Business Commons^™

The Science Of Creating Brand Associations: A Continuous Trinity Model Linking Brand Associations To Learning Processes, Christilene Du Plessis, Serena D'Hooge, Steven Sweldens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The Continuous Trinity Model (CTM) of brand associations integrates 50 years of consumer learning research with recent conceptualizations of consciousness. Three types of brand associations are proposed at the representational level (expectations, meaning, and affect), corresponding to three types of learning at the process level (predictive learning, referential learning, and direct affect transfer). A core proposition derived from research on automaticity holds that the operating conditions of the learning processes vary on a continuum from mostly System 2 for predictive learning to mostly System 1 for direct affect transfer, with referential learning as a mix of the two. The CTM …

Consumer Experience, David Norris, Ramsey Jones, Joshua Hurst-Coffey, Alexander Johnson

ENGL 1102 Showcase

This anthology talks about the current state of consumer experiences in the modern entertainment industry. Some of the trends are good while many are bad. Streaming services are now over abundant and cost way too much. Game publishers are pushing out games fast but lack content. One the other hand, smaller groups are publishing cheaper and much more successful. We wish to discuss the effects of these actions on the consumers' side of content consumption.

Zoomer Generation: Used Car Automobile Purchasing Behaviors, Scott E. Whitaker, Joe Spencer, Giovanni Calise

Association of Marketing Theory and Practice Proceedings 2024

There is a growing trend of online automobile purchasing that is altering the relationship between consumers and automobile dealerships. Consumers are more informed and seek a larger variety of inventory and options when shopping for used vehicles. The online marketplace provides a viable alternative to local dealerships who have hereto dominated much of the market. This research shows the current generation of Zoomers is helping to drive this trend which has significant marketing implications toward the industry. There remains a gap in the academic body of knowledge examining this behavior in relation to large online purchases such as automobiles. This …

Immersive Retailing: The In-Store Experience, Henrik Hagtvedt, Chandukala, Sandeep R.

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This conceptual article explores why consumers visit physical stores—despite living in a digital-first world—and presents potential ways for retailers to further encourage offline shopping. Although online retailing tends to offer the greatest convenience, brick-and-mortar outlets can offer an immersive in-store experience that combines convenience and interest. The present exposition considers store features within a 2 × 2 typology of convenience and interest and illustrates how these features contribute, or fail to contribute, to immersive in-store experiences. Other factors, such as ambient stimuli that elicit sensory- and aesthetic pleasure, provide additional paths to immersion. The notions raised may serve as a …

Consumers’ Reaction To Corporate Esg Performance: Evidence From Store Visits, Frank Weikai Li, Frank Weikai Li, Roni Michaely

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Using micro-level data on consumer shopping behavior, this paper investigates end-consumers’ attitudes toward firms’ ESG behavior, and as importantly, the ability of consumers to affect firms’ policy concerning sustainability issues. We find that consumers care about firms’ approach toward ESG, and consumers’ behavior can impact firms’ attitudes. Using ESG incidents as a proxy, we find that the reduction in store visits is more pronounced for ESG-conscious consumers, such as those living in democratic counties, and counties with a higher fraction of educated and younger residents. Online shopping interest data yields similar results. Using abnormally hot temperature as a shock to …

The Effects Of Sales Surprise On Inventory Turnover: An Empirical Study, Muhammad Yousaf, Bruce Dehning

Accounting Faculty Articles and Research

Sales surprise (SS) is a significant factor in a firm’s inventory turnover (ITO). In order to estimate SS, it is necessary to select an appropriate approach of sales forecasting. The current study’s main purpose is to examine the effects of SS on ITO. The data was gained from the Albertina database from 2017 to 2021, for two sectors: manufacturing and construction. The Czech firms’ panel data was used to estimate sales forecasts by four different methods: (i) sales linear forecast (SLF), (ii) sales change (SCH), (iii) sales growth (SG), and (iv) sales forecast random walk (SRW). The two most accurate …

A Statewide Study Of Disparities In Local Policies And Tobacco, Vape, And Cannabis Retail Environments, Georgiana Bostean, William R. Ponicki, Alisa A. Padon, William J. Mccarthy, Jennifer B. Unger

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

The current study: (1) assesses sociodemographic disparities in local policies related to tobacco and cannabis retail, and (2) examines the cross-sectional association between policy strength and retailer densities of tobacco, e-cigarette (vape), and cannabis retailers within California cities and county unincorporated areas (N = 539). We combined (a) American Community Survey data (2019 5-year estimates), (b) 2018 tobacco, vape, and cannabis retailer locations from a commercial data provider, (c) 2017 tobacco and vape retail environment policy data from American Lung Association, and (d) 2018 cannabis policy data from California Cannabis Local Laws Database. Conditional autoregressive models examined policy strength associations …

The Plastics Collection Reference Packet, Special Collections Research Center

Special Collections Research Center

This reference packet is an informational tool to support further research into the history of plastics—whether interested in companies, individuals within the plastics industry's history, historical plastics materials, essays, and more. All content featured within this packet was previously published on the former plastics.syr.edu website as part of a Syracuse University Libraries and Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) partnership established in 2007 with the Plastics Pioneers Association (PPA)—an association of plastics industry professionals interested in preserving the plastics industry's past.

Catching The Fast Payments Trend: Optimal Designs And Leadership Strategies Of Retail Payment And Settlement Systems, Zhiling Guo, Dan Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent financial technologies have enabled fast payments and are reshaping retail payment and settlement systems globally. We developed an analytical model to study the optimal design of a new retail payment system in terms of settlement speed and system capability under both bank and fintech firm heterogeneous participation incentives. We found that three types of payment systems emerge as equilibrium outcomes: batch retail (BR), expedited retail (ER), and real-time retail (RR) payment systems. Although the base value of the payment service positively affects both settlement speed and system capability, the expected liquidity cost negatively impacts settlement speed, and total transaction …

The Effect Of Firm-Controlled Store Type Touchpoints On Customer’S Discrete Emotions: An Exploratory Study On Physical Store & Online Store, Jyro B. Triviño

Leadership and Strategy Faculty Publications

Customer experience is a broad and multi-dimensional phenomenon, which currently divides academic scholars in terms of constructs and measurement. This study aims to examine some acceptable yet under-measured customer experience constructs already developed. The comparative exploration of the physical store and online store firm-controlled touchpoints seeks to identify differences or similarities in customers’ perceived affective response, which can help firms improve their current touchpoint design. Set in a business-to-customer context in the Philippines during a Covid-19 community quarantine, a total sample of 338 respondents evaluated their recent interaction during the purchase stage. A causal-comparative exploratory research design was utilized using …

Impact Of The Digitized Sales Work Environment On Customer Orientation, Julia Rötzmeier-Keuper, Nancy Viola Wünderlich

Association of Marketing Theory and Practice Proceedings 2023

Informed by appraisal theory, which highlights personal characteristics and resources as critical to the emergence of stress appraisal and adaptation (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), our study poses the following questions:

• What characterizes the DSWE?
• What is the role of the DSWE in creating salesperson distress and eustress?
• How is a salesperson’s customer orientation/ value-based selling affected by the DSWE?

In our attempt to explore the potential up- and downsides of work environment digitalization and the appraisal of the pervasive use of Information Technology in everyday work, we adopted a qualitative approach. We combined information from qualitative interviews with B2B customer …

Use Of Online Or Traditional Job Search Tools: Which Do Sales Students Prefer When Searching To Begin Their Post-College Graduate Careers-A Study Revisited, Linda G. Mullen, Randy S. Stuart, Michael Lee Thomas

Association of Marketing Theory and Practice Proceedings 2023

In 2019, a study was conducted to see if college students who studied/majored in professional sales, preferred digital media over face-to-face interactions for post-graduation careers searches. Results showed sales students used multiple methods during these searches. Although sales students engaged with digital media to land entry-level career positions, they still relied heavily upon traditional methods (i.e., college/university career fairs/services, internships, etc.). In March of 2020, as Covid-19 moved just about everyone online, the authors were interested in seeing whether the increased use and familiarity with digital media changed sales students’ preference for and use of job search tools.

This follow-up …

Predicting Mobility Using Limited Data During Early Stages Of A Pandemic, Michael T. Lash, S. Sajeesh, Özgür M. Araz

Department of Marketing: Faculty Publications

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed consumer behavior substantially. In this study, we explore the drivers of consumer mobility in several metropolitan areas in the United States under the perceived risks of COVID-19. We capture multiple dimensions of perceived risk using local and national cases and death counts of COVID-19, along with real-time Google Trends data for personal protective equipment (PPE). While Google Trends data are popular inputs in many studies, the risk of multicollinearity escalates with the addition of more relevant terms. Therefore, multicollinearity-alleviating methods are needed to appropriately leverage information provided by Google Trends data. We develop and utilize …

Forecasting Airport Transfer Passenger Flow Using Realtime Data And Machine Learning, Xiaojia Guo, Yael Grushka-Cockayne, Bert De Reyck

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Problem definition: In collaboration with Heathrow airport, we develop a predictive system that generates quantile forecasts of transfer passengers’ connection times. Sampling from the distribution of individual passengers’ connection times, the system also produces quantile forecasts for the number of passengers arriving at the immigration and security areas. Academic/Practical relevance: Airports and airlines have been challenged to improve decision-making by producing accurate forecasts in real time. Our work is the first to apply machine learning for predicting real-time quantile forecasts in the airport. We focus on passengers’ connecting journeys, which have only been studied by few researchers. Better forecasts of …

Consumers’ Preferences For Ethical Entertainment Consumption: Conceptualization, Development, And Validation Of A Scale, Avirupa Basu, Tamas Makany, Pratap Chandra Mandal, Ashutosh Bishnu Murti

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Our study describes the conceptualization, development, and validation of a reliable scale to measure the Consumers’ Preferences for Ethical Entertainment Consumption (CPEEC) in the context of OTT platforms. Past literature has addressed Ethical Consumption in various contexts that hold significant importance among consumers. However, there is limited literature on the Ethical Consumption in the domain of OTT entertainment, which is a new and burgeoning field of literature. Conceptualizing and developing a measurement scale for CPEEC will help measure the ethicality of entertainment like films, web shows and reality shows. The CPEEC scale is developed and validated by performing 33 in-depth …

Typology Of Tweets And User Engagement Generated By U.S. Companies Involved In Developing Covid-19 Vaccines, Priyanka Khandelwal, Leslie Ramos Salazar, Soni Khandelwal

Department of Marketing: Faculty Publications

This study analyzes 295 tweets by four U.S. companies engaged in discovering a vaccine for COVID-19. Tweets were analyzed to understand how their Twitter feeds balanced corporate and product branding (vaccine, medicines, etc.) and disseminated scientific information relating to COVID-19. The results suggest that these companies were actively embedding technical information about COVID-19 in their corporate and product branding. Tweets providing technical and scientific information about the progress made toward developing a COVID-19 vaccine garnered high levels of user engagement from their target audience. Findings from this study indicate the growing importance of technical communication in corporate settings during a …

Minimizing The Ratchet Effect: Why Reciprocity Preserves Customer Satisfaction In Service Environments, Kyle A. Huggins, Val Larsen

Association of Marketing Theory and Practice Proceedings 2023

This paper focuses on a fundamental problem for marketers: the ratchet effect. The ratchet effect occurs when actual service performance is perceived to be significantly higher than service expectations, causing dissonance and resulting consumer guilt. If left unattended, consumers relieve their guilt by increasing the perceived state of expectations for subsequent visits. Known as the ratchet effect, this causes a dilemma for the service business as they consistently strive to improve service performance. Using equity theory, our experimental study explores whether businesses can break the ratchet effect by providing mechanisms of reciprocity for consumers to respond at little or no …

Anchorage: Visual Analysis Of Satisfaction In Customer Service Videos Via Anchor Events, Kam Kwai Wong, Xingbo Wang, Yong Wang, Jianben He, Rong Zhang, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Delivering customer services through video communications has brought new opportunities to analyze customer satisfaction for quality management. However, due to the lack of reliable self-reported responses, service providers are troubled by the inadequate estimation of customer services and the tedious investigation into multimodal video recordings. We introduce , a visual analytics system to evaluate customer satisfaction by summarizing multimodal behavioral features in customer service videos and revealing abnormal operations in the service process. We leverage the semantically meaningful operations to introduce structured event understanding into videos which help service providers quickly navigate to events of their interest. supports a comprehensive …

The Impact Of Subscription Programs On Customer Purchases, Raghu Iyengar, Young-Hoon Park, Qi Yu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Subscription programs have become increasingly popular among a wide variety of retailers and marketplace platforms. Subscription programs give members access to a set of exclusive benefits for a fixed fee upfront. In this paper, we examine the causal effect of a subscription program on customer behavior. To account for self-selection and identify the individual-level treatment effects, we combine a difference-in-differences approach with a generalized random forests procedure that matches each member of the subscription program with comparable non-members. We find subscription leads to a large increase in customer purchases. The effect of subscription is economically significant, persistent over time, and …

A Survey Of Retail Trade Patterns In South Dakota: 2012-2021, Rand E. Wergin

Faculty Publications

This paper provides an analysis of retail sales and retail trade in the state of South Dakota for the years 2012 to 2021. This analysis will provide valuable information to community leaders in the cities and towns of South Dakota. Along with measures such as unemployment and inflation, Retail Pull (RP) provides a measure of community’s economic health. For example, retail is often the largest employer in a city, particularly the smaller communities of South Dakota, and a robust retail sector provides a tax base to support community services. Thus, the economic health of the community depends on the viability …

Multi-Functional Job Roles To Support Operations In A Multi-Faceted Jewel Enabled By Ai And Digital Transformation, Steven M. Miller

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this story, we highlight the way in which the use of AI enabled support systems, together with work process digital transformation and innovative approaches to job redesign, have combined to dramatically change the nature of the work of the front-line service staff who protect and support the facility and visitors at the world’s most iconic airport mall and lifestyle destination.

Does Social Media Accelerate Product Recalls? Evidence From The Pharmaceutical Industry, Yang Gao, Wenjing Duan, Huaxia Rui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media has become a vital platform for voicing product-related experiences that may not only reveal product defects but also impose pressure on firms to act more promptly than before. This study scrutinizes the rarely-studied relationship between these voices and the speed of product recalls in the context of the pharmaceutical industry where social media pharmacovigilance is becoming increasingly important for the detection of drug safety signals. Using Federal Drug Administration (FDA) drug enforcement reports and social media data crawled from online forums and Twitter, we investigate whether social media can accelerate the product recall process in the context of …

Out Of The Trap: Conversion Funnel Business Model, Customer Switching Costs, And Industry Profitability, Niloofar Abolfathi, Andrea Fosfuri, Simone Santamaria

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Research Summary: Across many industries, firms employ a conversion funnel business model to attract customers with basic and affordable products, generate lock-in, and then sell them more advanced and expensive products. We argue that this business model, coupled with high customer switching costs, results in a market outcome characterized by aggressive pricing and reduced profits. A sudden reduction in customer switching costs disrupts the conversion funnel and can eventually increase industrywide prices and profitability, an outcome that contradicts conventional wisdom in strategy research. We develop a stylized model to formalize our ideas and provide supportive evidence using a difference-in-differences methodology …

The New Consumed Consumer: The Impact Of The Covid-19 Pandemic On The Compulsive And Impulsive Buying Habits Of Gen Z, Kristen Kline

Honors Program Theses and Projects

This study focuses on the compulsive and impulsive spending habits of Gen Z over the past year. Gen Z is defined as the generation born within the years of 1997-2013, following the millennial generation. This generation has been raised surrounding the internet and social media and are considered one of the most technologically advanced generations (Schroth, 2019). Gen Z’s use of technology continues to drastically increase. Recent Data shows that 98% of Gen Z own a smartphone and average a usage time of about 4 hours per day (Kastenholz, 2021). The most popular social platforms among Gen Z are Instagram, …

Shopping Marketing Tactics That Drive Purchases, Dinesh K. Gauri

Marketing Faculty Publications and Presentations

Technology is reshaping the retail experience. In the fight for market share, how effective are traditional marketing tactics and technology offerings at attracting shoppers?

The Forces Changing U.S. Shopping Behavior, Dinesh K. Gauri

Marketing Faculty Publications and Presentations

The future of retail is all about catering to the consumer. To survive retail’s newest challenge, retailers must understand what’s shaping consumer demand.

Marketing Activity Influences On Brand Attractiveness & Loyalty, Keiondre' Mcallister

McNair Scholars Research

While selecting a specific brand could seem simple, many variables are considered. Consumers must trust that the chosen brand meets their needs by providing value. Value differs for everyone; however, four value pillars within the value creation pyramid could explain which value attracts the consumer most to a brand. These value elements will be explored to explain consumer preferences.

Are Lonely Salespeople Costing You Customers?, Valerie Good, Lisa Earle Mcleod

Other Faculty Publications

As customer interactions have shifted to Zoom, sales jobs have become increasingly transactional and lonely. Recent research suggests this is a costly problem that goes beyond a hit to morale: It’s actually causing three problematic behaviors — social awkwardness, impaired memory, and conspicuous overspending on customers — that could damage business performance. The authors offer eight strategies managers can implement to help salespeople feel less lonely and ensure your team is approaching customers with confidence.

Rainbowashing: Does It Impact Purchase Intention?, Ramon Luis Fille

Honors Projects in Marketing

Cause related marketing efforts by multiple brands have grown over the past few years. With the growth of social media and even more awareness for multiple causes, consumers are pickier when it comes to brands that supports them. While many studies have been done when it comes to “greenwashing” (the tactics of brands to show their green initiatives), there are still more that needs to be done to understand the impact of “rainbowashing” marketing methods on consumer purchase intention. The importance of this study and how it can affect businesses are discussed. To get a feel for the potential effect …

Tabletop Game Startup, Jack Meyer

Senior Honors Projects

Starting a new business is a tedious and challenging process especially when it comes to an original idea for a tabletop game. The original idea for the game must be put into written rules and physical gameplay components. These aspects must be confirmed to work and collecting feedback from others is often a major tool used in this stage. From this point, a game developer can go a few different directions such as attempting to sell the game to a larger company or trying to produce their own independent game.

Keeping the game independent is arguably the more difficult route …