The establishment of measurement invariance across groups is a logical prerequisite to conducting substantive cross-group comparisons (e.g., tests of group mean differences, invariance of structura...

A Review and Synthesis of the Measurement Invariance Literature: Suggestions, Practices, and Recommendations for Organizational Research

The authors examine the implications of electronic shopping for consumers, retailers, and manufacturers. They assume that near-term technological developments will offer consumers unparalleled opportunities to locate and compare product offerings. They examine these advantages as a function of typical consumer goals and the types of products and services being sought and offer conclusions regarding consumer incentives and disincentives to purchase through interactive home shopping vis-à-vis traditional retail formats. The authors discuss implications for industry structure as they pertain to competition among retailers, competition among manufacturers, and retailer-manufacturer relationships.

Interactive home shopping: Consumer, retailer, and manufacturer incentives to participate in

The authors examine the growing and pervasive phenomenon of brand alliances as they affect consumers’ brand attitudes. The results of the main study (n = 350) and two replication studies (n = 150, ...

Is a company known by the company it keeps? assessing the spillover effects of brand alliances on consumer brand attitudes

The authors investigate how critics affect the box office performance of films and how the effects may be moderated by stars and budgets. The authors examine the process through which critics affect box office revenue, that is, whether they influence the decision of the film going public (their role as influencers), merely predict the decision (their role as predictors), or do both. They find that both positive and negative reviews are correlated with weekly box office revenue over an eight-week period, suggesting that critics play a dual role: They can influence and predict box office revenue. However, the authors find the impact of negative reviews (but not positive reviews) to diminish over time, a pattern that is more consistent with critics’ role as influencers. The authors then compare the positive impact of good reviews with the negative impact of bad reviews to find that film reviews evidence a negativity bias; that is, negative reviews hurt performance more than positive reviews help performance, but only during the first week of a film’s run. Finally, the authors examine two key moderators of critical reviews, stars and budgets, and find that popular stars and big budgets enhance box office revenue for films that receive more negative critical reviews than positive critical reviews but do little for films that receive more positive reviews than negative reviews. Taken together, the findings not only replicate and extend prior research on critical reviews and box office performance but also offer insight into how film studios can strategically manage the review process to enhance box office revenue.

How Critical are Critical Reviews? The Box Office Effects of Film Critics, Star Power, and Budgets:

Bundling is pervasive in today's markets. However, the bundling literature contains inconsistencies in the use of terms and ambiguity about basic principles underlying the phenomenon. The literature also lacks an encompassing classification of the various strategies, clear rules to evaluate the legality of each strategy, and a unifying tramework to indicate when each is optimal. Based on a review of the marketing, economics, and law literature, this article develops a new synthesis of the field of bundling, which provides three important benetits. First, the article clearly and consistently defines bundling terms and identifies two key dimensions that enable a comprehensive classitication of bundling strategies. Second, it formulates clear rules for evaluating the legality of each of these strategies. Third, it proposes a framework of 12 propositions that suggest which bundling strategy is optimal in various contexts. The synthesis provides managers with a framework with which to understand and choose bundling strategies. It also provides researchers with promising avenues for further research.

Strategic Bundling of Products and Prices: A New Synthesis for Marketing

Consumers' reactions to multi-product bundles — two different products sold for one price — were obtained by systematically varying the attributes of both the primary product (e.g., VCRs) and the tie-in product (e.g., videocassette tapes). Respondents were given written product descriptions as well as the opportunity to inspect the actual products before responding. The results across a variety of dependent measures suggest that evaluations of the primary product and the tie-in product are averaged or balanced when evaluating product bundles. Furthermore, attributes of the tiein product had a much larger effect on the evaluations of product bundles than would be expected on the basis of their monetary worth alone. Other aspects of our results suggest that product bundling as a marketing strategy compares favorably with the use of cash rebates, especially when the bundle is enhanced by including a high-quality tie-in product.

Consumer evaluation of multi-product bundles: An information integration analysis

This paper addresses the question of how to combine online and offline services in the most complementary way for different product classes. In a series of surveys conducted for Experiment 1 it was determined that consumers’ preferences for online and offline services differ for different products at different stages of the shopping experience. These differences were accounted for by a model that weights the importance of different attributes for different products and assigns different values to these attributes depending on whether they are better served online or offline. For example, for products like clothing consumers place great value on the ability to touch and inspect the product and thus they prefer offline, bricks-and-mortar services at each stage of the shopping experience. By contrast, for products like computer software consumers place great value on the rapid dissemination of large amounts of information through Internet search, but many are concerned about speedy delivery and nohassle exchange which leads them to make their final purchases offline. Experiment 2 was a controlled test of a particular marketing strategy for capitalizing on the complementarity of online and offline services: alliances between online and offline brands. Confirming the operation of both assimilation and complementarity effects, it was found that the images of both brands could be improved with such alliances. Other marketing strategies were also discussed.

http://web.csulb.edu/journals/jecr/issues/20033/paper1.pdf

Product Category Dependent Consumer Preferences for Online and Offline Shopping Features and Their Influence on Multi-Channel Retail Alliances.

Modeling the Role of Brand Alliances in the Assimilation of Product Evaluations

Theoretical and Empirical Linkages Between Consumers' Responses to Different Branding Strategies

In order to develop the optimal mix of online and offline services for a particular product, marketers must determine which key attributes are perceived by their target market to be delivered better online or offline. A multipart survey was administered to assess how product attribute evaluations drive differences in online/offline shopping preferences between products, between consumers, and between stages of the shopping experience. Two groups of participants - a student sample and a sample from a national survey panel - were asked to rate their likelihood of shopping online or offline for each of a series of products, both at the search stage and at the purchase stage. They were then asked to rate the importance of attributes that might have differential importance for products like clothing and books, and to rate the extent to which they thought each attribute was delivered better online or offline. For both samples, differences in importance weights assigned to attributes that favor online shopping and attributes that favor offline shopping were key predictors of observed differences in shopping mode preference across products and across consumers.

/pdf/a-multi-attribute-analysis-of-preferences-for-online-and-2399nimb4g.pdf

Aron M. Levin

Papers

Consumer evaluation of multi-product bundles: An information integration analysis

Product Category Dependent Consumer Preferences for Online and Offline Shopping Features and Their Influence on Multi-Channel Retail Alliances.

Modeling the Role of Brand Alliances in the Assimilation of Product Evaluations

Theoretical and Empirical Linkages Between Consumers' Responses to Different Branding Strategies

A multi-attribute analysis of preferences for online and offline shopping: differences across products, consumers, and shopping stages