Crowdfunding is an increasingly popular fundraising tool where project creators solicit capital from potential backers in return for monetary rewards or presales of products/services. Potential backers in crowdfunding are looking for potential cues to reduce uncertainty and predict new venture success when making their capital contributions. To increase their funding success, project creators strategically use project descriptions as a marketing tool to attract potential backers and funding.
Based on the metaverse situation, this paper explores the influence of perceived usefulness and usability on brand experience. The brand experience include two dimensions of sensory experience and behavioral experience. And then, based on 329 valid data collected through online experiment, it makes an empirical analysis by structural equation model and hierarchical regression. Results show that, metaverse situational perceived usefulness and usability have significant effects on customer sensory experience and behavioral experience, and sensory experience plays a mediating role in the effects of usefulness and usability on behavioral experience. Social presence plays a positive moderating role in the influence path of usefulness and usability on sensory experience and behavioral experience.
Customer experience is a top priority for business executives and a competitive ground for marketing. Business-to-business (B2B) customer experience is more intricate as it involves multiple actors with distinct roles and objectives, necessitating more customization and knowledge. Hence, it is paramount for organizations operating in the B2B space to understand and enhance the customer experience to gain a competitive edge. This complexity is further amplified in cross-border settings where partners face additional differences and distances, requiring even more mutual adaptations than in domestic business interactions. In such scenarios, individuals involved may significantly differ in terms of culture, language, and business practices.
The unbounded nature of digital innovation requires innovating firms to be agile in the way they manage the processes, governance and outcomes in order to sense and seize the market directly and timely. This study adopts an inter-organizational approach and asks to what extent and in what way does organizational agility impact on innovation performance? This perspective underscores the interdependencies between collaborating partners, which creates a relationship regulating system of workflow to drive value creation in the process of innovation. While the literature has offered a broad conceptual argument for organizational agility in the context of digital innovation, the mechanisms through which value is transformed in the innovation process is still unclear. We contend that an agile innovation process stands on four main cornerstones: (1) joint strategic planning, (2) joint problem solving, (3) joint improvisation and (4) community (market) sensing. The empirical research is set in the video game industry, which is in a largely digitalized and borderless business environment. The data was collected through an interviewer-administered questionnaire. The sampling frame is based on a Swedish trade association database. Usable sample is 113. We performed structural equation modelling to test the hypothesized model, including main and moderation effects, using Mplus. The findings show that while only improvisation has a significantly positive effect on innovation performance, the role of strategic planning and problem solving between two collaborating partners remains unclear. For example, strategic planning has shown to be a negative influence in our empirical research. Problem solving has no effect on innovation performance, but it interacts with community sensing and subsequently facilitates innovation outcome. This highlights the importance of community sensing, which could offer rich, crucial knowledge and resources for problem solving that proves to be effective. The results provide further theoretical arguments for understanding organizational agility and digital innovation, but also raise further questions for future research.
A secure digital platform (SDP) can provide B2B marketers with confidence to use communications technology (CT) and engage in information sharing that facilitates resource utilization. Interlinked digital platforms constitute the company’s ecosystem and barriers in the form of a lack of skills and knowledge in relation to governance and compliance can be overcome through organizational intervention that is external to an individual’s capability of control. A framework for an SDP was developed by utilizing network theory and data were collected via an online survey and analysed (n=207) using SEM, AMOS. Organizational intervention through an SDP can help B2B marketers to increase the organization’s resource capability through improved interaction. It can also help individuals to become pro-actively compliant and be less at risk from various threats (e.g., fake news) as the organization provides a safer digital environment.
Previous studies do not provide information on which channel governance exporters should use in combination. Moreover, they neglect the role of multiple channel system and psychic distance in the implementation of channel governance. Accordingly, this study investigates the combined effects of channel governance, multiple channels, and psychic distance on export performance. The methodology used in this study is a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), which is a powerful method for analyzing whether combinations of conditions (i.e., configurations) lead to certain outcomes. The results show that which channel governance combination leads to higher export performance depends on multichannel use and on psychic distance. This study contributes to the advancement of international marketing channel research by identifying patterns in superior combinations of governance mechanisms.
Digitalization is a prevailing force in the marketplace and unquestionably a key topic on the strategic agenda of many firms (e.g., Balsmeier & Woerter, 2019). Alongside, research into managing digitalization has also strongly increased in recent years (Svahn, Matthiasen, & Lindgren, 2017; Ritter & Pedersen, 2020). Hofacker, Pillai, Golgeci & Gligor (2020, p. 1162) claim “Artificial intelligence, blockchain, data security/integrity, Internet of Things, and big data analytics are just some possible digital trends that can shape how B2B relationships are understood and managed”. Despite this increasing interest, the number of works within the scope of business-to-business (B2B) exchanges is still limited (Obal & Lancioni, 2013; Pagani & Pardo, 2017; Gomes et al., 2022; Matt, Pedrini, Bonfanti & Orzes, 2023) and there any many unexplored or underexplored phenomena.
The purpose of this paper is to understand how customer relationship termination (i.e., preparation and process), alone or in combination with customer involvement, contributes to the new product development outcome. While termination preparation has a synergistic effect with customer involvement, the termination process has a trade-off relationship with customer involvement.
Technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics are emerging as a new way to improve services, readjusting and impacting all business industries and relationships among people (Loureiro et al., 2021; Makridakis, 2017; Mingotto et al., 2020). The hospitality industry is no exception to this (Mingotto et al., 2020) since a quick growth in the use of robots and AI in this industry has registered a turnover of 249 million U.S. dollars (International Federation of Robots, 2021). However, very few of the existing studies highlight the customers’ perspective and sentiments on service robots (Luo et al., 2021) or the robot-human interactions/ customer service experience (Choi et al., 2021). Thus, further studies in the enhancement of human well-being through transhumanistic technologies, close relationship marketing capabilities, and the evolution of the engagement process between humans and AI-enabled machines are necessary (Loureiro et al., 2021). This research intends to understand how different types of robots influence customers’ perception of the service provided. Therefore, the following research questions are proposed; Can humans develop feelings of identification with a service robot? Can the identification that customers perceive between themselves, and service robots be strong enough to influence the creation of a close relationship between both parties? What are the features of service robots that heighten customer well-being?
In recent years, with its amazing online interactive promotion ability, e-commerce live streaming has attracted the attention of theoretical scholars and practical experts. This study takes “co-presence (CP) ” and “social presence (SP) ”, which are the prominent features of e-commerce live streaming, as the breakthrough point to explore the mechanism of the influence of co-presence and social presence on purchase intention. In this study, consumers with e-commerce live streaming watching experience are taken as participants, and the method of structural equation modeling is used. It is found that: presence significantly impacts flow experience and consumer purchase intention, while the impact of the two kinds of presence (SP, CP) is variable. the promotion effect of the two kinds of presence (SP, CP) on consumer purchase intention is completely mediated by flow experience. The mediating effect of co-presence on consumer purchase intention through flow experience is regulated by e-commerce live streaming topicality, but social presence doesn’t.
There is a growing trend towards consumption of meat alternatives. In response to rising demand, many brands add meat alternative options to their offerings (e.g., Impossible Whopper from Burger King, McPlant from McDonald’s). Consistent with this trend, a growing literature explores how to encourage consumers to reduce meat consumption and increase acceptance of meat alternatives. However, there are two major limitations in literature. First, most studies in this area do not employ real behavioral outcomes as the focal dependent variable. As a result, we cannot be certain that such findings can be extrapolated into real-world settings. Second, the majority of studies have focused on cognitive factors in investigating acceptance of meat alternatives. Hence, there is a need to attend more to affective factors when investigating how we can advertise meat alternatives. Against this backdrop, the present research investigates the interactive effect between regulatory mode (a motivational factor) and positive emotion (an affective factor) for driving social media engagement in advertising meat alternatives. Regulatory mode theory posits that consumers engage in goal pursuit by adopting locomotion (a motivation to “just do it”) and assessment orientations (a motivation to “do the right thing”). We propose that different, discrete positive emotions could interact with regulatory mode to create “fit” effects. Specifically, the fit between assessment orientation and the emotion of awe, and between locomotion orientation and the emotion of love will lead to increased social media engagement.
With the rapid growth of Podcast listening volume in the past two years (SoundOn, 2021), more and more research is also devoted to podcasts. Previous literature investigating podcasts mainly focused on the motivation of podcast listeners. This study aims to find out the voice characteristics of the producer and the psychological needs of the listener that affect listening intention, including speech rate, voice pitch, voice gender, and especially the mediating effect of affiliation needs and epistemic curiosity between proximity and listening intention. This study collects data from 3 experiments. We construct our stimuli from a script for a book introduction.
Social media has emerged as a prevalent tool for businesses in recent years through which brands actively engage in promotions. This development has resulted in several social media trends aimed at garnering increased consumer engagement on various social media platforms that brands utilize routinely. We investigate one such prevalent social media trend: brands sharing memes. Several popular brands, such as Netflix, regularly post memes on social media platforms. Therefore, it is important to study the brands’ use of memes and their resultant impact on consumer behavior.
With the infusion of advanced technology, interactions between customers and firms’ representatives take place in brick-and-mortar stores, 2D online sites, and even 3D metaverse environments. In the metaverse, a firm’s sales avatars interact with other users while representing the firm, recommend, and sell virtual items. Previous literature about the effectiveness of sales representatives agrees that a firm representatives’ smiling faces engender customer satisfaction and better interactions. However, it is unclear whether smiling faces of sales avatars will work the same way in the metaverse as they do in the real world. The current research examines whether a firm’s sales avatars with sad facial expression (vs. those with smiling facial expression) stimulate higher user intentions to interact with firm representative avatars, to purchase virtual items from the representative avatars, and to spread positive WOM about their experience in the metaverse. Moreover, focusing on subcultural appeal, we investigate why this unconventional phenomenon happens in the metaverse unlike in real world. We conducted two experiments to manipulate a firm representative avatar’s facial expression (smiling vs. sad) in the metaverse. We newly designed a metaverse place, and participants who put on a virtual reality headset are exposed to either a hat (Experiment 1) or shoes (Experiment 2) store where they can purchase a virtual hat or shoes. Experiments 1 and 2 basically tested the same things repeatedly. However, to improve internal validity and generalizability, Experiment 2 used human-like sales avatars instead of cartoon character-like sales avatars in Experiment 1, changed virtual stores from a hat store to shoes store, and finally controlled for various extraneous variables such as attractiveness, warmth, and competence of sales avatars, and user’s previous experience about metaverse. Sales representatives with a smile are believed to contribute to beneficial consumers’ attitudes and behaviors in offline stores. However, our experiments demonstrate that this well-received belief does not necessarily apply in the metaverse, where subcultural appeal plays a more critical role. In the metaverse, users evaluate sales avatars with sad facial expression (vs. with smiling facial expression) as more unique and cool (i.e., higher subcultural appeal), leading to their higher intention to interact with the sad sales avatar, to purchase a virtual item, and to spread positive WOM about their experiences. Our results imply that previous findings supported in the offline or 2D online sites may not work the same way in the 3D metaverse.
Metaverse tourism is blurring the boundaries between the virtual and physical worlds. Among the core technologies in the metaverse world (e.g., Avatar, Virtual reality, Augmented reality, NFTs, etc.), the avatar has the potential power to revolutionise customer experience. Destination management organisation (DMO) can boost customers’ immersion through effective avatar customer journey design (ACJD) in the metaverse world. Yet, there is a lack understanding of how practitioners view an effective ACJD in the metaverse world. This study aims to explore the role of avatars on customer journey design in a metaverse tourism program (e.g., Dunhuang) from practitioners’ perspectives through a qualitative study. This study advances theoretical understanding about metaverse tourism in the tourism literature, and provides important implications for tourism industry on how to design tourist experiences in metaverse tourism.
The extensive application of robots in hospitality and tourism service has transformed the original human-contact into contact-less, so it is necessary to understand the transformation of customers consumption behaviors under this new service mode. While studies have started investigating how service robots enhance the consumer autonomy, the impact of such technology on customers consumption behaviors remains largely unexplored and its underlying mechanism are still unclear. To address this issue, we explore how service robots shape customers autonomous behaviors in hospitality and tourism services. Drawing on the social impact theory, we presented an underlying process in terms of social discomfort, and reveal the boundary conditions.
Smart technologies are critical for businesses to develop these dynamic connections, as technologies enable them to network with others and exchange resources seamlessly. This fact makes it possible to modify the tasks performed by employees of tourism organizations that are in contact with consumers/tourists.
In response to the increasing deployment of brand chatbots in the service sector, this study developed a conceptual framework to examine the psychological processes through which brand chatbots contribute to relationship building efforts. A 2 (interactivity: high vs. low) X 2 (anthropomorphic conversation style: warm vs. competent) between-subject design was conducted in the context of the coffee service business. The levels of interactivity in the chatbots were operationalized by altering the subdimensions of interactivity: modality (i.e., media richness, response latency), message (i.e., interdependency in message exchanges), and source (i.e., customization of content flow). Different linguistic elements (e.g., terms of address, vocabulary, punctuation, emoticons) were used to construct two sets of scripts that emphasized either warmth or competence of the chatbots. Based on the results of the pretests, four brand chatbots via Facebook Messenger were developed using the platform provided by GoSky AI Inc.
Fear of missing out (FOMO) refers to the customer's perception of being anxious for not engaging in an experience. FOMO is an anxiety feeling positively associated with social media usage that one cannot catch up on something important in life. Fear of missing out (FOMO) marketing appeals initiated from social media usage were found to significantly affect consumer purchase decisions including choice of destination. Consumers usually browse social media and social networking sites such as forums and reviews in online tourism agents (OTAs) when they make travel decisions. Although FOMO is expected to affect tourists' perception and urgency in making a tourism decision, the use of FOMO-laden message to promote travel destination through different types of influencers has not yet been widely studied. This study fills this research gap by examining the effect of using FOMO laden content to promote travel destination through different types of influencers. An online experiment was conducted with four experimental conditions in which different influencers share about a destination using the same FOMO-laden message: (1) travel KOL, (2) tourists who post user-generated-content (UGC), (3) personal friends, and (4) a control condition with the absence of influencer and FOMO message. The 984 respondents were randomly assigned into one of the four experimental conditions. Data collected was analysed using PLS-SEM and PLS-MGA. Results indicated that anticipated elation, anticipated envy, and social influence predicted 30.2% variance of FOMO and FOMO explained 31.6% of variance of intention to visit the destination promoted. Multi-group analysis (PLS-MGA) found that exposure to message shared by travel KOL and personal friends significantly strengthen the FOMO feeling of participants resulting in strong intention to visit the destination promoted. UGC posted by tourists showed similar effect as the non-FOMO laden control group and are less significant in driving the FOMO feeling that leads to visit intention. Findings of this study provide insights into how effectiveness of destination promotion can be enhanced by using FOMO-laden message on social media through influential influencers.
The decision between standardization and localization (or adaptation) of advertising strategy is crucial for the performance of product/service in foreign markets. Since the online advertising media have diluted the physical boundaries between countries, decision making related to international advertising has focused more on message strategy rather than media strategy. In this paper, the authors utilize movie poster images as a typical example of online advertising of service business. Employing image deep learning approach, the researchers calculate the level of localization and its effect on the financial performance in a foreign market. This research will expand the academic discussion in international advertising strategy and movie marketing.