Search results

Corporate brands increasingly use influential, high reach human brands (e.g. influencers, celebrities), who have strong parasocial relationships with their followers and audiences, to promote their offerings. However, despite emerging understanding of the benefits arising from human brand-based campaigns, knowledge about their potentially negative effects on the corporate brand remains limited. Addressing this gap, this paper deepens insight into the potential risk human brands pose to corporate brands.

To explore these issues, this conceptual paper reviews and integrates literature on consumer brand engagement, human brands, brand hijacking and parasocial relationships.

Though consumers' favorable human brand associations can be used to improve corporate brand outcomes, they rely on consumers' relationship with the endorsing human brand. Given the dependency of these brands, human brand-based marketing bears the risk that the human brand (vs the firm) “owns” the consumer's corporate brand relationship, which the authors coin relationship hijacking. This phenomenon can severely impair consumers' engagement and relationship with the corporate brand.

This paper sheds light on the role of human brands in strategic brand management. Though prior research has highlighted the positive outcomes accruing to the use of human brands, the authors identify its potential dark sides, thus exposing pivotal insight.

Chatbots are increasingly prevalent in the service frontline. Due to advancements in artificial intelligence, chatbots are often indistinguishable from humans. Regarding the question whether firms should disclose their chatbots' nonhuman identity or not, previous studies find negative consumer reactions to chatbot disclosure. By considering the role of trust and service-related context factors, this study explores how negative effects of chatbot disclosure for customer retention can be prevented.

This paper presents two experimental studies that examine the effect of disclosing the nonhuman identity of chatbots on customer retention. While the first study examines the effect of chatbot disclosure for different levels of service criticality, the second study considers different service outcomes. The authors employ analysis of covariance and mediation analysis to test their hypotheses.

Chatbot disclosure has a negative indirect effect on customer retention through mitigated trust for services with high criticality. In cases where a chatbot fails to handle the customer's service issue, disclosing the chatbot identity not only lacks negative impact but even elicits a positive effect on retention.

The authors provide evidence that customers will react differently to chatbot disclosure depending on the service frontline setting. They show that chatbot disclosure does not only have undesirable consequences as previous studies suspect but can lead to positive reactions as well. By doing so, the authors draw a more balanced picture on the consequences of chatbot disclosure.

Firms increasingly rely on content marketing to trigger user engagement in social media brand communities. The purpose of this paper is to examine how three generic types of marketer-generated content (affiliative, injunctive and utilitarian content) drive user engagement by considering distinct motivational paths and the role of users’ preference for intimate (vs broad) social networks.

The authors conduct a field survey and a scenario experiment among social media users across different brands from three different product categories. They examine the impact of marketer-generated content on user engagement while considering the moderating role of network intimacy (i.e. the mutual confiding within a user’s social network in terms of small social circles) and the mediating role of user motivations (i.e. autonomous vs controlled motivation for community membership).

The findings show that affiliative content (i.e. content that highlights shared values) drives user engagement through autonomous motivation, and utilitarian content (i.e. content that highlights tangible benefits) drives user engagement through controlled motivation. Notably, injunctive content (i.e. content that demands specific user behavior) is not a promising instrument to increase user engagement in social media brand communities when not targeted correctly.

The authors link three generic content types derived from literature on communal systems to user engagement, demonstrate the motivational underpinnings of their translation into engagement behavior and show that network intimacy can explain why the same content type can impact user engagement through two motivational paths.

The authors present three types of content that marketers can craft to trigger users to engage with a brand’s social media community and show when this content is most effective and why. By examining the moderating role of network intimacy, this research aims at providing targeting implications to social media marketers.

This research provides new insights on the effectiveness of marketer-generated content. The authors reveal two motivational paths that compete in explaining the overall effectiveness of different types of marketer-generated content to fuel user engagement. The authors further demonstrate that these relationships depend on the intimacy of a user’s circle of online friends.

The proliferation of online brand communities has shifted control over brands from firms to consumers. Demonstrating how marketers can stimulate consumers to use these opportunities and engage with the brand in such communities, the purpose of this paper is to address the effectiveness of normative and utilitarian appeals commonly employed in practice for enhancing engagement intensity and brand equity in turn.

This paper presents two studies at an individual user level. The first study builds on matched data on marketing actions, user behavior, and user perceptions from a Facebook brand community. The second study uses an experiment with members of a firm-hosted online brand community. The authors employ seemingly unrelated regressions while controlling for self-selection.

Marketer-generated appeals have a positive effect on brand equity that is mediated by engagement intensity. However, the strength of these effects depends highly on community, user, and relationship characteristics.

Generally speaking, marketer-generated appeals are effective tools for marketers to build brand equity through enhanced user engagement. However, their effectiveness can be improved when managers use a targeted approach. To offer precise managerial guidance, this paper shows how entertainment value, content consumption asymmetry (e.g. whether a user prefers user-generated content over marketer-generated content), and membership duration increase or lower the impact of appeals in building the brand through engagement intensity.

The authors provide evidence that appeals designed to drive user engagement in online brand communities are effective tools for boosting brand equity.

Service robots are now an integral part of people's living and working environment, making service robots one of the hot topics for service researchers today. Against that background, the paper reviews the recent service robot literature following a Theory-Context-Characteristics-Methodology (TCCM) approach to capture the state of art of the field. In addition, building on qualitative input from researchers who are active in this field, the authors highlight where opportunities for further development and growth lie.

The paper identifies and analyzes 88 manuscripts (featuring 173 individual studies) published in academic journals featured on the SERVSIG literature alert. In addition, qualitative input gathered from 79 researchers who are active in the service field and doing research on service robots is infused throughout the manuscript.

The key research foci of the service robot literature to date include comparing service robots with humans, the role of service robots' look and feel, consumer attitudes toward service robots and the role of service robot conversational skills and behaviors. From a TCCM view, the authors discern dominant theories (anthropomorphism theory), contexts (retail/healthcare, USA samples, Business-to-Consumer (B2C) settings and customer focused), study characteristics (robot types: chatbots, not embodied and text/voice-based; outcome focus: customer intentions) and methodologies (experimental, picture-based scenarios).

The current paper is the first to analyze the service robot literature from a TCCM perspective. Doing so, the study gives (1) a comprehensive picture of the field to date and (2) highlights key pathways to inspire future work.

In the internet economy, the business model of web portals has spread rapidly over the last few years. Despite this, there have been very few scholarly investigations into the services and characteristics that transform a web site into a portal as well as into the dimensions that determine the customer's evaluation of the portal's service quality.

Based on an empirical study in the field of e‐banking, the authors validate a measurement model for the construct of web portal quality based on the following dimensions: security and trust, basic services quality, cross‐buying services quality, added value, transaction support and responsiveness.

The identified dimensions can reasonably be classified into three service categories: core services, additional services, and problem‐solving services.

The knowledge of these dimensions as major determinants of consumer's quality perception in the internet provides banks a promising starting point for establishing an effective quality management for their e‐businesses.

Synthesis of the customer lifetime value and the shareholder value (SHV) approach in order to develop an integrated, marketing‐based method for corporate valuation.

Discusses the limitations and assumptions of existing methods to estimate customer value components and examines the limitations of the SHV concept. By linking the customer equity (CE) and the SHV approach, a formal model to calculate corporate value is developed. The discounted cash flow method is used for modelling the profit streams.

Provides formulas for the estimation of both the individual lifetime value of a customer and CE. Provides a comprehensive model to estimate corporate value based on customer‐related cash flows and traditional financial metrics. Introduces typical cases, in which the use of a customer‐based valuation seems beneficial. Illustrates how our approach can be applied by using a simple case study on M&A in the telecommunication industry. Gives suggestions on how to obtain the necessary data, partially even from publicly available sources.

Advancement of the quantitative techniques for modelling the customer value components would allow for relaxing some restrictive assumptions. The explicit modelling of the future growth of the customer base (the acquisition rate) would increase the applicability of the model. Additionally, taking into account heterogeneity within the customer cohorts is a task for future research. Finally, our model needs to be applied more extensively using real data for the input variables.

A CE‐based valuation approach can guide marketing investments and helps to avoid misallocation of resources. Based on an example in the field of M&A, we demonstrate the usefulness of the approach for obtaining a realistic indicator of firm value. It helps to assess whether an acquisition is economically sensible. We provide evidence for the superiority of a customer‐based approach over traditional financial methods.

While the traditional SHV method considers cash flows at a highly aggregated level, our approach employs disaggregated cash flows on the level of individual customers. Thereby we do incorporate the lifetime values of future customers by considering different cohorts. We do capture customer defection by incorporating retention rates. Our model enables a more detailed and valid estimation of corporate value by accounting for the single customer activities that drive marketing actions. This enables a better forecasting of the free cash flow. Incorporating customer‐related drivers into financial valuation models makes easier to assess the return on marketing investments.