Business Commons^™

Canadians Redefining R&B: The Online Marketing Of Drake, Justin Bieber, And Jessie Reyez, Amara Pope Ms.

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In a country that long failed to accept, include, and institutionalize R&B music as part of Canadian culture, musical artists Justin Bieber, Drake, and Jessie Reyez have successfully broken-down barriers by having successful careers as racially diverse Canadian R&B artists. This qualitative study surveys the literature on classifications of the R&B genre and of Canadian identities in popular media. The theoretical framework of discourse analysis is used to conduct a brief episodic history of Canadian R&B and to evaluate how the music genre “R&B,” is traditionally associated with people who have "Black" and "American" identities, and how a “Canadian” identity …

A Descriptive Analysis Of Sport Nationalism, Digital Media, And Fandom To Launch The Canadian Premier League, Farzan Mirzazadeh

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In April 2019, the Canadian Premier League (CPL), a professional domestic soccer league, launched in Canada, making it the first top-tier league in North America to begin operations in the modern digital era. The CPL represents a unique and timely opportunity to examine how a new professional sports league cultivates ties with fan-consumers via sport nationalism, digital media, and fandom. As yet, there are very few academic works on the CPL, and there is also a paucity of scholarly publications on the launch of new professional sports leagues in the 21st century. For this study, two types of qualitative data …

Two Essays On Everyday Financial Decisions, Poornima Vinoo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Every day consumers make numerous financial decisions which have the potential to increase or decrease their wellbeing in the short-term or long-term. For instance, choosing to pay only the minimum due on a credit card bill can increase liquidity and wellbeing in the short-term, but increase debt and decrease wellbeing in the long-term. My work examines two such instances of everyday financial decisions which influence consumer wellbeing. In Essay 1, I use experiments to examine how the design of retirement savings investment plans can influence the choices consumers make, thus setting them up for comfort or hardship in their retirement. …

Trust And Bias In Peer-To-Peer Ratings: Why Peer-To-Peer Service Ratings Are Nearly Always Positive, And How They Can Be Fixed, Michael Moorhouse

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Transactions in the peer-to-peer sharing economy carry high risk and uncertainty. Consumers exchange with non-professional providers with whom they have no past history, and must rely on ratings and reviews for choice selection. However, there is a large positive bias in the ratings, making differentiation difficult, and causing some consumers to lose trust. Despite these concerns, little progress has been made to demonstrate the cause of the bias or how it can be fixed. I address this gap by demonstrating that consumers evaluate peer-peer experiences based on trust. This trust evaluation, in concert with network and social factors, contributes to …

Ideas Worth Spreading? Adverse Effects Of Information Load In Online Communications, Amir Sepehri

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What makes public addresses such as online talks successful vs. not? Across seven field and lab studies, I find that information overload hurts consumer adoption. The cause? Processing disfluency. Information overload makes a message more difficult to process, which in turn reduces liking and interest. The effect disappears among audience members with greater need for cognition, a personality trait marking a penchant for deep and broad information-processing. My empirical investigation concludes by documenting the counter-intuitiveness of the findings (i.e., how consumers mispredict which talks they actually (dis)like). From these results, I derive insights for (i) the psychology of adoption, and …

Essays On Information Asymmetry And Leakage, Jun Hyun (Joseph) Ryoo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Since the underlying qualities of products and firms are not readily apparent, information asymmetry exists at the heart of marketing. This dissertation investigates information asymmetry that is present specifically between: (1) firms and consumers, and (2) firms and investors. I advance our knowledge of how information asymmetry can be reduced in beneficial ways for the firm either by voluntary or involuntary means. This dissertation consists of two essays. In Essay 1, I examine involuntary information leakage in the movie industry. I find that spoilers, which prematurely resolve plot uncertainty for those who have yet to see the movie, can increase …

Essays On The Economics Of Digital Piracy, Zhuang Liu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My thesis consists of three chapters relating to the economics of digital piracy. Digital piracy is a debated topic catching tremendous academic and public attention. My studies contribute to the understanding of the impact of digital piracy on legitimate sales revenue with a focus on the motion picture industry.

In my first chapter, I examine the effects of screener piracy on the movie box office. Screeners are movie copies sent to critics and industry professionals for evaluation purposes. Sometimes, screeners are leaked and made available to download on the Internet. This chapter exploits the plausibly exogenous variation of file sharing/piracy …

Two Essays On Consumer-Generated Reviews: Reviewer Expertise And Mobile Reviews, Peter Nguyen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Over the past few decades, the internet has risen to prominence, enabling consumers to not only quickly access large amounts of information, but also openly share content (e.g., blogs, videos, reviews) with a substantially large number of fellow consumers. Given the vast presence of consumers in the online space, it has become increasingly critical for marketers to better understand the way consumers share, and learn from, consumer-generated content, a research area known as electronic word-of-mouth. In this dissertation, I advance our understanding about the shared content generated by consumers on online review platforms. In Essay 1, I study why and …

Toward A Better Understanding And Management Of Product Recall, Vivek Astvansh

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Product recalls have become increasingly common across product categories and countries. Although recalls pose adverse consequences for businesses, regulatory agencies, and society, they also test these stakeholders’ resilience in the face of adversity. Perhaps because scholars from multiple disciplines have studied recalls for nearly four decades now, a large number of terms, most of which stay undefined, has been used to describe recalls and several closely related yet distinct phenomena. We also lack a framework that can help synthesize our knowledge and guide us toward questions that are both interesting and relevant. Finally, there has been no attention to the …

Two Essays On The Link Between Consumer-Brand Relationships And Customer Brand Loyalty, Mansur Khamitov

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Customer brand loyalty is one of the most important concepts to consumer researchers and marketing practitioners. A considerable amount of research over the last 20 years documents that different consumer-brand relationship constructs, such as those characterized by attachment, identification, brand love, self-brand connection and trust, are positive predictors of customer brand loyalty. However, there is little consensus on what consumer-brand relationship constructs are superior predictors of loyalty and under what conditions each type performs relatively better. To advance understanding of how well different consumer-brand relationship constructs drive customer brand loyalty and to help companies improve the effectiveness of their relationship-building …

Consumption As Emotion Regulation, Jeff D. Rotman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Products and services often provide value that goes beyond functional utility. Drawing from a compensatory consumption model, which suggests that consumption is a means to regulate self-discrepancies, the current research suggests that consumers are motivated to self-regulate their emotions and this self-regulation can be accomplished via consumption. Specifically, emotional and physiological deviations from a steady state motivate individuals to find balance in order to alleviate those deviations. Three papers provide evidence for this hypothesis. Utilizing an embodied cognition framework for chapter 2 and chapter 3, I demonstrate that individuals are motivated to reduce a perceived lack of interpersonal warmth by …

The Impact Of Growth, Governance, And Geography On Franchise Performance, Moeen Naseer Butt

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Growing franchise systems are admired and rewarded favorably by press, seen as “growth engines” in investor stock portfolios, and attract significant interest from potential franchisees. Yet growth brings with it the specter of intra-brand competition, and its attendant ill effect of sharply reducing the motivation of franchisees – the very drivers of such growth. Facing competition from their very own, franchisees indulge in shirking, in turn eliciting franchisor terminations in ever greater numbers as they run afoul of the franchise agreement. These franchisor terminations, in turn, may subsequently affect the financial position of franchise systems in terms of sales and …

Designing A Hybrid Experience: The Effect Of Experience Structure On Consumers' Evaluations, Juan Wang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

A hybrid experience refers to an experience that is composed of two or more separable constituent experiences that are traditionally consumed independently of one another. A good example is an educational trip where sightseeing tours and educational engagements are combined in a single market offering for consumers. In this dissertation, I consider whether the structure of a hybrid experience impacts its evaluation. Through six experiments, I demonstrate that alternately structured hybrid experiences (e.g., partaking in both sightseeing tours and educational engagements within each day of a six-day trip) are more favourably evaluated than sequentially structured ones (e.g., completing all sightseeing …

Evaluating Loyalty Programs With Endogenous Redemption, Mihaela Alina Nastasoiu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Evaluating the capacity of consumer loyalty programs to generate additional sales is essential for marketers who run such programs. However, customers' self-selection into the loyalty programs makes this evaluation difficult. This is the case especially in set-ups where the reward is not granted automatically upon achieving a certain number of points. In the case of automatic rewards, marketing theory predicts that points accumulation accelerates as consumers approach the threshold of necessary points for the reward, and is also boosted after the redemption, in what is called `the rewarded behavior effect'. In this thesis I use these insights to develop two …

Exploring Consumer Relationships With Human Brands: How Reference Groups, Affiliation Motives, And Biological Sex Predict Endorser Effectiveness, Jennifer A. Jeffrey

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Using human brands (also termed “celebrities”) as product endorsers is a popular marketing tool. Although human brands are traditionally regarded as aspirational others, a concept based on reference group literature, no research has examined whether adopting a reference group framework is of theoretical or substantive value when predicting a human brand’s endorsement potential. I explore this issue, arguing that the traditional conceptualizing of human brands as purely aspirational, while not incorrect, is restrictive. How consumers interact with human brands and who they classify as such is evolving, and the result is that consumers see some human brands as similar others …

The Viability And Sustainability Of A Trivial Attribute Differentiation Strategy, Charan Kamal Bagga

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My dissertation examines whether, when and why the competitive advantage provided by a trivial attribute (i.e., a product attribute that provides no verifiable objective benefit) to a differentiating brand holds in the event of competitive retaliation. I construct a multitude of experimental action-reaction settings to examine the sustainability of a trivial attribute differentiation strategy. The manipulated factors across different experiments include the category dominance of the first-mover and the retaliating brands, and the nature of competitive retaliation (i.e., same trivial attribute, a different trivial attribute, a more attractive trivial attribute, and price retaliation). My dissertation contributes theoretically to the areas …

Music And Auditory Transportation: An Investigation Of The Music Experience, Gail Leizerovici

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

To date, music has been primarily investigated as an atmospheric component of retail environments, or as a manipulable variable to assess consumer behaviour responses. However, across disciplines, listening to music has been shown to foster group membership, decrease anxiety, improve mood, and induce strong physical reactions such as thrills and chills. My dissertation research looks at closing this gap by investigating how music can offer more to its consumer than is currently understood. Using a mixed-method approach, I first explore the phenomenon of experiencing a favourite song. Following that, I experimentally investigate: 1) how and whether different modes of music …

Money, Morals, And Human Rights: Commercial Influences In The Marketing, Branding, And Fundraising Of Amnesty International And Human Rights Watch, Danielle Morgan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis explores the marketing, branding, and fundraising activities of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and critically examines promotional texts used to communicate with the public. This thesis is multidisciplinary, combining scholarly work on the topics of history, humanitarianism, marketing, branding, commercialization, representation, and consumer culture. By adopting market logic and corporate strategies from the private sector, both organizations have increased revenue and created a strong identifiable brand. Each organization attempts to balance between the moral foundation or grassroots origins of the organization and the need to raise immediate revenue to sustain operations. This money-morals dilemma is also at …

Outsourcing Family: Consumers, Culture, And Marketplaces For Care & Intimacy, Aimee L. Huff

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this thesis, I present an interpretive study of family members’ experiences consuming market-offered care or intimacy services for themselves or other family members. Included herein is a series of three essays that explores the phenomenon of outsourcing care and intimacy to the marketplace across three distinct contexts: mothers consuming childcare for their infants; adult siblings and their elderly parents choosing and using commercial elder care; and adult males consuming commercial sex and romance. The purpose is to develop a deep understanding of consumers’ experiences as they engage with the marketplace to consume care and intimacy, and to demonstrate that …

Context Is Everything: Facilitating Fit When New Products Are Ambiguous, Theodore J. Noseworthy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Researchers have long believed that consumers adjust their functional expectations in accordance with a product’s physical appearance. Recently this belief has come under fire. Product categories are converging rapidly. Take modern cell phones; the physical appearance of the iPhone is only tangentially related to the breadth of its functionality. Examples like this have sparked a wealth of interest in exploring how consumers generate inferences for products with functions that span multiple categories. One important finding is that consumers tend to generate functional inferences based mainly on the knowledge of a single category. This suggests that new hybrid products are not …

The Structural Importance Of Consumer Networks, Seung Hwan (Mark) Lee

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation contains three essays that investigate how a consumer’s social network position (i.e., a person’s location within a web of relationships) plays an important role in the way that consumer influences and exchanges information with others. Using social capital theory as the conceptual framework, I demonstrate that a consumer’s location within a network (network centrality) has an effect on their ability to influence others and, conversely, on others’ ability to influence them. I also show that network positions influence the type of information that is sought from others (information about the self or information about others). Moreover, I demonstrate …