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Although vanity sizing has often been conceptualized as “smaller is better” in apparel sizing, this perspective is limited in that many products would be more negatively perceived if viewed as smaller in size. In such scenarios, “larger is better” would be a more appropriate heuristic. Thus, vanity sizing should be redefined as a practice in achieving social desirability in size labeling. Namely, vanity sizing actually seeks to induce feelings of either smallness or largeness depending on the context. The purpose of this paper is to address this redefinition.

The current research provides initial empirical support of this redefinition with two studies that utilize a blended qualitative/quantitative approach and a hypothetical product scenario in which “larger is better” (bras).

Study 1 indicates that consumers seek to feel smaller and larger across different bodily areas. Further, study 2 found that compared to consumers of larger cup sizes, consumers of smaller cup sizes react more favorably to larger-than-typical cup sizes, forming more positive cognitive/affective reactions. Further, these cognitive/affective reactions influence purchase intentions, confirming findings of prior literature concerning attitudes and purchase intentions. Overall, the findings support the need to redefine vanity sizing.

The present conceptualization of vanity sizing is too narrow and limits understanding of the implications of vanity sizing across all sizing situations. Thus, this paper redefines vanity sizing and furnishes empirical evidence that such redefinition is warranted.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate employment of positioning strategies in the retail bank sector of Sub-Saharan Africa, specifically using Ghana as the study context. In addition, it explores the applicability of western-based typology of positioning strategies in the Sub-Saharan African environment.

Six retail banks – three national and three foreign – are studied, each through an in-depth case study method: covert and participant observation techniques; and face-to-face interviews of chief executive officers, marketing managers, and bank branch managers provided data for the study.

The results show that the “service” positioning strategy is the most popular strategy employed by retail banks. “Value for money,” “attractiveness,” “brand name,” and “country of origin” positioning strategies are also dominant. “Top of the range” and “selectivity” strategies are minimally pursued by the sample of banks studied. The results reveal that both foreign and national retail banks employ multiple positioning strategies in the face of competition. However, foreign retail banks consistently employ a; large number of strategies relative to national retail banks. This paper supports the applicability of a western-derived set of positioning strategies in the Sub-Saharan African marketplace.

This study closes a gap in the understanding of positioning, as well as filling the empirical gap in the application of positioning. In addition, it helps resolve a contextual gap of knowledge in Sub-Saharan Africa’s retail banking sector.

This study responds to Porter (1996), Clancy and Trout (2002), and Knox (2004) for continued empirical research in positioning in service industries and specifically in Sub-Saharan African economies (Coffie, 2014, 2016; Coffie and Owusu-Frimpong, 2014). Moreover, this research adds value to the banking and marketing literatures through a qualitative case study method, which is an important yet overlooked research method (Yin, 2009).

The current work reviews all retailing articles published in four prominent retailing journals – Journal of Retailing, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, and International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research – in the 2009-2015 period, picking up where Runyan and Hyun (2009) left off. The purpose of this paper is to identify leading authors and institutions in retailing research based on overall impact.

Content analysis/literature review/descriptive research.

In total, 1,392 articles were published during this time period, and through a procedure of weights and adjustments for author count, journal impact, journal quality, and journal publishing opportunity, the findings reveal that research collaboration is highly prevalent, as evidenced by the high number of multi-authored papers and cross-university/international partnerships. Additionally, some authors and institutions remain influential, while others have emerged as highly influential in the last seven years. This shows the dynamic nature of the field and the need to remain active in quality publishing.

Scholars must understand that several factors influence impact judgments, which cannot be assessed using raw counts alone. Journal quality, impact, and publishing opportunity as well as author counts are important elements to consider.

These reviews are vital to the field in that they provide status updates on scholarship, so these reviews should be done periodically. Additionally, the findings in this paper provide a more holistic understanding of research impact and permit better assessment for scholars and administrators.

The purpose of this paper is to (1) characterize representational and nonrepresentational images; (2) review the literature on representational and nonrepresentational images; (3) introduce the theory of consumption values (TCV) framework vis-à-vis representational and nonrepresentational images; and (4) generate propositions and questions for future research based on that intersection.

Conceptual/literature review with propositions and future research directions.

The authors offer nine propositions and several associated example research questions to explore and document the important ways in which representational and nonrepresentational images can affect the five dimensions of value as outlined in the TCV.

It is the hope that this work serves as a theoretical starting point – surely, there are other theories and frameworks beyond the TCV that may share ties with types of images, which scholars should be encouraged to explore, but if the authors had attempted to document every possible theory, the result would be a limitless document. As such, the authors have honed the efforts on a broad-reaching framework, the TCV, in the attempt to balance theoretical insights with parsimony. Through exploration of these and other avenues, the authors hope that scholars and practitioners alike will benefit from elucidation of theories and effects around representational and nonrepresentational images.

Several practical implications flow from the dimensions and propositions within this work.

Representational and nonrepresentational images have featured prominently throughout visual content and communications for centuries, yet the current body of literature remains scant and underdeveloped in its relationship to marketing. The present work addresses this gap by using the TCV as an overarching framework to generate propositions and future research questions.

This paper aims to investigate textual characteristics of customer reviews that motivate companies to respond (sentiment negativity and sentiment deviation) and how aspects of these company responses (response intensity, length and tailoring) affect subsequent customer review quality (comprehensiveness and readability) over time.

Leveraging a large data set from a leading app website (Shopify), the authors combine text mining, natural language processing (NLP) and big data analysis to examine the antecedents and outcomes of online company responses to reviews.

This study finds that companies are more likely to respond to reviews with more negative sentiment and higher sentiment deviation scores. Furthermore, while longer company responses improve review comprehensiveness over time, they do not have a significant influence on review readability; meanwhile, more tailored company responses improve readability but not comprehensiveness over time. In addition, the intensity (volume) of company responses does not affect subsequent review quality in either comprehensiveness or readability.

This paper expands on the understanding of online company responses within the digital marketplace – specifically, apps – and provides a new and broader perspective on the motivations and effects of online company responses to customer reviews. The study also extends beyond the short-term focus of prior works and adds to literature on long-term effects of online company responses to subsequent reviews. The findings provide valuable insights for companies (especially those with apps) to enhance their online communication strategies and customer engagement.

While prior research has investigated factors that predict consumers’ information search behaviors as they relate to automobiles, such studies were conducted prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Given that the pandemic has necessitated lockdowns, social distancing, business closures and other disruptions to normal shopping activities, consumer information search behaviors have also been substantially altered as the psychological distance between consumers and marketers has increased. Thus, this study aims to examine these changes and identify patterns of search behavior for a major durable product: automobiles.

Using survey data from before and during the pandemic, the study implements Finite Mixture Modeling to unveil latent segments of U.S. consumers’ search behaviors and choices for Japanese automobiles. This analytic method enables capturing consumer unobserved heterogeneity through mixing probabilities guided by individual characteristics. These segments are determined based on consumers’ information search for online and offline marketer-controlled and nonmarketer-controlled sources.

The study identifies that two segments of consumers emerge both prior to the pandemic and during the pandemic. These empirically validated findings indicate that the pandemic has led to shifts in consumers’ information search behaviors for Japanese automobiles by relying more on nonmarketer-controlled sources of information.

This work is among the first comprehensive empirical analyses of consumer search for a major durable product by comparing pre- and during pandemic patterns. Using analytics and econometrics, the first-hand analysis findings offer meaningful implications for marketers and product managers in the automotive industry.

Service delays are of significant concern to both consumers and companies – delays cost both groups billions of dollars and lead to consumer frustration and switching activity. Therefore, determining means of overcoming negative consumer reactions to delays is important, and the authors propose that anthropomorphic facial expressions could be one of those means. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to test the effects of anthropomorphic cues (namely, happy and sad faces) on consumer responses to service delays, depending on whether service providers are at fault for those delays.

Three experimental studies test the proposed effects.

Happy faces alongside messages about delays appear to provide no significant benefit to repatronage intentions compared to a non-anthropomorphic (control) condition, whether the service provider is or is not to blame. Meanwhile, sad faces are harmful when the provider is not to blame but can somewhat bolster repatronage intentions when the provider is at fault. Further, perceived sincerity of the facial expression and patience with the provider mediate these effects.

The findings offer important insights into how anthropomorphic cues, including emojis, can influence consumer responses to service delays. The work, thus, offers clarity around instances in which anthropomorphism might lead to negative consumer responses.

Managers can use the findings to increase patience and mitigate potentially negative consumer responses when service delays occur.

This work adds clarity to the literature on anthropomorphism by showing how blame attributions for service delays can lead to different consumer responses to anthropomorphic cues. The findings also show how anthropomorphism can help to mitigate negative consumer responses to service delays.

The present research takes a qualitative approach to examine young adult consumers’ perceptions and intentions toward non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The goal of the study is to identify consumer sub-segments of young adults based on their perceptions of/intentions toward NFTs.

This research utilized qualitative/thematic analysis.

The results revealed three sub-segments of young adults with different perceptions of NFTs. The largest group, Authenticators, perceive NFTs as luxurious digital possessions that are prestigious, have premium prices and are high quality. They are most likely to be early/late majority, but some are innovators/early adopters. The second-largest group, Pessimists, hold negative views about NFTs, seeing them as fads, silly and/or a waste of time and believing that investing in them is risky. These individuals are most likely to be laggards in terms of adoption. The smallest group, Futurists, hold forward-thinking views about NFTs. They are most likely to see themselves as innovators/early adopters, think of NFTs as the future of asset ownership, investment and digital life, and do not perceive them as overly risky.

The findings add to the scant literature on NFTs in marketing by documenting three potential sub-segments of young adult consumers for NFTs. NFT marketers should take care in effectively marketing NFTs’ value and addressing their risks to consumers as they relate to the identified consumer segments.

Although the functional benefits of e-books have been discussed in the emerging literature on the e-reader platform, the hedonic/emotional aspects of e-book usage have not been explored. This study aims to explore the impact that e-readers have on consumers’ connections with books. Relying on self-concept theory and possessions as the extended self, the authors address the following two questions: What are the hedonic differences between e-books and printed books, and, if the functional benefits of e-books are so compelling, then why do some people still use printed books?

The researchers pursue a qualitative design through the use of semi-structured interviews, with a combination of base questions and follow-up questions tailored to the individual respondent.

The results reveal six primary themes: convenience, change, community, collection, connection and children. Within each, functional benefits are identified, confirming prior literature on these benefits, and hedonic/emotional themes emerge, revealing that e-readers are capable of changing consumers’ connections with books. Namely, while e-books offer functional benefits over printed books, consumers feel less connected to books read using an e-reader platform and prefer to purchase the printed versions of books that hold special meanings for them. These findings align with self-concept theory and indicate that printed books are an extension of the self, one that cannot be completely replaced by e-books.

This research adds to the emerging literature on e-books by demonstrating that e-readers have emotional implications for consumers as components of the self-concept/extended self. Prior literature has focused solely on the functional benefits associated with e-books but has not directly addressed the role of books in the self-concept.