Even though more than half a century has passed since the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) emerged, many people still have an interest in CSR. According to a survey, eighty-seven percent of American consumers said they would purchase a product produced by a corporation that supported at least one specific social issue. Also, more than three-quarters (76%) would refuse to buy a product if they found out the company endorsed the issue contrary to their beliefs. These numbers align with consumers’ intent to purchase or boycott based on CSR commitment. Do CSR activities affect sales? Many studies have been conducted to answer this question in the academic field, but the results have not been consistent. Some articles reported that CSR activities positively impact the firm’s various aspects, including financial performance. But other studies reported that the impact of CSR on firms’ performance is unclear or even harmful.

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.

Recently, the studios in Hollywood introduces mobile games based on the storyline of movies for promotional purpose. With wide exposure of such games, managers could expect raised market awareness and purchase intention toward movies set to be released. Among the movie-themed mobile games, at the same time, not a few games have made financial success as the box office scores of the original movie increases. Thus, managers should deal with the promotional mobile app and the target product simultaneously on the belief of reciprocal relationship between them. If the dynamic relation is true then, finding deterministic factors of mobile game performance has practical significance to make positive consequences for both products. Branded entertainment is defined as “the integration of advertising into entertainment content, whereby brands are embedded into storylines of a film, television program, or other entertainment medium” (Hudson and Hudson 2006). Wise et. al. (2008) states that the advergame, a videogame designed around a brand, is one form of branded entertainment. Additionally, Sood and Drèze (2006) examined film sequels as brand extension of experiential goods based on the reality that Hollywood brands movies. In this vein, movie-themed mobile games can be contemplated as a new practice of branded entertainment. To test the research hypotheses, we collected 43 pairs of a movie and a movie-themed mobile game. Among 300 movies in the annual top 100 U.S. domestic box office chart from 2012 to the end of October 2014, films having more than one promotional mobile game were selected. The data on mobile game were limited to the Apple’s App Store for consistency. For data collection, we utilized multiple archival sources such as boxofficemojo.com, metacritic.com, imdb.com, and appannie.com. The objective of this research is to investigate the impact of movie-themed mobile games on the performance of original movies and the characteristics leading mobile game success. We developed a simultaneous equation system to discover the interdependent relationship between mobile game ranking and movie sales. This study is one of the first empirical investigation demonstrating reciprocal relationship between promotional game app and its target product. The results show that mobile games perform profit generating function as well as promotional function, thus suggesting managers to deal with mobile game more strategic way.

People want to watch a sports game which cannot anticipate the result until the end of the game. Sometimes, however, excessive tension of contest lowers the interest of audience. Vast amount of existing researches have focused on finding explanation about what makes a difference of the preference level of suspense among sports fans and where is the optimal level of suspense. We apply Expected Utility Theory and Prospect theory to illustrate the expected utility of sports spectators. According to our findings, if someone someone who is satisfied more when the cheering team wins, he or she may prefer lopsided match than close match. And fans who support winning team, which means team which wins often, prefer lopsided match to close match because they forecast their team will win more than fans who support losing team, which means team which loses often. We manipulate the level of satisfaction when the cheering team wins (S) and subjective forecasted probability of win before the game (Q) of respondents and measure the utility of them toward difference game aspect (P) to verify our hypothesis. This study was carried out to investigate how the satisfaction of sports spectators will change according to the change of the game aspect. In particular, research model was set up using the Expected Utility Theory and Prospect Theory of economics. The use of economics models to explain sports consumer behavior is different from that of previous studies, and consumers' prior expectations can affect the current game viewing based on Prospect Theory is another contribution of this research.

Do Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities really influence firm value, and if so, what is the mechanism that is at work? In this study, we especially focused on publicizing CSR (PCSR) and tried to examine the effect of PCSR on firm value. We merged the data from different archival sources and obtained balanced panel data consisting of 385 firmyear observation across 77 firms for 5 years. The data contained several variables such as Publicizing CSR, WOM, Tobin's q, Advertising intensity, Contribution to sales ratio, ROE, Sales increase, Asset, GDP, and other financial indicators. This study provides several implications for marketing theory and practice. First, it simultaneously reveals the preceding and following factors of word of mouth. Second, our evidence suggests that marketing managers could obtain benefits if they concentrate not only on finding good CSR activities but also on publicizing them well, and that PCSR could be a great help for companies that want to improve the public awareness and interest. The purpose of this study is to clarify the relationship between publicizing CSR (PCSR) and firm value, and the mechanism by which the influence is conveyed. Our findings are as below. First, the higher the PCSR, the greater the firm value even though the ratio of contribution to sales is added. Because the contribution is known as a representative proxy for corporate socially responsible investment, this result implies that PCSR is significant even though the effect of CSR itself is controlled. Second, WOM mediates the relationship between PCSR and firm value. This suggests that publicizing CSR could attract people's attention and then contribute positively to firm value. Finally, this study found that the effects of PCSR on firm value are mediated through positive WOM in the context of controlling negative WOM. This result implies that PCSR increases the amount of positive WOM, rather than negative WOM, which helps improve corporate value.

To lead a movie to success, managers must understand why consumers buy tickets. Some go to the movies due to trailers or movie posters, others watch movies triggered by their friends’ recommendation. Using Bass (1969)’s terms, we may categorize the former type of consumers into innovators who are influenced by external factors such as advertisements and media reports. We may label the latter type as imitators who are affected by internal factors such as word-of-mouth (WOM). Consumers in the digital era, regardless of their motivation types, easily obtain information related to movies through webpages or social networking services. Therefore, marketers should focus on how online information influence the diffusion of products. Additionally, each country has a unique cultural background, thereby resulting in different consumer behavior. Based on the prior arguments, we expect that the US movie market would show higher innovation effect and lower imitation effect compared to the Korean movie market. Opposite to the hypothesis, there are no significant differences in the innovation effect between the two markets. However, as expected, the imitation effect of US is significantly lower than that of Korea. In both markets, the advertising level and the publicizing level do not show any significant effect on the innovation effect. However, the two variables have significant and positive effect on the market potential. As predicted, the gender and the age heterogeneity of WOM are revealed to affect the imitation effect in the hypothesized direction. Product availability, measured with the number of screens, has a positive relationship with the innovation effect in the US market and with the market potential in both markets. Lastly, seasonality shows a positive association with the imitation effect in the US market and with the market potential in the Korean market. The current research tries to explore key differences in the diffusion patterns of movies between the US and Korean markets by applying Bass diffusion model. Further, this study aims to discover the factors that bring about the innovation and the imitation effects in both markets. By employing data available online, the current study could provide practical implications on how to manage information delivered through online channels.

Based on the collaborative and social characteristics, social networking services (SNSs) are growing platforms for consumer-to-consumer conversation including electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). eWOM is defined as ‘any positive or negative statement made by potential, actual, or former customers about a product or company, which is made available to a multitude of people and institutions via the Internet’ (Hennig-Thurau, Gwinner, Walsh, & Gremler, 2004, p.39). Despite its academic and managerial significance, several preliminary studies have examined what determines effective eWOM in SNSs (e.g., Chu & Kim, 2011; Teng, Khong, Goh, & Chong, 2014). Extending these attempts, we empirically investigate what influences consumers’ evaluation of eWOM, especially on Facebook. We suggest a new perspective of focusing on the psychological stream of social identity (Tajel & Turner, 1986) which is a distinctive factor explicit on Facebook. Unlike conventional eWOM platforms like bulletin boards and online communities where the user information is limited due to anonymity or presented in restricted manner (e.g., reputation from ratings by other members) (Dou, Walden, Lee, & Lee, 2012), Facebook provides profile information about users including one’s social group membership (e.g., school, company). This implies that the perception of social identity on Facebook may influence how one evaluates the source and his/her eWOM message.