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This book explores new and leading edge marketing research approaches as successfully practiced by visionaries of academia and the research industry. Ideal as either a supplementary text for students or as a guidebook for practitioners, this book showcases the excitement of a field where discoveries abound and researchers are valued for solving weighty problems and minimizing risks. The authors offer rich new tools to measure and analyze consumer attitudes, combined with existing databases, online bulletin boards, social media, neuroscience, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, behavioral economics, and more. The reader will profit from the numerous contemporary case studies that demonstrate the key role of marketing research in corporate decision-making.

Cosmopolitans are individuals with a distinctive kind of extended national and international orientation, a global vision, and sense of belonging to the world. These people are sophisticated and importantly engaged in the cultures outside of local geographical boundaries. But what do we know about them as consumers—their origins, values, media usage, and buyer behavior? This unique book details much about this group, and fills a knowledge gap that has long been overlooked largely because other related marketing areas have overshadowed and overlooked the notion of cosmopolitan consumers. Until this book, in fact, there has been no single authoritative source that directly and comprehensively covers the field of consumer cosmopolitanism. This book also includes original essays by an all-star cast of contributors, giving you an introduction to a powerful new approach to marketing, eclectically packed with novel ideas and insights that noticeably advance the marketing field and bring it more fully into the age of globalization.

The concept and framework of market sensing was introduced by George Day more than 20 years ago into the strategic marketing literature and especially the philosophy of the market-driven organization. Market sensing can be considered an expression of a company's capabilities to scan the external environment. It does this by using real time data and intelligence to understand business or uncertain changes, to meet the current and future needs of the market, increase customer value, and outperform competitors. Market sensing enables managers to resist complacency, as well as to exploit opportunities and to design appropriate competitive strategies in order to remain successful in today's uncertain, rapidly changing, and hypercompetitive market. The present volume, Market Sensing Today, is essential reading in the marketing discipline, given the rapidly escalating innovative developments in market sensing techniques. This book of essays by acknowledged experts in the field fills an important knowledge gap and provides a realistic basis for strategy. It is replete with real-life examples of market sensing that illustrate actionable ideas for immediate impact that will improve organizational learning and accelerate growth. This book of contemporary tested and comprehensive concepts and methods grounded in diverse and rich experience is intended to stimulate creativity and insightful approaches for educators offering courses in strategy as well as for practitioners involved in crucial strategic decision making.

Purpose This paper aims to explore the effect of employees’ state mindfulness, a short period of mindful presence, on the quality of the service they provide in a service encounter. Design/methodology/approach Three studies are conducted. A pilot study explores the relationship between state mindfulness and service encounter quality. Experiment 1 examines whether a 15-min mindfulness exercise results in an increase in service employees’ state mindfulness. Experiment 2 tests whether induced state mindfulness produces higher service quality and whether a reminding technique can prolong state mindfulness between service encounters. Findings The results demonstrate the following. First, that more mindful employees provide better service quality. Second, that a short, easily implemented, mindfulness exercise can reliably increase employees’ state mindfulness. Third, induced mindfulness has an impact on subsequent service quality in terms of reliability, assurance, empathy and responsiveness. These effects persist regardless of the service encounter structure (high vs low structure) or the degree of emotional labor involved (high vs low emotionally charged). Finally, the reminding technique developed as part of this research suggests that state mindfulness can be maintained between service encounters. Research limitations/implications As simulated (programmed) customers are used, independent evaluators to assess service quality are used. Service providers in this study are college students; future field studies should consider a wider range of service providers. The research focuses on state mindfulness; exploration of trait mindfulness offers future research opportunities. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to empirically examine the link between mindfulness and service quality. It shows that mindfulness can be induced, and through a reminding technique be maintained, and improve service quality across service interactions. This is a powerful finding for marketing managers, for it offers a new method to enhance service provision. Moreover, this research implies that the increase in service quality is likely to be accompanied by reduced job burnout: a double win for employees, employers and customers.

Purpose: Given that many consumers are skeptical about environmentally based advertising campaigns, the purpose of this study is to propose an optimized message strategy to facilitate consumer engagement with green messages in social media contexts. Design/methodology/approach: Four empirical studies are conducted using self-report questionnaires to test proposed hypotheses with a focus on the interplay between claim specificity and benefit appeals in green advertising on social media. Findings: The current study examines the interaction effects of claim specificity and benefit appeals on consumer engagement in social media. Specifically, the results reveal that when the message claim is abstract, using other-benefit appeals produces more positive consumer engagement than using self-benefit appeals. Moreover, the results illustrate that self-enhancement motivates consumers to engage with green product advertising messages when the advertising appeal is abstract and the advertising message is associated with benefits for others. Finally, it is found that consumers’ self-construal level moderates the interaction effect of claim specificity and benefit appeals type on consumer engagement on social media. Practical implications: This paper has practical implications to both social media managers and advertisers in the green product industry: a match with advertising claim specificity and construal level (i.e. social distance: self-benefit vs other-benefit) should be ensured to increase consumer engagement on social media. In addition, self-enhancement and self-construal should be considered for a better message strategy in social media contexts. Originality/value: The findings make important contributions to the literature in that we extend the applications of construal level theory to social media contexts as a valid theoretical tool to identify optimized green message strategies. As such, it provides future researchers and practitioners in the domain of green campaigns with useful guidelines to boost more consumption of green products. © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited.

The aim of the study is to investigate the motivational effects of tourist traits and risk appraisal on tourist destination risk perception. Risk appraisal involves subjective estimates of vulnerability to a threat and the threat’s consequential severity. Fear levels influence both of these elements of risk appraisal. Individual differences in reactance proneness and risk aversion are introduced into the study model to more fully account for differences in travel destination risk perceptions. The study design involves US adults, who have used their passports for international travel in the past 5 years. Travel risk assessments were studied for four destination sites: London, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur and Istanbul. A general structural model is developed to test hypotheses about antecedents and consequents of risk appraisal and destination risk perception. © The Author(s) 2021.

Alexander Josiassen (2011) initiated research on the consumer disidentification (CDI). More specifically, in his investigation of 2nd generation Turks in the Netherlands, he introduced the concept of acculturation as an antecedent to consumer disidentification among this ethnic group. Josiassen's study showed that acculturation negatively affects CDI. The present replication research among American 2nd generation US immigrants confirmed Josiassen’s findings with respect to CDI. It also confirmed his findings that acculturation positively affects consumer ethnocentrism (CET). In elaborating his model, the US study found that (a) national disidentification (NDI) is inversely predictive of acculturation, and (b) acculturation is negatively predictive of consumer xenocentrism (XEN). Replication of the Netherland CDI model in the U.S. results in an acceptable measurement fit and structural fit. © 2020, University of South Australia. All rights reserved.

Facial expression emojis are commonly used in digital communications and marketing campaigns. However, it is less known how the design of emojis may affect consumer responses. To address this gap, this research examines the impact of emojis’ facial asymmetry levels on consumer judgments. Findings across four studies demonstrate that compared with their symmetric counterparts, asymmetric facial expression emojis are more likely to receive favorable consumer evaluations. This effect is driven by perceptions of human expression resemblance and emotional expression strength and tends to be more prominent among consumers with a higher level of emotional sensitivity. Moreover, marketing messages including an asymmetric (vs. a symmetric) emoji are more likely to generate positive consumer responses.

Since the typical account longevity is short, agencies should anticipate their likelihood of loss, seek to forestall and invest in their client relationships. A model is proposed for examining account lifetimes, which can offer guidance on the likely retention of future accounts. The impact of agency structural characteristics on longevity is also examined, and compared for both U.S. and U.K. markets. Results for both markets indicate that cumulative account dissolution increases at a decreasing rate over time. Greater account longevity is associated with larger agency size (both in terms of agency billings and employees), and agency age but not with stability of billings growth. Evidence suggests that several structural characteristics of agencies reflect the motivation and/or ability to maintain accounts. © 1999 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

To gain insight into how people select life insurance policies, we conducted a controlled experiment to see how consumers with varying levels of expertise make choices among life insurance policies when provided relevant information presented in an easy-to-use format. We found that those with greater product class knowledge engage in qualitatively and quantitatively different decision processes than those with less knowledge, and therefore are likely to reach different decisions. Specifically, experts are statistically more likely to engage in pairwise/multiple comparisons and to evoke a greater number of choice criteria. There is directional support that they search for more information as well. For all participants, the number of information searches far exceeded the number of elimination and choice criteria evoked. © 1998 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

A growing body of literature suggests that experts are little if at all better than novices in terms of the quality of decision outputs, To explain this counter-intuitive finding, the authors propose a conceptual framework that focuses on initial problem structure as a key moderator of the effect of expertise on performance, Specifically, they argue that the expert-novice performance differential should be greatest at moderate levels of problem structure and weakest at both extremes. To examine this central hypothesis, the authors conduct a controlled experiment that compares experts with novices when solving a complex problem that had characteristics of a moderately ill-structured problem, Relative to novices, the authors find that experts select fewer, but more diagnostic, information inputs and are more consistent when evaluating nonquantified inputs, As a result, they make more accurate and tightly clustered judgments than do novices, and. also are more confident in their decisions. To examine the moderating influence of problem characteristics, certain task variables are manipulated to increase or decrease initial problem structure. As hypothesized, the benefits of expertise are less pronounced when solving a problem with increased initial structure.

The purpose df this paper is to examine factors that affect the calibration of judgments by systematically comparing experts' judgments to novices' when solving a complex, real-world problem that varies in its initial characteristics. Calibration in this context refers to the proportion of times decision makers provide a range about their best estimates that includes the actual outcome. We found that experts specify a narrower range and provide more accurate best estimates than novices. But their tighter ranges are not justified by their greater accuracy: they are less likely to encompass the actual outcome than are novices. However, this effect is attenuated when solving more complex problems. Novices apparently underestimate the complexity of difficult problems, hence the accuracy of their best estimates decreases as does the width of their ranges, resulting in worse calibration. The performance of experts was not significantly different across problem solving conditions. Both groups provided asymmetrical ranges about their best estimates, which suggests they account for the effect of subproblem dependencies. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.