Online reviews enable brands to promote their products by means of word-of-mouth communication. In an e-commerce environment, user-generated customer feedback, as a form of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), is a crucial source of information in the prepurchase stage as many customers base their purchase decision on feedback from other customers. eWOM is perceived as a reliable source of information and has become especially important in an online environment (Chevalier & Mayzlin, 2006; Li & Zhan, 2011). Existing research has shown that customer feedback positively influences sales (Chevalier & Mayzlin, 2006; Forman, Ghose, & Wiesenfeld, 2008; Ha, Bae, & Son, 2015). Yet, only very limited research on how to communicate customer feedback to maximize a company’s top-line growth has been conducted (Packard & Berger, 2017). In this study, we aim to fill this gap by investigating how numerical customer feedback metrics should be communicated to attract new customers. Using an experiment, we empirically investigate which of the two widely established numerical customer feedback metrics, a customer recommendation rate or a customer satisfaction rate, is better suited to attract new customers and hence stimulate company growth. The impact of the stimulus on the purchase process is measured by means of three different dependent variables to imitate the hierarchy of a purchase decision: consumers’ interest towards the ad, their attitude towards the product shown in the ad as well as their purchase intention. Furthermore, we include several moderating factors, which have proven to be relevant when looking at online reviews, namely product type as well as consumers’ motivation and ability to process persuasive communication (Gupta & Harris, 2010; Klein, 1998; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).

Over the course of the past decades, technological advancements accompanied a plethora of new types of data and consumer insights (e.g., Erevelles, Fukawa, & Swayne, 2016). Companies value opportunities provided by the availability of large data sets for their business strategy. Customers, however, are wary, as these analyses require the collection and storage of large amounts of personal information. Therefore, it is vital for companies to understand what customers perceive to be fair with regard to their personal data (e.g., Malhotra, Kim, & Agarwal, 2004). However, research still lacks deeper insights into customers’ expectations of fair data handling (Marketing Science Institute, 2016). Yet, only few studies have covered the field of expectations regarding fair data collection and use (Earp, Antón, Aiman-Smith, & Stufflebeam, 2005; Milne & Bahl, 2010). Importantly, however, previous studies have frequently neglected how companies’ fulfillment of customers’ expectations translates into subsequent consumer behavior. Moreover, we have yet to understand if companies’ actual behavior meets customers’ expectations. Grounded on psychological contract and justice theory, we investigate how customers want their data to be handled and in which ways they want to be informed about its usage, while also exploring how customer expectations translate into subsequent behavioral intentions. Additionally, we shed light on current company behavior, thus analyzing if customers’ expectations of fair data collection and usage are aligned with company perspectives. Responding to calls for a mixed methods approach in business research (e.g., Harrison, 2013; Woodside, 2010), we undertook qualitative and quantitative studies to address our research goals. In Study 1, we conduct in-depth interviews with customers and experts to gain an overview of customer expectations with regard to fair data collection and usage. Based on these findings, we conducted a quantitative study (Study 2) investigating each of the customer expectations identified in the prior study. The findings of Study 2 reveal that customers expect a simplification of privacy statements as well as easier control options for their data. Moreover, customers are willing to switch to a competitor, if it better fulfills expectations. Study 3 applies a content analysis of company homepages and privacy statements. Aligning the results from Study 2 and Study 3, we demonstrate that companies currently do not sufficiently meet customers’ expectation of fair data collection and usage.

Corporate reputation – the central antecedent of trust – bears the potential to create sustainable competitive advantage. However, far too many examples of companies’ socially irresponsible behavior over the past years led to a severe crisis of confidence. Disgraced companies suffer from the adverse effects of their misbehaviors at all levels. As a consequence, one of the top priorities for both practitioners and business scholars is the identification of opportunities to (re)build corporate reputation. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), a key driver of reputation perceptions, is a very promising one. However, as CSR is a multidimensional construct that comprises a wide range of activities, the selection of the “right” ones deems a major challenge. Based on a literature review, we advocate that news media data should be utilized to analyze which CSR dimensions are particularly likely to affect reputation perceptions. As journalists rely on companies’ press releases as a starting point for their business articles, companies need to carefully evaluate which CSR dimensions they emphasize in their communication strategy. Based on superior measures of reputation and CSR, this study utilizes reputation and news media coverage data on companies listed in the German DAX30 between 2005 and 2011. The panel data regression encompasses the multidimensional concept of CSR, presenting a six-dimensional CSR construct including environment, employee relations, community, product issues, corporate culture and corporate governance. Relevant moderating variables, namely firm and stakeholder characteristics, are investigated. In this context, the results show that the relevance of each of those six distinct dimensions differs for the formation of reputation judgements and varies across investigated stakeholder and company types: across all model specifications, negative media coverage addressing employee relations and community affects reputation perceptions. The general public primarily perceives negative news coverage as relevant for their reputation judgements. Opinion leaders seem to be less dependent on the media to learn about CSR dimensions, as only four out of twelve independent variables exert a significant impact on their reputation judgments. News coverage about product issues only constitutes a key role in the formation of reputation judgements of firms that are predominantly known from direct experiences. A particularly large amount of variation can be explained for reputation ratings of these companies as well as for reputation perceptions of opinion leaders.

Organizational agility is a firm-wide dynamic capability to cope with rapid, relentless, and uncertain changes and thrive in a competitive environment of continually and unpredictable changing opportunities. A conceptual model is drawn up, based on the literature and a previous qualitative inquiry, to identify agility enablers that help organizations to sustain in dynamic environments. Further, the model explores the relationship between organizational agility and firm performance as well as the moderating effect of environmental dynamism on this relationship. The validity of the construct is assessed by means of a quantitative study using a survey methodology. A data set consisting of 348 German-based companies is analysed on a business unit level as well as for the organization as a whole. Partial least squares path modeling (PLS-SEM) results reveal that four dimensions (organization, innovation, people and knowledge management), comprising various agility enablers, positively influence organizational agility. Moreover, results indicate that organizational agility has a significant effect on firm performance and that this relationship is modearted by environmental dynamism. Therefore, this study contributes to a better understanding of the complex nature of the agility construct and provides guidelines how organizations can achieve an agile alignment. It further emphasizes the need for managers to integrate agile practices in order to outperform competitors in hypercompetitive and turbulent business environments.

Higher education institutions are facing increased national and international competition for research talent and research funds (OECD, 2009). The best way for a university to react to this situation is to foster its reputation. Not only for firms (Raithel & Schwaiger, 2015), but also for universities, reputation is one of the most valuable intangible assets (Albers, 2015). Therefore, this study investigates the drivers of business school reputation as perceived by academics. The impact of the following potential drivers is analyzed in this study: research performance, third-party research funds and standing of professors within the academic community. We used the variable research reputation from the business school ranking of the Centrum für Hochschulentwicklung (CHE) as a proxy for reputation. In addition, also the variable sum of third-party funds was available from the CHE dataset. Furthermore, we measured professors’ standing in the academic community by considering if they are outstanding members in the two major German research communities and if they are in the editorial board of one of the A+ or A ranked journals according to the vhb-jourqual ranking. Moreover, we measured research performance by means of the score of the faculty achieved in the Handelsblatt Rankings Faculties as well by means of the publication output per faculty member. Besides, the previous score of the CHE ranking was included to control for path dependency of reputation (Gray & Balmer, 1998). As additional control variables, the size of the business school, the research reputation of the host university (measured as the number of Nobel-price winners from the university) and the size of the city (measured by the number of inhabitants) were used. Research performance as measured by the Handelsblatt Ranking accounts for 31% of current reputational assessment. The influence of third-party funds as well as professors’ standing within the academic community could not be confirmed. Moreover, city size was found to be correlated to reputation. The obvious explanation would be that large cities are able to attract better researchers (be it for quality of life or because universities in large cities offer more attractive compensation schemes), which in turn leads to a higher research productivity – an important driver for academics’ reputational assessments of a business school.