Marketing Commons^™

What Makes Your Movies More Engaging For Backers? A Text Analysis Of Kickstarter Projects, Shuman Liu

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

Crowdfunding has become an increasingly popular channel for entrepreneurs to raise funds from the crowd to support their startup projects. However, the percentage of crowdfunding projects that can reach their funding goals is relatively small among all crowdfunding websites. Although previous studies have examined various factors such as individual project attributes, social ties that might influence the fund-raising outcomes, the project pitches, as a key part of any crowdfunding proposal, have rarely been studied for their role in driving the crowdfunding success.

In this research, we study a corpus of 1559 movie projects from Kickstarter up to the end of …

Introversion And Online Word-Of-Mouth Behavior : What Roles Do Review Website Design And Product Design Play?, Shu Ting Lau

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

This research investigates the online review behavior of introverted customers. Introversion is a major personality trait that has been widely discussed in many personality theories. This thesis includes two essays. Essay 1 investigates how the design of an online review website can affect the willingness to do an online review of introverts. Based on the arousal theory, it is hypothesized that introverted consumers, because of their avoidance of arousal, would have a higher willingness to do online review in an environment where other users’ feedback is not allowed, but this design does not affect extroverts. These predictions are confirmed by …

The Impact Of South-South Fdi : Knowledge Spillovers From Chinese Fdi To Local Firms In The Cambodian Light Manufacturing Industries, Pisey Vicheth

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations

The study of the extent to which incoming FDI results in ‘spillovers’ (technology, R&D, management practices and know-how) has so far yielded only mixed results, and research has largely been restricted to north-north and north-south interactions; this study develops a model of knowledge spillovers based on previous literature and extends inquiry into south-south FDI by investigating spillovers from Chinese FDI to the Cambodian garment and light manufacturing industries. Several significant factors including the nature and extent of FDI linkages, local industry absorptive capacity, nature of the network relationship, and local firms’ learning orientation have been found to influence the extent …

The Roles Of Product Type And Product Newness In Consumer Value Co-Creation For Luxury Brands, Qi Lu

Theses & Dissertations

The study examines the effect of consumer co-creation in different new product development stages on consumer loyalty, purchase intention and word-of-mouth. It also examines (a) the mediating role of consumer perceived value, (b) the moderating effect of product type (search goods vs. experience goods) and (c) the influence of product newness (high-level vs. low-level) on the moderating effect of product type. Two scenario-based experiments on real luxury buyers in China were conducted to test the proposed hypotheses.

The findings show that co-creation at the early (vs. late) stage have a greater positive impact on consumer loyalty, purchase intention and word-of-mouth. …

Assessing The Effect Of Mobile Word-Of-Mouth On Consumers : The Physical, Psychological And Social Influences, Juanyi Jiang

Theses & Dissertations

Mobile technologies enable users to discover and research products anytime, anywhere. Mobile devices allow consumers to create and share content based on physical location, facilitate seamless interactions, and provide context-relevant information that can better satisfy users’ needs and enhance their shopping experience. As consumers increasingly rely on mobile devices to search information and purchase products, they need immediate, updated, informative and credible opinions in concise forms. Meanwhile, marketers face unprecedented opportunities for mobile marketing, making ever important for them to understand the mobile word-of-mouth and its effect on the purchase behaviors of consumers on the mobile platform vs. those on …

The Integrative Effects Of Promotion Attributes : Implications For Effective Promotion Design, Suntong Qi

Theses & Dissertations

Promotion attributes, such as giveaways, time limitation and exclusivity, are commonly studied separately. Previous studies may focus on how individual attributes (e.g. time pressure or price discounts) affect sales, but seldom consider the integrative effect of them. As individual attributes are often found to have a bilateral effect (both positive and negative) on sales, in this thesis, we explore how different attributes can be aligned with each other and integrated with different level of brand strength according to fit logic. That is how promotion elicits sales and generates word-of-mouth impact in terms of the configuration of promotional attributes and brand …

Engaging Your Customers Via Responding To Online Product Reviews, Chunyu Li

Theses & Dissertations

Given the tremendous impact of online reviews on consumer choice, responding to online word of mouth (WOM) has become an important channel for firms to engage the consumers. This thesis investigates how firms can proactively respond to online product reviews to engage customers and manage customer relationships. In Study One, based upon the data of hotel reviews on Tripadvisor.com, I propose that responding by firms differ in three aspects, namely frequency, speed, and the amount of information, and these metrics exert significant influence on subsequent consumes’ WOM engagement, hotel rankings, and votes of usefulness of the reviews.

Moreover, in contrast …

Overcoming "Liability Of Newness" Of International New Ventures : The Role Of Flexibility, Yuqing Chen

Theses & Dissertations

Riding on the trend of globalization, a large number of new ventures have emerged deploying resources in multiple country markets so as to arrive at a competitive advantage. Studies that focus on such international new ventures grew to become a distinct research area: "international Entrepreneurship" that attracts much research attention but leaves a core issue namely "liability of newness" unaddressed. About 50 years ago, Stinchcombe (1965) coined this term to explain that most new ventures fail because their founders cannot switch their roles quickly enough to adapt to the changing environment. Although previous empirical studies have examined the entrepreneurial firms …

What Do Seller Manipulations Of Online Product Reviews Mean To Consumers?, Ling Peng, Geng Cui, Mengzhou Zhuang, Chunyu Li

Hong Kong Institute of Business Studies Working Paper Series

There is growing evidence that consumers are influenced by online product reviews when making a variety of purchase decisions. Firms are therefore tempted to monitor and manipulate online product reviews on the company's website or forum to influence consumer perceptions by anonymously posting positive reviews, hiding or deleting unfavorable reviews, or offering rewards to consumers who post favorable reviews. Our review of the literature has revealed a surprising shortage of work directed at the development of an integrative theoretical framework or rigorous empirical studies on the effectiveness and the exact impact of such activities on the payoffs to various parties. …

Perceived Similarity Of Other Customers On Service Experience, Lisa Wan, Shing Chung, Patrick Poon, Maggie Chu

Hong Kong Institute of Business Studies Working Paper Series

This study aims to examine how a mere appearance of other similar customers will influence the perceived service quality of a potential customer. This research involves two experimental studies. Findings shows that if potential customers perceive other customers to be similar (vs. dissimilar) in a hospitality setting with regard to age, they will have more favorable perceptions toward the service quality and have a higher purchase intention. However, the positive impact of the similarity in age cohort can override the negative impact of dissimilarity in ethnicity on one's perceived service quality and purchase intentions. The results provide implications for hospitality …

Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word : The Effect Of Self-Attribution When Apologizing For A Brand Crisis, Denghua Yuan, Geng Cui, Lei Lai

Hong Kong Institute of Business Studies Working Paper Series

When apologizing for a product failure, self-attribution by a business inevitably affects consumer attitude and behavior. This study draws from the dissonance-attribution model and investigates the effect of self-attribution in apologies on consumers' brand attitude. Using a 2x2 experiment, the results show that internal attribution generates significant change in brand attitude in a positive direction, while external attribution leads to negative change in brand attitude. Dispositional attribution leads to significantly more positive brand attitude than situational attribution. Internal/dispositional attribution produces significantly more positive effect on consumer attitude than the other three types of attribution. Moreover, perceived risk is found to …

Consumer Animosity And Purchase Behavior : The Role Of Corporate Social Responsibility, Chun Zhang

Theses & Dissertations

Consumer animosity may have a negative impact on consumers’ purchase behavior for foreign products. The consequences of the negative influence include boycotting and reluctant to purchase. This study explores the research on consumer animosity and focuses on how to attenuate the negative effect of consumer animosity towards consumers’ purchase behavior. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is considered to have a moderating effect on the relationship between consumer animosity and purchase intention. In addition, individual thinking styles are expected to influence the moderating role of CSR. In this study, a 2 (consumer animosity: high vs. low) x 2 (CSR: high vs. low) …

Customer Selection For Direct Marketing : Bi-Objective Optimization Using Support Vector Machine, Qian Wang

Theses & Dissertations

A major challenge in direct marketing is to build a customer-selection model that can help achieve higher response rate and greater profit at the same time. In this study, I adopt a bi-objective optimization (BOO) approach and propose a two-stage method using support vector machine (SVM) and support vector regression (SVR) to maximize response rate and profit simultaneously. To deal with the difficulty of learning models from imbalanced data, synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) is used to generate more balanced datasets. Experiments are conducted on two datasets, a direct marketing dataset and the KDD-98 dataset, to compare the predictive performance …

A Pleasant Surprise Or Injury Plus Insult? : Consumers' (Dis)Satisfaction With Recovery Strategies For Service Failure, Muyu Wei

Theses & Dissertations

Dealing with service failure, one question is constantly asked: why certain consumers are still dissatisfied even though compensations are made? The effectiveness of recovery strategy has been discussed in the context of service failure paradox and second deviation in the past literature. In this thesis, these two issues were brought together under the same framework - from the perspective of expectation. We propose that expectation mediates consumers’ evaluation of recovery strategies, and leads to different levels of satisfaction and re-patronage intention. The expectation is further influenced by the type of resource spending consumers are reminded of and the failure type. …

The Internationalization Of Emerging Market Multinationals : Effects Of Host And Home Country Institutional Facotrs, Yuanyuan Zhang

Theses & Dissertations

As we all know, economic globalization and internationalization have sparked off countless studies and arguments in the past years. Some of the conventional theories about the internationalization of firms, however, are repeatedly challenged when they are applied to the less developed countries. The internationalization of firms from less developed countries has been a topic of growing interest in the international business and economics literature. In our study, we consider the influence of institutions from both the host and home country on entry modes of Chinese firms expanding overseas. Based on a sample of 314 China’s MNCs, the results support our …

The Effect Of Word-Of-Mouth On The Purchase Of Genuine And Counterfelt Luxury Brands : The Roles Of Attitude Functions, Wei Wang

Theses & Dissertations

This research aims to investigate the effect of word-of-mouth (WOM) on the purchase of genuine and counterfeit luxury brands with a focus on the roles of attitude functions, product type, valence of WOM, and brand popularity. It consists of two experimental studies. Study 1 examines the effect of WOM on the purchase of luxury brands and attempts to investigate the mediating role of attitude functions in the relationship between WOM and purchase intentions for luxury brands, with regard to different product types and valence of WOM. Study 2 compares the effects of WOM communications with traditional advertising on the purchase …

The Effects Of Perceived Brand Globalness On Consumer Responses To Brand Failures, Xue Gao

Theses & Dissertations

Even big companies cannot guarantee their brands never ever fail customers. Recently the brand failures of Toyota taught us a vivid lesson that a brand takes decades to be built up but to be ruined overnight. Although, the advantages of building global brands are well recognized in literature, the superiorities of global brands in brand failure context are not yet studied. This study aims to investigate the effects of perceived brand globalness (PBG) on consumer affective and behavioral responses to brand failures. Global brands are perceived superior to local brands due to factors like higher quality perceptions and prestige feelings. …

"Seeing Is Believing?" : A Persuasion Knowledge Model On Attitudinal Evaluations In Advertisements, Yan Wu

Theses & Dissertations

This study examines the effects of individuals' beliefs about persuasion tactics (i.e., persuasion knowledge) evoked in an advertisement on their attitudes toward the advertisement and the advertised brand. Drawing on persuasion knowledge theory, this thesis develops a conceptual model that argues how ad image incongruence, defined as an inappropriate match-up between model type (western versus local) and advertised product category (western product category versus local product category) featured in advertisements, leads to the use of persuasion knowledge, which in turn affects attitudinal evaluations. A series of experimental studies were conducted. The results suggest that individual’s use of persuasion knowledge mediates …

Improving The Profitability Of Direct Marketing : A Quantile Regression Approach, Xi Zhang

Theses & Dissertations

Direct marketing is to target consumers who are most likely to respond. A number of target selection methods have been employed to select potential customers. These methods either only consider the customer response probability and ignore the profit issue or assume that the estimates of profit are homogenous across customers when considering the expected amount of profit. Furthermore, the traditional analytical techniques based on ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, which focus on the average customer, cannot examine the differences of various customer groups or account for customer heterogeneity in profitability estimates. Quantile regression, instead of the point estimate for the …

The Effect Of Online Consumer Reviews On New Product Sales : A Study Of Amazon.Com, Xiaoning Guo

Theses & Dissertations

In recent years, online word-of-mouth (WOM) communication in the form of online consumer reviews has become a major information source for consumers planning to purchase a new product. With the help of online reviews, consumers can access diverse opinions from others who have bought or used the new products before making their purchase decisions. This study compares the impact of online reviews on the sales of two types of new products (experience vs. search products) over time, in terms of the volume and valence of online consumer reviews. Using the data collected from Amazon.com over a period of nine months, …

Creation Of Principal-Agency Relationship Value : Social Capital And Dynamic Learning Capability Perspectives, Yan Bin Xie

Theses & Dissertations

In this 'age of turbulence' (Greenspan, 2007), businesses, in response to challenges of globalized competition, escalated customer expectation, and disruptive technological innovations, find innovative value propositions (Slater, 1997) critical for survival and sustained competitiveness. In lined with relationship marketing that suppliers need target valuable custome r to establish long-term relationship for survival in fierce competition (Gronroos, 2000), scholars (e.g. Walter, Ritter & Gemunden, 2001) looking from supplier perspective identify direct and indirect value as two dimensions for supplier-perceived relationship value. Direct value-based drivers of business relationships consist of higher profits from the product and service offering (i.e. profit function), growth …

Susceptibility To Global Consumer Culture : Scale Development And Purchase Behaviour Of Shanghai Consumers, Yue Huo

Theses & Dissertations

Global Consumer Culture (GCC) is a term emerged in early 1990s. It refers to generally accepted beliefs and consumer tendencies toward globally shared consumption-related symbols such as brands, product categories, and consumption activities and events. Although researchers sought insights in this area in the last decade, they mainly focused on the specific topic of Brand Positioning method under the context of GCC. Little efforts were made to examine what global consumers actually do and think when making their buying decision, and what the common characteristics global consumers share in the world. The existence and increasing influence of global consumers whose …

Internationalization Of Chinese Firms : A Contingent Resource Perspective, Xiaoyan Ma

Theses & Dissertations

This study examines the role of inward activities in the internationalization of firms from China and proposes a theoretical framework of internationalization using the contingent resource theory. Based on case studies of four Chinese enterprises and a survey of Chinese manufacturing firms, the study shows that by engaging in inward activities, firms may acquire the critical resources that can lead to outward activities and the internationalization process. Whether firms can succeed in internationalization is conditional upon several contingency factors including management motivation, absorptive capacity, resource fungibility, exploration strategy, exploitation strategy and government support. Lastly, we explore the implications of the …

Predicting Customer Responses To Direct Marketing : A Bayesian Approach, Wei Chen

Theses & Dissertations

Direct marketing problems have been intensively reviewed in the marketing literature recently, such as purchase frequency and time, sales profit, and brand choices. However, modeling the customer response, which is an important issue in direct marketing research, remains a significant challenge. This thesis is an empirical study of predicting customer response to direct marketing and applies a Bayesian approach, including the Bayesian Binary Regression (BBR) and the Hierarchical Bayes (HB). Other classical methods, such as Logistic Regression and Latent Class Analysis (LCA), have been conducted for the purpose of comparison. The results of comparing the performance of all these techniques …

Customer Lifetime Value : An Integrated Data Mining Approach, Chen Xu

Theses & Dissertations

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) ---which is a measure of the profit generating potential, or value, of a customer---is increasingly being considered a touchstone for customer relationship management. As the guide and benchmark for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, CLV analysis has received increasing attention from both the marketing practitioners and researchers from different domains. Furthermore, the central challenge in predicting CLV is the precise calculation of customer’s length of service (LOS). There are several statistical approaches for this problem and several researchers have used these approaches to perform survival analysis in different domains. However, classical survival analysis techniques like Kaplan-Meier …

What Makes Them Ignored? Consumers' Mindset Of Food Labels, Wai King Tse

Bachelor Degree - Marketing - Final Year Project

Executive summary

While Hong Kong consumers are increasingly concerned with food safety and a healthy diet, their usage of food labels during purchase remains significantly low. In order to prospect for effective moves in the future, one concordant step for both the government and pre-packaged food manufacturers is to understand the consumers’ perceptions and usage of food labels. This research explores what factors lead to such phenomenon and subsequently its implications in Hong Kong. The research also examines the behavioral variations of consumers in processing food labels.

The study begins with a literature review to construct research hypotheses, covering aspects …

Market Performance And Technical Efficiency Of Domestic And Foreign-Invested Service Industries In China = 中外資服務業的比較分析, Yue Ma

Centre for Public Policy Studies : CPPS Working Paper Series

Although the Chinese manufacturing industry has attracted a vast amount of foreign direct investment (FDI) and has made rapid development, the Chinese service sector is still heftily-protected and has absorbed little FDI since the open door policy adopted in 1978. As a result, the share of the service output is just around 41% of China’s GDP. This is clearly unsatisfactory as the service sector has been able to create more jobs proportionally in many other developed and less developed countries than that in China. This paper is the first attempt in the literature to conduct an empirical comparative study of …

Consumer's Adoption Of The Technology Innovations : The Role Of Coping Strategies, Wenjing Bao

Theses & Dissertations

Given the accelerated technology innovations and shorter product lifecycles, explaining and predicting consumers’ adoption of technology innovations have been increasingly difficult. With new generations of the same products emerging every few years or less, consumers often face the dilemma of choosing between continuing to use the existing product and upgrading to a new version, and have increasingly experienced a certain level of technology fatigue. They may delay the adoption, frog-leap the new product, and simply ignore its existence. Thus, the traditional models of adoption based on product attributes and consumer innovativeness can no longer accommodate these new realities. Based on …

West Rail Vs. Bus : A Passenger Study For West New Territories, Kin Hang Foo

Bachelor Degree - Marketing - Final Year Project

Executive summary

Before the opening of West Rail, bus is a leading transportation mode to go to urban area in West New Territories. But after the opening of West Rail in 2003, the situation is changed. West Rail and bus become an important transportation mode of residents. But the market share of West Rail is not high enough to reach the target of KCRC. Then what is the main problem of West Rail behind? The purpose of this report is to investigate on how people choose their transportation mode and use the data of the survey to help KCRC to …

Management Localization And Performance Of Mncs In China : A Contingent Resource-Based View, Shengsheng Huang

Theses & Dissertations

Although many foreign invested enterprises (FIEs) and consultants in China put the localization to a strategic level, management localization is still an emerging issue of human resource management in academic research. A few previous studies on management localization focused on the internal efficiency of the subsidiaries or parent-subsidiary relationship. The impact of management localization on the interaction between the subsidiary and local environment has received little attention. Moreover, localization lacks a consistent and valid definition. This thesis attempts to bridge the gap by systematically exploring the strategic impact of management localization. Management localization is defined as substituting expatriate managers with …