Robert Harrison, Risto Moisio, James Gentry and Suraj Commuri
Despite years of research into consumer socialization, little research examines men’s roles in consumer socialization processes. The purpose of this paper is to attend to this gap…
Abstract
Purpose
Despite years of research into consumer socialization, little research examines men’s roles in consumer socialization processes. The purpose of this paper is to attend to this gap and to investigate consumer socialization processes in single-father households.
Design/methodology/approach
To study consumer socialization processes, this paper develops its insights using grounded theory, deploying qualitative data to develop theory. The data include long interviews with both fathers and their children used to understand the processes of consumer socialization.
Findings
This paper finds six socialization processes: entrustment, entrainment, education, emprise, estrangement and elevation. These processes emerge based on different types of household resource gaps or aspects of men’s gender identity.
Research limitations/implications
The main implications are to study the roles played by cultural context and family type in socialization processes. Studies could examine whether the processes uncovered here occur in other family settings, as well as whether they vary based on children’s age and gender.
Practical implications
Household brands, products and services could target resource-scarce households using appeals that portray offerings as a means to develop children’s responsibilities, independence and involvement in household management. Marketers could also use advertising appeals that depict playful product usage and learning situations or more broadly position brands as identity brands making them more appealing to men who are striving to be better fathers.
Originality/value
This paper uniquely identifies a number of previously uncovered consumer socialization processes, as well as factors that influence them.
Details
Keywords
Reo Song, Risto Moisio and Moon Young Kang
Virtual gifts have emerged as a common feature of online communities, social gaming and social networks. This paper aims to examine how network-related variables and gift-seeding…
Abstract
Purpose
Virtual gifts have emerged as a common feature of online communities, social gaming and social networks. This paper aims to examine how network-related variables and gift-seeding impact virtual gift sales. The network variables include gift-giver centrality and gift-giving dispersion, capturing, respectively, the relative importance of gift-givers in a network and their tendency to give gifts to a greater or lesser number of network peers. Gift-seeding tactics capture social network firms’ attempts to stimulate virtual gift purchases by awarding virtual gifts to network members.
Design/methodology/approach
This study develops and estimates a fixed-effects panel data regression model to analyze virtual gift purchase data for a large social network service.
Findings
Gift-giver centrality, gift-giving dispersion and gift-seeding increase virtual gift purchases. Increases in consumers’ receipt of seed gifts from social network firms (“direct seeding”) and from other consumers (“indirect seeding”) increases virtual gift purchases. However, the extent to which consumers give seed gifts to their friends in the social network (“seed mediation”) does not affect sales. Greater gift-giver centrality amplifies (attenuates) the positive effects of direct (indirect) seeding. At greater levels of gift-giving dispersion, the effects of indirect seeding and seed mediation become negative. Furthermore, gift-seeding has spillover effects on virtual good (non-gift) purchases.
Research limitations/implications
This study’s data, drawn from a South Korean social network service, offer unique and valuable social network information on actual virtual gift purchases and their seeding. Future research should replicate the results of the study outside the South Korean context.
Practical implications
Given the effects reported in this study, social network firms can facilitate the purchases of virtual gifts by improving the targeting of consumers in social networks and gift-seeding tactics.
Originality/value
This study uniquely examines the individual and interactive effects of network-related variables and gift-seeding on virtual gift sales. The study is seminal in its examination of how gift-seeding can be used as a marketing tactic to increase virtual gift purchases.