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This paper aims to improve understanding of data-driven marketing by examining the experiences of managers implementing big data analytics in the marketing function. Through a series of research questions, this exploratory study seeks to define what big data analytics means in marketing practice. It also seeks to uncover the challenges and identifiable stages of big data analytics implementation.

A total of 15 open-ended in-depth interviews were conducted with marketing and analytics executives in a variety of industries in Ireland and the USA. Interview transcripts were subjected to open coding and axial coding to address the research questions.

The study reveals that managers consider marketing big data analytics to be a series of tools and capabilities used to inform product innovation and marketing strategy-making processes and to defend the brand against emerging risks. Additionally, the study reveals that big data analytics implementation is championed at different organizational levels using different types of dynamic learning capabilities, contingent on the champion’s stature within the organization.

From the qualitative analysis, it is proposed that marketing departments undergo five stages of big data analytics implementation: sprouting, recognition, commitment, culture shift and data-driven marketing. Each stage identifies the key characteristics and potential pitfalls to be avoided and provides advice to marketing managers on how to implement big data analytics.

This study examines the use of high-expertise sources such as doctors to sell dietary supplements and the use of skeptical statements toward approved drugs in the act of selling dietary supplements.

The research questions are addressed by means of a scenario experiment that manipulated two independent variables: expertise (high- vs low-expertise) and skepticism toward prescription drugs (present vs absent).

Surprisingly, skeptical statements from a low-expertise source toward a prescription drug made while selling dietary supplements was found to have an insignificant effect on selling effectiveness (willingness to recommend and perceived product effectiveness). However, when a high-expertise source (doctor) did the same, selling effectiveness was reduced.

The paper identifies a boundary condition for competitive selling claims of dietary supplements. Doctors are likely to get away with claims regarding the efficacy of dietary supplements until they criticize a more credible prescription drug in favor of supplements.

Claims made by a low-expertise sources and high-expertise sources in the act of selling dietary supplements must be carefully considered. Conventional wisdom tactics may be ineffective.

This paper uniquely demonstrates the role of competitive skepticism at different levels of expertise. The findings of this study suggest that managers, in especially the multi-level marketing industry, should reconsider some of their selling tactics.

Consumers who experience social exclusion often prefer high-risk financial products over low-risk financial products. The aim of this study is to examine how this effect can be attenuated by applying the theories of mental budgeting and pain of payment. The authors’ aim in pursuing this research is to improve the effectiveness of financial professionals and others in educating consumers on healthy financial practices. Understanding how social exclusion experiences influence financial decision-making is essential for continued progress in consumer financial education.

The authors examine the effect of consumers experiencing social exclusion on preference for high-risk financial products using an experimental design involving the manipulation of social exclusion/inclusion experiences. Data were collected from 148 consumers of mutual fund investment services via Amazon Mechanical Turk.

The study found that consumers experiencing social exclusion are more likely to make high risk investments. It also found that this effect is moderated by consumers' level of mental budgeting such that at high levels of mental budgeting the effect of social exclusion on investment choice is attenuated. The study further finds that the moderating effect of mental budgeting is mediated by pain of payment.

The findings of this study suggest that policymakers can reduce unduly risky personal investment behavior by triggering mental budgeting thoughts using methods such as advertising and explicit mention of transaction fees.

The present study builds on existing research demonstrating the adverse behavioral consequences of social exclusion but refines our understanding by demonstrating the attenuating effect of mental budgeting and the mediating effect of pain of payment on high risk financial purchases.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how small and medium-sized, regional financial service firms reacted to the financial crisis by helping their customers cope with their heightened state financial anxiety during the Economic Crisis of 2008. It also examines the variety of strategies pursued by these firms to rebuild consumer trust in their brands in the ensuing years.

The authors relied on grounded theory as a methodological approach to understand the unfolding situation of the financial crisis and to inductively develop a framework explaining managers’ experience with consumer financial anxiety and trust. Data collection involved key informant interviews with 20 CEOs and senior marketing and sales professionals of financial service firms in the USA.

The study discloses a desire among many retail financial institutions to re-personalize their relationships with customers following the financial crisis. One motivating factor for this has been a demand by regulators for more evidence that the firm really knows its customers. The paper also found that some managers are ambivalent about mentioning regulatory oversight and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insurance to customers because it is unclear whether these issues heighten or reduce consumer fears. More research is needed to provide guidance to managers on how mention of regulatory oversight may be used strategically in a crisis.

This study was limited to regional financial service firms in the USA with assets of less than$1 billion. The extension of the study to compare other geographical markets or to large financial service firms remains to be done. This investigation could tell us whether consumers now trust regional banks more than they do large national banks, difference in the strategies they employed and whether they resulted in different rates of brand equity recovery.

This paper suggests that the 2008 financial crisis may have resulted in permanent changes in consumer attitudes to financial services. As one manager suggested, “consumers have moved from a trust-me phase to a show-me phase.” This implies that financial service managers need to rethink how they build consumer trust. Such managers would do well to consider ways of integrating actions that reinforce the company's integrity and commitment to its customers into different stages of their firms’ relationships with consumers.

Many small and medium-sized banks are re-embracing community-banking practices including building strong personal relationships with stakeholders after years of underinvesting due to these banks’ pursuit of property development investments. As a result of these developments, a stronger financial services industry could likely emerge. Accordingly, trust for this battered industry among consumers could improve.

This paper discuss how the depersonalization of customer interactions by financial services firms through increased use of electronic channels and the use of call centers as primary interaction points may have weakened customer relationships and worsened consumer anxiety during the 2008 financial crisis. Additionally, it discusses both the failure of regulatory oversight and the symbolic effects of the big bank failures and the Madoff scandal in heightening consumer fears. Based on managerial interviews the paper discusses how financial service firms countered consumer anxiety by providing social support to customers, by repersonalizing customer interactions, and by reconnecting with local community values.

The pretty girl with raven hair sings as she works and dreams of wonderful days ahead. The girl's dream is deferred by the wickedly jealous stepmother who sends a trusted guard to commit murder. The man, overwhelmed by the girl's inherent goodness is unable to complete his deed, and warns her to run away and never return. She travels deep into the woods and is helped by friendly forest creatures with big eyes. They take her to a small cottage and she falls asleep, to be awakened by several small men who find it in their hearts to allow her to remain. The miniature men leave for work the next day, warning the girl of the stepmother and her trickery. The nasty woman disguises herself and easily convinces the girl to take a bite of the religiously symbolic apple, after which the girl is induced into a coma. The small men return, chase after the horrible stepmother and cause her to fall to her death, after which they do not bury the beauty-girl, but instead leave her ensconced in a glass tomb for all to see. The gallant prince finally arrives and kisses her, true love breaking the apple's spell and allowing the girl to ride away on the horse with the true hero, leaving behind the woodland creatures and small men forever. Sunlight beaming, girl beaming, small men and creatures beaming. All is right with the world.

This paper aims to uncover the drivers of consumer-brand engagement on Facebook, understood here as users’ behavioral responses in the form of clicks, likes, shares and comments. We highlight which content components, interactivity cues (calls to action [CTA]) and media richness (e.g. video, photo and text) are most effective at inducing consumers to exhibit clicking, liking, commenting and sharing behaviors toward branded content.

This study analyzes 757 Facebook-based brand posts from a media and entertainment brand over a 15-week period. It investigates the relationship between interactive cues and media richness with consumer engagement using a negative binomial model.

Results show positive relationships for both interactivity cues and media richness content components on increasing consumer-brand engagement outcomes. The findings add clarity to previous inconsistent findings in the marketing literature. CTAs enhance all four engagement behaviors. Media richness also strongly influences all engagement behaviors, with visual imagery (photos and videos) attracting the most consumer responses.

The sampled posts pertain to one brand (a radio station) and are thus concentrated within the media/entertainment industry, which limits the generalizability of findings. In addition, the authors limit their focus to Facebook but recognize that findings may differ across more visual or textual social networking sites.

The authors uncover the most effective pairings of media richness and interactivity components to trigger marketer-desired, behavioral responses. For sharing, for example, the authors show that photo-based posts are more effective on average than video-based posts. The authors also show that including an interactive call to act to encourage one type of engagement behavior has a near-universal effect in increasing all engagement behaviors.

This study takes two widely used concepts within the communications and advertising literatures – interactivity cues and media richness – and tests their relationship with engagement using real and actual users’ data available via Facebook Insights. This method is more robust than surveys or wall scrapping, as it mitigates Facebook’s algorithm effect. The results produce more consistent relationships than previous content marketing studies to date.

This paper aims to examine the effect of customer-to-customer (C2C) interaction while using a service on the willingness of consumers to engage in altruistic customer participation (CP) or co-production efforts aimed at helping other customers. It further examines the role of consumer skepticism toward the service category in moderating the effects of C2C interaction on altruistic CP and customer satisfaction.

A survey methodology was used to collect data from 374 consumers of health-care services in India. The data collection involved interviews of patients visiting diabetes clinics and focused primarily on the interaction between customers and their willingness to participate in educating members of the community on diabetic self-care.

The analysis shows that C2C interaction positively affects customer satisfaction and willingness to engage in altruistic CP. Consumer category skepticism does not moderate the effect of C2C interaction on customer willingness to engage in altruistic CP. However, category skepticism does have the moderating effect of significantly reducing the positive effect of C2C interaction on customer satisfaction.

Data for this study were collected via interviews of consumers in India. Each consumer was interviewed by a trained interviewer. Although the authors do not detect any systematic influence in the results, the possibility of bias is acknowledged. Regarding the research implications, the finding that category skepticism does not moderate the effect of C2C interaction on willingness to engage in altruistic CP suggest that ultimately consumers may have stronger commitment and loyalty to themselves and that their relationships with the firm’s might be peripheral.

The study finds that consumer skepticism toward a service category can have adverse effects for service co-creation. The authors advise managers in troubled industries not to focus exclusively on improving brand differentiation but to also consider working with major industry players and regulators to address the deepest fears of consumers.

The findings have implications for the service dominant logic of marketing in that it suggests that category skepticism is disruptive to the value integration process on which service co-creation relies for value creation. This has strong implications for how managers should structure their interaction processes with customers and for future research that seeks to them prove customer productivity.

In this chapter, we describe the policy and practical decisions one school district and school had to make to implement a progress monitoring and Response to Intervention (RtI) model in an historically low-achieving school with a substantial population of students at risk tfor academic failure – characteristics that are common to many public schools across the nation. We contrast the lofty goals and theoretical orientations of RtI described in a burgeoning literature in special and general education with the “real life” burdens of capacity, resources, time, and school culture in a struggling school.

A distinction must be drawn between a dismissal on the one hand, and on the other a repudiation of a contract of employment as a result of a breach of a fundamental term of that contract. When such a repudiation has been accepted by the innocent party then a termination of employment takes place. Such termination does not constitute dismissal (see London v. James Laidlaw & Sons Ltd (1974) IRLR 136 and Gannon v. J. C. Firth (1976) IRLR 415 EAT).

Compiled by K.G.B. Bakewell covering the following journals published by MCB University Press: Facilities Volumes 8‐18; Journal of Property Investment & Finance Volumes 8‐18; Property Management Volumes 8‐18; Structural Survey Volumes 8‐18.