Search results

This study aims to quantitatively consolidate the research conducted over the past four decades on how internal branding activities drive employee commitment. It summarizes several operationalizations of internal branding and tests the moderating effect of employee’s personal characteristics and job characteristics on the relationship between internal branding and employee commitment.

This paper uses meta-analysis as the research methodology. The analysis includes a sample of 65 studies (from 62 published works), yielding 226 effect sizes (coded into 82 composite effect sizes) over an aggregated sample of 21,706 respondents.

This study finds that brand communication, brand-centered human resource management (HRM), training and development, organizational support and culture, brand-centered leadership and an excellent reward system are the key operationalizations of internal branding. Furthermore, employee’s personal (education, age and gender) and job (tenure, work status and level of customer orientation) characteristics significantly moderate the internal branding–employee commitment relationship.

Limited empirical literature on some of the internal branding operationalizations such as brand-centered HRM and rewards has curbed the scope of moderator analysis.

This paper proposes some effective ways of implementing internal branding strategies and provides support for boundary conditions that brand managers should consider to strengthen the impact of internal branding activities on employee commitment.

As per the authors’ knowledge, this paper is among the few quantitative consolidations of four decades of research on the internal branding–employee commitment relationship.

This paper aims to delineate the nature of the costs associated with the diffusion of brand posts. Since cost is an essential component of customer lifetime value, this research also aims to identify factors that impact consumer engagement (CE) with brand posts.

This study conceptualize marginal cost of CE as the ratio of a unit change in cost for a unit change in CE – this ratio is conceptualized for a paid brand post compared to an organic brand post. The authors present a theoretically grounded simulation method that analyzes the relative impact of several factors that influence CE with brand posts. By using an agent-based simulation model, the method presented in this paper helps explain the relative impact of four factors on CE with brand posts on social media.

The authors explain four factors that influence the diffusion of CE with a brand post – promotion-related (i.e. whether it is paid vs organic), network-related, user-related and active periods. The authors also show that the effectiveness of paid posts vs organic posts attributed to a better audience assembled by the seeding algorithms dissipates after the initial stages of diffusion. These findings indicate that paid posts are effective vs organic posts in large part due to higher exposure than due to the efficiency of the algorithms to assemble nodes that are likely to engage with the post.

An agent-based model details the impact of several factors that influence the effectiveness of paid and organic posts and presents methods to analyze the impact of these factors that have implications for theory.

The authors address the difficulty in ascertaining the effectiveness of paid posts by proposing a metric – marginal cost of engagement, defined as the incremental cost incurred by the marketer in earning one additional unit of CE. Since the costs incurred on paid and organic posts differ only on variable components, the marginal cost of engagement presents a way to benchmark paid posts against organic posts, which is very useful for managers in ascertaining the amount to spend on paid posts on social media.

There is little prior research on the costs involved in the diffusion of brand posts on social media. Identifying specific factors that impact costs is valuable for theory and practice.

Emerging economies are dominated by an unorganized retail landscape, with complex sociocultural norms dictating the behavior of retailers and customers. The purpose of this paper is to explore the phenomenon of consumer embarrassment in an emerging marketing, India.

This research adopts a grounded theory approach and undertakes 31 in-depth interviews with consumers in India. The data is analyzed inductively and iteratively simultaneously with data collection.

The study uncovers that sociocultural normative influences, the retail environment’s structural constraints, interaction-based buying processes and customers’ perceptions play a role in eliciting embarrassment in traditional stores. The traditional format retailers play a significant role in evoking embarrassment and, surprisingly, also in facilitating coping. Contrary to the extant findings, purchasing embarrassing products online may not ensure anonymity and elicit embarrassment. The findings contribute to understanding the phenomenon of embarrassment in emerging markets.

There is a dearth of research examining consumer embarrassment in emerging markets, with extant studies investigating the phenomenon in the modern retail setup of developed economies. The retail landscape of India is predominantly unorganized, with distinct transactional processes and physical characteristics that are starkly different from modern retail stores. Moreover, sociocultural normative forces have distinct influences on the informal setup of unorganized retail.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of parents (via family communication patterns) on teenagers’ electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) intentions, via a serial mediation by internet usage and self-esteem, along with the moderating effect of online impression.

A conceptual model was developed based on the nature vs nurture perspective and theory of consumer socialization. Structural equation modeling was applied to investigate the interplay among proposed variables, using a sample of 797 teenage respondents in India.

The findings indicate that family communication, internet usage, and self-esteem are significant antecedents to eWOM intents of teenagers. Also, online impression is a strong moderator which influences whether teenagers would engage in eWOM activities or not.

This study presents actionable items for marketers interested in teenage consumers in an emerging economy. Marketers can benefit by tailoring their online communication to influence parent’s attitude toward the internet and to enhance online impression of teenagers to substantially increase eWOM dispersion.

This study provides original insights about how parents and individual characteristics act as antecedents and impact teenagers’ eWOM intentions including the moderating effect of online impression.

This paper aims to explore the moderating impact of four moderators, namely, retailer brand strength, customer’s perceived purchase regularity, gender and purchase channel (online and offline) on the relationship between relationship marketing investments (RMIs) and customer gratitude, and customer gratitude and customer loyalty. The context of research is the purchase of a high-involvement product by Indian customers.

This study adapts Huang RMIs-Gratitude-Loyalty model and empirically validates the associated hypotheses using structural equation modeling. Data is collected through the survey method.

The study (N = 385) results suggest a significant impact of preferential treatment and interpersonal communication investments on customer’s feeling of gratitude toward the retailer and, consequently, on loyalty. Purchase channel, gender and, to a lesser extent, customer perceived regularity each moderates the relationships between marketing investment and gratitude, and that between gratitude and loyalty; surprisingly, retailer brand is not a significant moderator.

Future research can factor in the impact of loyalty program on the proposed relationships.

This research offers helpful guidelines for retailers, especially for those who currently have a multichannel presence and invest or plan to invest in relationship marketing to obtain benefits from customer loyalty.

This investigation explores not only the relevance of RMIs–gratitude–loyalty model in the Indian retail context but also the influence of moderating variables on the retailers’ efforts of gaining consumer loyalty.

The purpose of this paper is to identify a model that provides explanations for normative behavior in information technology (IT) use, and to test the model across two different types of normative behavior (i.e. green information technology (GIT), and digital piracy (DP)).

The proposed model is based on the norm activation model (NAM) and the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model (UTAUT). A total of 374 and 360 usable responses were obtained for GIT and DP, respectively. The authors use the SEM technique in order to test the proposed model on the two sub-samples.

Findings from the proposed model show that DP users’ personal norm (PN) negatively impacts behavioral intention and actual behavior. These findings indicate that users of IT who indulge in DP understand that use of pirated software may not be a socially approved behavior but they still indulge in it because their PNs are not aligned with social expectations. GIT users’ PN positively impacts behavioral intention and actual behavior, and the relationship is stronger for behavioral intention than for actual behavior.

The sample consists of college students and working professionals based in India who may be savvy with respect to internet use. Future work may evaluate whether the pattern of results that the authors report for normative behavior does hold across other types of normative behavior.

These findings hint at a gap between the moral compass and the final “action” taken by DP users. What managers need to do is to create awareness among their customers about the implementation of DP/GIT and help users engage in normative behavior.

This research contributes to the literature by integrating the UTAUT and the NAM to explain normative behavior of IT use. The authors propose and test a model that identifies cognitive as well as social-psychological motivations to explain normative behavior in IT use, which have been sparingly studied in extant literature, and provides a holistic understanding of the phenomenon. As such, this research contributes to the existing knowledge of understanding of normative IT behavior.

This research empirically investigates the differential roles of utility and entertainment on the value obtained from the use of mobile phones by users belonging to low-income groups in emerging markets.

This research reports the findings from an investigation that obtains data through a survey of mobile phone users from urban and rural areas across five emerging markets. Structural equation modeling is used to analyze the data obtained.

Study findings demonstrate that users obtain utility, social as well as entertainment value from mobile phones.

This investigation uses the capability approach for conceptualizing the capabilities obtained from mobile phones by users from lower socioeconomic strata, a theoretical lens that is particularly suited for explaining behavior that may represent well-being of the user group.

Managers may explore whether the platform of entertainment is a suitable vehicle for offering additional services. This study’s findings also suggest that creating value for customers should be a primary concern in emerging markets, similar to that in developed markets.

This research is among a few that report investigations into the differential roles of utility and entertainment on the value obtained from mobile phones. This study also presents differences in terms of: urban versus rural, younger versus older and male versus female subgroups. This research presents a large-scale multicountry empirical study investigating mobile phone use by users from lower socioeconomic groups in emerging markets.

Multinational companies (MNCs) entering developing markets face cultural, language, and other barriers to understanding consumers. Ethnographic consumer insights research offers the best means of understanding needed product innovations and adaptations for these markets. This paper aims to focus on these issues.

The paper emphasizes qualitative methods and gives examples of their successful application in developing markets.

Despite a wealth of quantitative consumer data from surveys, online data, and secondary data analysis, these methods cannot provide a culture‐sensitive understanding of local consumers. Anthropological approaches are best situated to do this.

While MNCs have global experience they can gain local experience by coming to see through the lens of qualitative consumer insights.

The purpose of this viewpoint is to raise the issue of the development of marketing communication in and for emerging markets.

This is a conceptual piece which is not supported by formal research. It is based on existing literature and the experience of the author. Previous experience, writings, consulting and teaching are the primary base for the discussion. Suggestions and recommendations for further research and development are made.

This work suggests that present western models are inappropriate, therefore, it provides an alternative view and a new conceptual model. The model developed has been based on the needs and requirements of emerging markets and is presented and discussed.

This viewpoint provides practitioners with a new, practical way to consider and develop marketing communication programs in emerging markets. It also provides the academic community with a conceptual model which can be tested and refined over time. Thus, it serves a dual purpose: it provides a new, unique and relevant view of marketing communications in emerging markets and it also provides a platform for cooperative research among the academic and professional communities.

The concept suggests that consumers now and will in the future control the impact and effect of all forms of marketing communication. There are substantial implications of this shift of marketplace power if the suppositions of the author are accurate.

This viewpoint builds on other research, writing and developmental work by the author. It is the synthesis of several years of research, teaching, consulting and discussion by the author in a number of emerging markets and economies.