Business Commons^™

The Impact Of E-Service Quality On The Customer Satisfaction Of Electronic And Small Appliances Online Shoppers In Saudi Arabia, Majed A. Almobarak

Theses & Dissertations

The objective of this quantitative study, which utilized a non-experimental, correlational predictive design, was to evaluate the association between perceptions of e-service quality by Saudi Arabian adult residents and their overall satisfaction with the online retailer from which they buy their electronics and small appliances products. The study also sought to determine to what extent e-service quality factors, as a group and independently, predict the customer satisfaction of the participants of this study. The participants of this study were limited to adults (18 years of age or older), male and female, who live in any region of Saudi Arabia, and …

Factors Impacting The Intent To Use An Interactive Visual Aid On A Tablet Pc Platform By A Biotechnology Sales Force, Tom Dotter

Theses & Dissertations

The interactive visual aid on a tablet PC technology platform is a relatively new marketing tool. The interactive visual aid was developed to replace the visual aid brochure, also known as pharmaceutical promotional literature. The interactive visual aid is used by biotechnology area business managers to promote their respective medications directly to a healthcare provider. Biotechnology corporations are equipping their sales forces with tablet PCs to leverage customer relationship management tools, adhere to compliance and Food and Drug Administration regulatory policies, and to launch marketing tools such as the interactive visual aid. Do these companies know the factors contributing to …

The Sport Commitment Model’S Effect On The Participation Frequency And Purchase Behavior Of Golfers, Kevin Rubel

Theses & Dissertations

Golf has a multi-billion dollar impact on the U.S. economy. Golf course revenues have flattened since the industry peaked in 2005. Many golf courses have closed as fewer and fewer golfers continue to play. Golf course managers must develop effective marketing plans to retain customers. This means developing effective systems to retain golfers who have a large variety of playing and equipment options. Determining what factors are related to the reasons a golfer continues to play would help in the development of needed programs. Commitment to golf could be one of the factors related to the purchase intention and participation …

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 …

Ethics Of Thailand's Tourism Industry, Ganjanaporn Lertpipat Luther

Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate how ethical sales behavior related to the likelihood of tourists to return to Thailand. The Ethical Tourism Industry survey used was adapted from previous studies found in the literature. The sample of 300 participants was drawn from international tourists who travelled in the North, Central, and South regions of Thailand. Tests of correlation used Pearson, logistic regression, and linear regression to analyze the research questions in this study. An analysis found that most tourists who were revisiting Thailand were male, and 49% of tourists came from Europe and Africa for leisure purposes. …

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 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 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 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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Exploring Online Brand Choice At The Sku Level : The Effects Of Internet-Specific Attributes, Yanan Wang

Theses & Dissertations

E-Commerce research shows that existing studies on online consumer choice behavior has focused on comparative studies of channel or store choice (online or offline), or online store choice (different e-tailers). Relatively less effort has been devoted to consumers’ online brand choice behavior within a single e-tailer. The goal of this research is to model online brand choice, including generating loyalty variables, setting up base model, and exploring the effects of Internet-specific attributes, i.e., order delivery, webpage display and order confirmation, on online brand choice at the SKU level. Specifically, this research adopts the Multinomial Logit Model (MNL) as the estimation …