues that in order for trust to be apparent there has to be high-perceived risk. Various studies have also focused on trust being operational when there is risk‐taking behavior (Anderson & Narus, 1990; Canning & Hammer‐Llyod, 2007; Doney & Canon, 1997; Morgan & Hunt, 1994). In the food sector, as consumers lose control over knowing about the food we eat due to the increasing complexity of the food system trust becomes an essential component. Consumers have to trust food producers ranging from farmers to food companies as well as the public authorities to ensure food safety, quality and adequate supply. Consumers display different and inconsistent reactions regarding food safety that affects the perception of quality and their willingness‐to‐pay (Berg, 2004; Brewer & Rojas, 2008).

Communicating corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become increasingly important for the success of organizations (Coombs and Holladay, 2012; McWilliams and Siegel, 2001). Several studies have focused on consumer responses to CSR and found that positive evaluations of CSR initiatives led to greater loyalty to both companies and their brands and to more positive behaviors toward companies (Dhanesh, 2015; Glavas and Godwin, 2013; Sen and Bhattacharya, 2001). Therefore, the effective communication of these CSR initiatives appears to be important (Eberle, et al., 2013; Lee et al., 2013). However, research on how consumers perceive a company’s communication of specific CSR motives in relation to its corporate reputation is scarce (De Vries et al., 2013). The current study aimed to investigate the role that communicating CSR motives plays in someone’s perception of a company. To investigate the role of intrinsic and extrinsic motives in explaining consumer-company identification, scepticism and reputation, we conducted two online consumer survey studies. In Study 1 (N=178), we used a well-known personal care product (PCP). In Study 2 (N=220), in the context of a large worldwide furniture retailer, we tried to replicate the findings of Study 1. In contrast to Study 1, we now added situational scepticism. The results of the current study show that the positive relationship between intrinsic CSR motives and company evaluations were replicated from previous studies. In this relationship consumer-company identification and scepticism play a mediating role. However this role seems to be different for positive versus negative attributions. The negative relationship between extrinsic CSR motives and company evaluations seems to be more ambiguous. Suggestions are made for a more meta-analytical approach to distinct consumers’ perceptions on a company’s CSR motives.

Deregulation of electricity market has brought new business opportunities for electricity suppliers. As of 2011, there are around 60 electricity retailers in the Danish market competing against each other (Yang, 2013). Thus, Danish households have the opportunities to choose different electricity services, green electricity services vs. the conventional brown electricity (generated from fossil fuels) service. However, statistics have indicated that the movement of electricity market deregulation has produced little effect on Danish consumers in terms of switching among suppliers or renegotiating an existing service contract (Yang, 2014). Unfortunately, evidences from the actual market show that the penetration of green electricity remains very low (Yang, 2013). This is bad, because Denmark’s long-term energy goal is to become a fossil fuel independent nation by 2050. The study divided a sample 1022 respondents into two nearly equal sized sub-samples chosen from an Internet Panel administrated by a commercial marketing research firm. One subsample received a positive frame version of the questionnaire regarding subscribing to a green electricity contract, and the other subsample received a negative frame version of the questionnaire. The selected sample reflects the Danish population structure in terms of the major socio-economic variables such as gender and age. Contingent valuation (CV) method was used to value the households’ willingness to subscribe a green electricity service contract (Alberini & Kahn, 2006). As expected, consumers displayed stronger intention to buy green electricity when the situation was framed in a positive maner (i.e., most Danish households have already bought it), as compared to the situation was framed in a negative manaer. The theoretical explaning can be formulated in terms of the theory of social norms. The framing effect also signals the public good side of green electricity in that there seems to be a free rider problem. The relatively low intention to buy green electricity in the negative frame manner (i.e., a few Danish household has bought green electricity) indicates that the free-rider incentive is particularly powerful in large group, where an indivudal may percived that her or his behavior will have only little influence on the collective outcome (Olsen, 1970). The results confimrs the finding from (Ek & Söderholm, 2008).

This research analyzes the effect of the education choices on the career of CEOs and the performance of their companies. A sample of companies with a market capitalization greater than EUR 1 billion has been considered.

Businesses today are looking for new ways to acquire and retain customers, by delivering innovative products and services, which serve each customer's individual demands. Fo- cusing on individual customer needs and addressing each request individually with a ser- vice or product that is perceived as being customized has become the focal point of Inter- action Orientation (IO), a firm-level strategic orientation developed by Ramani and Kumar (2008). Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) is also a firm-level strategic construct, which reflects the "processes, practices, and decision-making activities" that firms use to identify and exploit new business opportunities (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996, p.136). As op- posed to IO, EO is a well-established concept, being one of the most examined topics in entrepreneurship research. However, most studies have focused on cross-sectional de- signs to assess the relationship to firm performance, leading to numerous research calls focusing on the need for more dynamic investigations (Saeed, Yousafzai, & Engelen, 2014). Based on our analysis including 247 S&P500 firms from a variety of industries over a period of three years, this longitudinal study is one of the first to assess the short-term and long-term effects of IO and EO. To establish the firm's levels of IO and EO, we ana- lyze the content of Letters to Shareholders (LtS), as LtS have been widely used to assess different strategic orientations - Market Orientation, Learning Orientation - including EO (Noble et al., 2002; Short, Broberg, Cogliser, & Brigham, 2010; Zachary, McKenny, Short, & Payne, 2011). We relied on multisource secondary data for performance indica- tors and included several control variables: past performance of the firm, firm age, firm size, as well as industry specific effects. Our results confirm that each orientation has a positive impact on the firm's financial suc- cess in the long-term but a combined IO-EO strategy reveals a negative effect on firm performance in the long-term. This study investigates the synergies between IO and EO in a longitudinal setting and using objective financial performance indicators, establish- ing the advantages and disadvantages of implementing a single or combined strategy.

The present study focuses on the construct of entrepreneurial alertness, investigating the external antecedents of the construct, responding to the call for more research pledged by Tang, Kacmar, and Busenitz (2012). Namely, we examine how receiving feedback, awards and collaboration offers in relation to an individual’s hobby activity influences the development of entrepreneurial alertness dimensions. Additionally, we make a contribution by testing the effect of these external factors in a non-entrepreneurial context of homebrewing communities, that is individuals producing beer at home as a hobby. In line with other form of craft activities, this context has demonstrated a high potential for business start-up development due to the increasing number of new small brewing businesses in North America run by entrepreneurs that were previously homebrewers (Carroll & Swaminathan, 2000). We test our tenets within the complexity theory, where configurations of antecedents are examined in order to gain deeper understanding of the possible outcome (Woodside, 2014), using 213 completed questionnaires. We apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA, Ragin 2000; 2008) to achieve a holistic overview of the examined interrelationships (Ordanini, Parasuraman & Rubera, 2015). We find that high feedback is a sufficient condition for high scanning and search, association and connection, as well as evaluation and judgement activities of entrepreneurial alertness. Without feedback, people at the hobby stage engage in their leisure activities solely because they like it. However, receiving feedback in relation to their hobby outcomes provides an opportunity for individuals to develop and experience additional motivations beyond enjoyment, where they understand that the hobby could be commercialized and bring monetary rewards. Moreover, we find that an individual receiving low amount of awards but high amount of collaboration offers may also have high entrepreneurial alertness. Since individuals receive rewards related to the excellent performance in their leisure activity, it may not provide any cue for a potential transformation into a business. However, the more collaboration offers people receive, the more likely they get involved in scanning and search, association and connection, and evaluation and judgement activities of entrepreneurial alertness. Therefore, they are likely to conduct additional search, connect bits of available information and evaluate this business opportunity (Gaglio & Winter, 2009). The findings of this study could help entrepreneurs reflect on their decisions and behaviours during the business start-up planning process, and measure their entrepreneurial alertness and the extent of readiness to engage in business venturing.

The basic premise of this paper is to determine the exclusivity of the concept “social business” comparing other concepts seemingly parallel to it. To this end, through scope and evaluation of the concept, the article focuses on how social business adds superior value, addresses social problems, and may motivate the business community to dedicate their talents and energy and invest money in this business.

The paper focuses on the social commerce paradigm, underlining how social media are able to assist e-retailers in their effort of creating a total omni-channel e-customer experience. The empirical research represents a new prospect on the topic, because nowadays social commerce is not completely understood and realized from a managerial perspective.

Indonesia is struggling to achieve financial inclusion. These barriers could be addressed through branchless banking program. This study explores roles of regulator and bank in the program. This study used secondary data and interviews to explore the objectives. Both regulator and banks are embracing branchless banking to achieve financial inclusion.

This research study was conducted to explore the association between consumer attitudes and adoption of mobile payment in South Africa. Students of University of Witwatersrand were interviewed to identify their attitudes regarding usefulness, ease of use and risk. The results revealed majority of consumers found mobile payment systems as convenient and saved significant amount of time. Consumer perception of usefulness was found to be significantly associated with adoption. Perceived risk was weakly associated with adoption and perceived ease of use was not associated with adoption. However, introduction of income to moderate the effects of perceived ease of use led to significant positive association with adoption. Similarly when awareness was introduced to moderate the influence of perceived risk, the interaction had a significant positive association with adoption. The outcome of study resulted in improve understanding of consumer adoption of MPS in South Africa.

Personalization and privacy issues are the most important factors in the online context. To reveal how these factors affect on users’ acceptance of mobile apps, we performed structural equation modeling using 337 respondents in Japan. Our findings suggested that adaption behaviour of mobile apps can be explained by privacy paradox.

Present study propose a dual-route perspective on emoticon usage in mobile instant messaging. One is the utility route where emoticons familiarity and perceived synchronicity of emoticons influence perceived ease of use. The other route is the affection route in which self-image congruity between emoticons and individuals drives psychological ownership.

Many consumers are buying products online but a key barrier to purchase are insufficiently detailed product demonstrations (Rose et al., 1999). Consumers have different expectations of online shopping for various product categories sold on the Internet (Hyllegard et al., 2000). The purchase of physical goods, such as sofas, wardrobes or tables, is often associated with increased risk and presents a problem for large furniture retailers, such as Habitat or IKEA. These type of goods be characterized as infrequent and expensive purchases that require extensive decision-making (Oh, Yoon and Shyu, 2008). Furthermore, almost 78% of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts because of uncertainty about the consequences of the purchase (Goldwyn, 2003). Currently, large home-furnishing retailers have only used static product presentation formats for their products online that offer basic product information. Thus, this study investigates different product presentation formats that could be used by these retailers in an experimental setting.