Marketing Commons^™

Influence Of Alumni Affinity Groups On Alumni Engagement And Alumni Giving, Gary R. Johnson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A student’s college experience lasts only a finite amount of time, but their role as alumni lasts for a lifetime. Alumni play an important role in higher education. The future financial success of a college or university is largely based on involvement and financial support by the school’s alumni. The purpose of this research was to learn about the role alumni affinity groups play in engaging alumni with the school and if they have the ability to impact alumni giving.

The dissertation data was collected using a qualitative methods research approach. Alumni data was gathered from two public universities from …

Controlling Turnover In An Inside Sales Organization: What Are The Contributing Factors, Dennis H. Kimerer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The turnover rate for inside sales team, particularly in Central Florida, is exceedingly high. I have experienced this negative scenario managing inside sales teams for two major Telecom companies over the past 11 years, having as many as 40% of the salesforce resign within 30 days. Organizational costs to hire a new salesperson can be as high as 300% of the replaced employee’s salary and take as long as eight months to reach full productivity. The purpose of this research is to determine the internal and external factors that impact a salesperson’s propensity to leave a company. This qualitative research …

Advances In Global Business And Economics: Volume 2, Cihan Cobanoglu, Muhittin Cavusoglu, Abdulkadir Corbaci

University of South Florida (USF) - M3 Publishing

This is the second volume of the Advances in Global Business and Economics Book Series. This volume has the following parts:

• Part 1: Accounting
• Part 2: Consumer Behavior
• Part 3: Corporate Finance & Governance
• Part 4: Economics
• Part 5: Education & Training
• Part 6: Environmental Issues/Sustainability & Green Tourism
• Part 7: Finance & Banking
• Part 8: Food and Beverage Management
• Part 9: Hospitality & Tourism/Smart Tourism
• Part 10: Human Resource Management
• Part 11: Innovation & Entrepreneurship
• Part 12: International Trade
• Part 13: Leisure Management
• Part 14: Management
• Part 15: Social Science Studies
• Part 16: Technology/E-Business/Social Media

ISBN: 978-1-7321275-5-5

Proceedings Of The Global Conference On Business And Economics: Volume 2, Cihan Cobanoglu, Muhittin Cavusoglu, Abdulkadir Corbaci

University of South Florida (USF) - M3 Publishing

This is the second volume of the Global Conference on Business and Economics Proceedings Series.

ISSN: 2641-502X

Youtube Advertising Value And Its Effects On Purchase Intention, Duygu Firat

Journal of Global Business Insights

This study investigated the factors that affect the YouTube advertising value and its effect on purchasing intention. The data were gathered through a 52-item questionnaire administered to YouTube users (n = 420). Multiple regression analysis determined the effect of the factors on YouTube advertising value, and simple regression analysis determined the effect of its value on purchasing intention and ANOVA test was run to determine the differences of demographic groups via YouTube ads value. The findings indicated that informativeness and entertainment and trendiness had a positive effect on YouTube advertising value; however, irritation had a negative effect. In addition, …

Womenpreneurs In A Digital Environment: Utilizing Instagram To Build A Personal Brand, Michelle N. Nuñez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Personal branding on social media is a growing and expanding field. The present research works to uncover the processes and practices of womenpreneurs and the ways in which they utilize social media, specifically Instagram, to build and maintain their personal brands. Grounded theory is used to underpin the research and provide a basis of which the study is conducted. The review of literature provides the context necessary to support the methods of a content analysis and semi-structured interviews. There is a gap in research as it pertains to the conceptualization of personal branding practices on Instagram and the present study …

How Digital Versus Non-Digital Modes Of Food Ordering Influence Menu Healthfulness Perceptions And Food Choices, Annika Abell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Do digital devices change the way we think? Recent news reports and studies in education and psychology suggest that using modern internet technology affects our cognitive abilities. Modern technology is part of our daily lives and has facilitated communication. As technology has also changed the ways consumers order foods, the present research aims at investigating how the presence of different types of technology in a food choice context might influence food perceptions and choices. Touch-screen tablets or kiosks are becoming widely available in casual dining and fast-food restaurants. In addition, through collaborations with tech-giants like Uber Eats and Amazon, an …

A Comparative Study On The Amount Of Tips Left By The Generations Based On The Personalized Bill Types, A. Celil Cakici, Alaiddin Kosar

Journal of Global Business Insights

Tip is the monetary amount that consumers voluntarily leave for the quality of the service they get. Whether a tip is left or not, and the amount of the tip left may result from different demographic and characteristic features of consumers. This study was conducted to determine the amount of tip left by the generations based on the personalized bills. Based on three different personalized bill types for a dinner for two people at a mid-quality restaurant, it was attempted to determine whether the costumers left tips or not, and if they did, how much was the amount. The data …

The Effect Of Website Quality On Repurchase Intention With The Mediation Of Perceived Value: The Case Study Of Online Travel Agencies In Vietnam, Huyen Pham, Thu Nguyen

Journal of Global Business Insights

The sharing economy is getting broader with its non-ownership assets, better use of resources, lower prices, and more customized products (Belk, 2014). In tourism industry, the development of the sharing economy involved the emergence of online travel agencies (OTAs) who are intermediates between services providers and consumers, provide accommodations, transport services, food and beverages services, tour guide services, etc. (Skalska, 2017). Recently, Vietnam has experienced a rapid growth in the number of users booking tourism products and services through OTAs. Playing such an important role in the tourism market, it is essential for OTAs to retain customers which later bring …

The Impact Of Digital Marketing Decisions On Market Outcomes In Residential Real Estate, Denise Hunter Gravatt

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the competitive and fast-paced industry of residential real estate, digital marketing strategies must effectively meet the information needs and demands of the industry’s three key stakeholders: buyers, sellers, and agents. Digital house hunting is the predominant search strategy for prospective homebuyers who scour the Internet looking for homes to purchase. Property sellers and real estate professionals, whose shared end-goal is to transact a successful sale, must discern which digital marketing choices are optimal for marketing for-sale properties online in the digital channels where buyers are searching.

A 2008 settlement agreement between the Department of Justice and the National Association …

The Relationship Between Ambient Lighting Color And Hotel Bar Customer Purchase Behavior And Satisfaction, Kunal Shah

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Increasingly competitive markets lead brand managers to search for new methods to improve customer satisfaction, increase revenue, and promote customer loyalty. Sensory marketing has the potential to meet those objectives. Sensory marketing programs are designed to engage consumers’ senses and affect perceptions, judgments, and behaviors. Ambient light color is an environmental variable with the potential to influence the customer experience in lodging industry sensory marketing programs. Contrast theory and disconfirmation of expectations served as the theoretical framework for this study. The purpose of this quantitative comparative study was to examine the relationships between ambient light color, consumer spending, and perceptions …

An Examination Of The Progressive And Regressive Factors That Business Owners Consider When Choosing Whether Or Not To Implement An Exit Strategy, David C. Pickard

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This purpose of this dissertation is to examine the progressive and regressive factors that affect a small business owner’s decision to implement an exit strategy. An exit strategy can be defined as an entrepreneur's strategic plan to sell his or her investment in a company he or she has controlling interest in. An exit strategy gives a business owner a way to reduce or eliminate his or her stake in the business and, if the business is successful, make a substantial profit. Exiting a business is a complicated process which includes among other things, the evaluation, preparation, marketing, and ultimate …

Social Media Deployment In A Business To Business Environment: Theory And Practice., Loran Jarrett

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Social media is increasingly being used by business-to-business (B2B) firms to engage with their customers as they seek to maintain and grow their relationship with their customers. In my dissertation, I examine what communication objectives B2B firms seek to achieve via social media at different stages of the relationship cycle (exploration, expansion, maturity). I then use a panel of social media experts to evaluate the social media efforts of these firms to determine how well these firms achieve their social media objectives. I then contrast how the social media communication objectives of these firms at different stages of the relationship …

Analytics For Novel Consumer Insights (A Three Essay Dissertation), Utkarsh Shrivastava

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Both literature and practice have investigated how the vast amount of ever increasing customer information can inform marketing strategy and decision making. However, the customer data is often susceptible to modeling bias and misleading findings due to various factors including sample selection and unobservable variables. The available analytics toolkit has continued to develop but in the age of nearly perfect information, the customer decision making has also evolved. The dissertation addresses some of the challenges in deriving valid and useful consumer insights from customer data in the digital age. The first study addresses the limitations of traditional customer purchase measures …

Determinants Of Tipping Rates: New Findings And Extensions, Christopher Carl Olson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There is a movement underway to eliminate the practice of tipping restaurant servers that is gaining momentum (Goldberger, 2015). In lieu of gratuities, restaurants are simply raising menu prices or assessing a service charge and paying servers a fixed hourly wage (Kummer, 2016). Before restaurateurs can adopt such a strategy, they need to thoroughly understand the factors that affect tipping behavior in order to develop meaningful fixed wage rates that do not diminish service levels or employee morale. The first step in this process is a better understanding of the determinants of tipping rates.

The existing research has identified many …

The Effects Of Loneliness On Consumers’ Digital Engagement With Social Media Ads, Yu Qin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Social media has become an integral part of consumers’ lives and a popular platform for interactive marketing communication. In an age boasting of unprecedented digital connectivity, loneliness (defined as perceived social isolation) has, paradoxically, becoming widespread, affecting consumers’ preferences for products and brands in the marketplace. The present research extends the feelings-as-information theory and develops a conceptual framework in which loneliness modifies people’s cognitive processing style and induces concrete thinking in the context of evaluating social media messages. Using a mixed methods research approach, I first take a close look through the lens of a qualitative study at what it …

Product Shadows And Ad Evaluations, Nazuk Sharma

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Prior research shows that stylistic ad manipulations (i.e., the style or manner in which product visuals are presented in an ad) impact consumer perceptions (Yang, Zhang and Peracchio 2010). This dissertation explores the impact of presence (versus absence) of a product’s shadow in the ad frame, as a visual stylistic manipulation influencing consumer ad perceptions. While many stylistic manipulations have been explored in the past, product shadows in how they impact ad perceptions have not been explored.

Drawing on a holistic understanding on object shadows from the visual art, cognition and psychophysics literature streams, this dissertation investigates how product shadows …

Hate Is A Strong Word: The Influence Of Hate-Acknowledging Advertising On Brand Outcomes, Lisa Monahan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Given a lack of tactics for addressing brand hate, most managers tend to ignore brand haters, and instead dedicate their resources towards consumers who like or love their brand. Similarly, relative to the volume of research on positive brand emotions, the academic literature exploring negative brand emotions is limited. Moreover, research indicates that compared to positive brand information, negative brand information is more diagnostic, and ultimately more damaging.

In contrast to such findings and practices, this dissertation proposes a strategy whereby using advertising to openly acknowledge that a brand is hated (i.e. hate-acknowledging advertising) can be advantageous for corporate polarizing …

Essays On Sales Coaching, Carlin A. Nguyen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In general, scholars and practitioners agree that sales coaching enhances sales performance. Sales firms continue to invest billions of dollars towards coaching endeavors. However, despite the positive benefits of sales coaching, the fact is that most sales coaches are ineffective. In three essays, this dissertation aims to offer insight that will help companies and coaching programs improve the effectiveness of their sales coaches.

The first essay explores the sales coaching process and how it is affected by factors related to the sales manager (coach) and the salesperson (coachee). Using in-depth interviews, we identified various skills, behaviors, and abilities that reflect …

Mar 4824 Marketing Management, Yancy Edwards

Service-Learning Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Evaluating The Relative Importance Of Influencing Factors On Cruise Vacations: A Conjoint Analysis, Frida Bahja

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study focuses on exploring the relative importance of six influential factors in cruise customers’ decision-making process such as: cruise vacation price, cruise duration, distance from the cruise port, itineraries, environmental friendliness of cruise line and cruise online reviews. The decision on which influencing factors to select was made based on the review of literature.

The complexity of cruise customers’ decision-making process for these six attributes with several levels was examined with Choice-Based Conjoint (CBC) Analysis. CBC was selected due to its realistic approach to purchase decisions, in the form of trade-offs. The online survey collected data anonymously. The survey …

Effect Of Price Reduction And Increased Service Frequency On Public Transport Travel, Inge Brechan

Journal of Public Transportation

A random effects meta-analysis of the results from 15 projects involving price reduction and 9 projects involving increased service frequency showed that both price reduction and increased service frequency generated public transport travels. On average, the increased service frequency projects generated more travels by public transport than the price reduction projects. In the increased service frequency projects the proportion of travels generated by the increased frequency was strongly influenced by the size of the frequency increase. In the price reduction projects, we did not find a significant effect of the size of the price reduction on the proportion of travels …

Investigating The Effect Of Gasoline Prices On Transit Ridership And Unobserved Heterogeneity, Hojin Jung, Gun Jea Yu, Kyoung-Min Kwon

Journal of Public Transportation

Based on a unique scanner panel data set on debit and credit card transactions, we examined the effect of gasoline prices on individual choices between private vehicle use and public transit ridership. The unique feature of our data allowed us to address possible heterogeneity in the effect of gasoline prices and to explicitly incorporate the link between private vehicle use and public transit ridership. A series of empirical analyses reveal that there is significant heterogeneity in the effect of gasoline prices on fuel consumption and that financial constraints and commitment to vehicle use determine individual sensitivities to the price of …

The Impact Of Emojis And Emoticons On Online Consumer Reviews, Perceived Company Response Quality, Brand Relationship, And Purchase Intent., Jayme Hill Hill

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Several studies have examined the use of emoji and emoticons in computer mediated communication among peers and colleges but there is yet academic research on the impact of businesses using these paralinguistic cues when responding to online consumer reviews. This research is examining the influence these paralinguistic cues have on the consumers perception of the companies quality of the response to an online consumer review, brand relationship, purchase intent.

Using an online survey, participants are asked to answer general questions about the brand, the quality of the response, brand relationship, and purchase intent after seeing a random condition of both …

Branding Implications Of Co-Created Social Responsibility, Alexander J. Kull

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

One of the most profound transformations of the marketing discipline in recent history has been driven by the democratization of power relations and value creation between brands and consumers. This dissertation explores the branding implications of this fundamental shift by investigating whether and how the type and degree of control shared by brands affect consumer empowerment perceptions and, in turn, consumer–brand relationships, as well as whether and how these effects might be moderated by the size and diversity of the choice set and by the image valence of the brand that shares control with consumers.

The present research examines such …

Cause Placement: A Conceptual Framework And Empirical Findings, Ream A. Shoreibah

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The use of embedded marketing, the practice of seamlessly integrating advertising messages into entertainment vehicles, continues to grow as media consumption shifts to on-demand forms, and reaching audiences with traditional advertising becomes more challenging. This dissertation investigates cause placement, the term proposed for the social marketing equivalent of product placement, the more widely known form of embedded marketing. Cause placement is the promotion of pro-social causes by verbally and/or visually inserting related elements into entertainment programming. Cause placement merits its own stream of research, because consumers are expected to react differently to the placement of social issues than to the …

Understanding The Complexity Of Product Returns Management: A Complex Adaptive Systems Theory Perspective, Jennifer Anne Espinosa

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The core essence of a marketing transaction is the exchange of value between two parties. Quite often, the exchange of value describes a customer purchasing a product from a company. When purchasing products, the exchange of value can often fail due to product defects or customer dissatisfaction. When the marketing exchange fails, customers often desire an avenue for recourse to right the exchange imbalance. Accepting and quickly processing product returns represents a strategic tool companies can leverage to maintain healthy relationships with customers, despite an exchange failure. Effectively managing product returns also benefits companies financially, by reducing inventory levels, costs, …

An Altered Sense Of Magnitude: Exploring How The Visual Presentation Of Time, Space, And Numbers Can Influence Consumer Judgments And Behaviors, Marisabel Romero

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Consumers are constantly evaluating quantitative information, such as the prices of different products, the time spent on an activity, or the distance covered during one day. Substantial research in psychology has demonstrated that judgments of quantity in one dimension (e.g., numbers) influence subsequent judgments on another dimension (e.g., time). The present research contributes to a growing body of work by exploring how the shared representation of time, space, and numbers affects consumer perceptions and behaviors.

My first dissertation essay explores how the organization of time on a spatial plane affects temporal judgments, product evaluations, and intertemporal discounting (i.e., time-space interaction). …

Mar 3613 Marketing Research, Yancy Edwards

Service-Learning Syllabi

No abstract provided.

How You Categorize Influences How Helpful You Are: The Effect Of Categorization Mindset On Consumers’ Social Decisions, Hsiao-Ching Kuo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation demonstrates how categorization mindsets (introduced by Ulkumen et al., 2010) moderate the altruistic behavior of consumers in decisions that have consequences to others besides oneself. Categorization mindset refers to a way of thinking about options, and is induced by simple sorting or categorization tasks. Ulkumen et al. (2010) has shown that mindsets can be unidimensional (in terms of being focused on a single, salient dimension) or multidimensional (in that both salient and non-salient dimensions are processed). Across three experiments, this dissertation finds that a multidimensional mindset (compared to a unidimensional mindset) enhances the preference for other-oriented options among …