Marketing Commons^™

Two Essays On The Role Of Empathy In Consumer Response To User-Generated Content, Mohammadali Koorank Beheshti

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Empathy is known to be the basis of all human interactions and an essential component of human psychology. Empathy includes a cognitive component (perspective-taking) and an affective component (e.g., emotional contagion). The two essays of my dissertation investigate how each of these components of empathy affect consumer responses to user-generated content.

Essay 1: Although both price and online review ratings are important cues in consumers’ product quality judgment, most previous studies have treated price and review ratings as separate inputs into consumer decision-making. The current research shows that the two cues are intertwined, such that consumers’ perception of the same …

Green Advertising Using Sick-, Well-, And Healed-Appeals, Dooyoung Choi, Ha Kyung Lee

STEMPS Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of sick, well, and healed appeals while examining the interaction effect of the saliency of environmental issues in the fashion industry on consumer responses. A 3 x 2 experimental study was conducted with the appeals (sick vs. well vs. healed appeals) and the salience for environmental issues in fashion (low vs. high) as independents and positive and negative anticipated emotions as mediators, leading to purchase intentions. A total of 195 usable responses were collected through MTurk. While all appeals worked well with consumers with high saliency through anticipated positive emotions, …

Collecting Samples From Online Services: How To Use Screeners To Improve Data Quality, Aaron D. Arndt, John B. Ford, Barry J. Babin, Vinh Luong

Marketing Faculty Publications

Increasingly, marketing and consumer researchers rely on online data collection services. While actively-managed data collection services directly assist with the sampling process, minimally-managed data collection services, such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), leave researchers solely responsible for recruiting, screening, cleaning, and evaluating responses. The research reported here proposes a 2 × 2 framework based on sampling goal and methodology for screening and evaluating the quality of online samples. By sampling goals, screeners can be categorized as selection, which involves matching the sample with the targeted population; or as accuracy, which involves ensuring that participants are appropriately attentive. By …

Artificial Empathy In Marketing Interactions: Bridging The Human-Ai Gap In Affective And Social Customer Experience, Yuping Liu-Thompkins, Shintaro Okazaki, Hairong Li

Marketing Faculty Publications

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to transform firm-customer interactions. However, current AI marketing agents are often perceived as cold and uncaring and can be poor substitutes for human-based interactions. Addressing this issue, this article argues that artificial empathy needs to become an important design consideration in the next generation of AI marketing applications. Drawing from research in diverse disciplines, we develop a systematic framework for integrating artificial empathy into AI-enabled marketing interactions. We elaborate on the key components of artificial empathy and how each component can be implemented in AI marketing agents. We further explicate and test how artificial empathy generates …