1,721,031 research outputs found
Managerial and organizational perspectives on online-offline integration within integrated marketing communication. Toward a holistic conceptual framework
No full textThe digital revolution has transformed the communication landscape into a hybrid online-offline environment. Although increasing complexity does pose new challenges for practitioners and scholars, the literature also lacks theoretical and empirical analysis of managerial and organizational issues regarding online and offline integration within integrated marketing communication (IMC). This study aims to provide an initial contribution to this field from a business perspective. First, we provide a definition and empirical analysis of the key managerial and organizational issues and approaches adopted by senior managers to tackle the challenge of online and offline integration. Second, we propose a conceptual framework that offers a holistic view of implementation modalities of offline and online integration, as well as the achievable outcomes and barriers to such implementation
Solid Green and Greenwashing: When Is Communication Really Green?
No full textThe aim of the paper is to investigate consumer perceptions involving green communication, analysed with reference to audience efficacy. In particular, the focus of the study is on the object of communication,
in terms of responsible corporate processes or products, which are ecosustainable, natural, green and so on. Starting from a critical overview on the topic, an interpretive model of green communication is suggested
and an empirical analysis is conducted, using a quali-quantitative
approach. In particular, to verify whether the green content of communication encourages consumers» purchases, the perceptions of the sample with respect to four print advertisements of companies positioning
themselves as «green», are examined. The variables used to evaluate the advertisements are extracted from the Iso standard 14021. Findings suggest that sustainable communication can be redefined, in terms of
«response-ability» for the requirements of what still remains nowadays, a niche market
The importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) for branding and business success in small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) in a business-to-distributor (B2D) context
Full text linkIntegrating corporate social responsibility into brand positioning strategies has become a key concept for the brand marketing of many companies. There is a wealth of studies focusing on the effects of CSR for large international brands and companies operating in business-to-consumer markets. However, there is only limited empirical evidence about the relevance of CSR for sales and branding strategies of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in a business-to-distributor (B2D) context. Using a qualitative research design based on an exploratory case study approach, this paper therefore explores how CSR can be incorporated into the brand marketing strategy of a SME in the B2D sector and how CSR is evaluated in terms of brand perceptions and purchase intentions of business partners (n = 25). The findings suggest that although industrial buyers attribute a certain importance to CSR, product design and perceived product quality are nevertheless the main purchase reasons. The paper concludes with discussing practical and theoretical implications
The influence of website design features and consumer characteristics on internet banking adoption in Saudi Arabia
No full textRecent years have seen rapid growth of Internet technology and its incorporation into many areas, including banking. Despite the potential advantages offered, however, adoption of Internet Banking (IB) has been relatively low. This thesis aims to enhance understanding of customers' adoption of IB, with particular reference to commercial banks in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). It investigates the rationale for and current status of IB in the KSA. Then, taking as a framework the Decomposed Theory of Planned Behaviour (DTPB), with the additional construct of website features, it investigates what factors may influence Saudi customers' adoption of IB, including the potential impact of website features at different stages of the customer's decision-making process (DMP).The research targeted policy makers, IB managers and clients in all 11 commercial banks operating in KSA. Data were collected in two phases, each containing qualitative and quantitative elements. In phase one, focused on the bank perspective, interviews were held with 11 bank officials, to explore the thinking behind their IB provision and website design. Then, content analysis was used to investigate the features of 22 websites – 1 corporate and 1 individual site for each bank. In phase two, semi-structured interviews (N = 40) were used to explore bank clients' perceptions of IB, and their responses used to inform a survey, delivered online and through bank branches, of IB users' (N = 651) and non-users' (N = 409) attitudes and behaviours in relation to IB.Results showed that bank managers attempted to attract and support clients throughout the DMP, and this was reflected in website content. However, support was constrained by some erroneous assumptions about clients, and the regulatory environment. Obstacles to IB use included psychological, marketing, educational, technical, cultural and linguistic barriers. IB non-users' intention to try IB was influenced by Trust and Subjective Norms, while users' intention to continue was influenced by perceived Relative Advantage and Compatibility, Ease of Use, Self-Efficacy, Resource Facilitating Conditions and Website Characteristics. Attitudes to IB also differed by clients' gender, age, income, education and Internet experience.Implications are drawn for technology adoption and e-marketing theory, and recommendations are made to government, the central bank and commercial banks to enhance the functionality and attractiveness of IB
The influence of website design features and consumer characteristics on internet banking adoption in Saudi Arabia
Full text linkRecent years have seen rapid growth of Internet technology and its incorporation into many areas, including banking. Despite the potential advantages offered, however, adoption of Internet Banking (IB) has been relatively low. This thesis aims to enhance understanding of customers' adoption of IB, with particular reference to commercial banks in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). It investigates the rationale for and current status of IB in the KSA. Then, taking as a framework the Decomposed Theory of Planned Behaviour (DTPB), with the additional construct of website features, it investigates what factors may influence Saudi customers' adoption of IB, including the potential impact of website features at different stages of the customer's decision-making process (DMP).The research targeted policy makers, IB managers and clients in all 11 commercial banks operating in KSA. Data were collected in two phases, each containing qualitative and quantitative elements. In phase one, focused on the bank perspective, interviews were held with 11 bank officials, to explore the thinking behind their IB provision and website design. Then, content analysis was used to investigate the features of 22 websites – 1 corporate and 1 individual site for each bank. In phase two, semi-structured interviews (N = 40) were used to explore bank clients' perceptions of IB, and their responses used to inform a survey, delivered online and through bank branches, of IB users' (N = 651) and non-users' (N = 409) attitudes and behaviours in relation to IB.Results showed that bank managers attempted to attract and support clients throughout the DMP, and this was reflected in website content. However, support was constrained by some erroneous assumptions about clients, and the regulatory environment. Obstacles to IB use included psychological, marketing, educational, technical, cultural and linguistic barriers. IB non-users' intention to try IB was influenced by Trust and Subjective Norms, while users' intention to continue was influenced by perceived Relative Advantage and Compatibility, Ease of Use, Self-Efficacy, Resource Facilitating Conditions and Website Characteristics. Attitudes to IB also differed by clients' gender, age, income, education and Internet experience.Implications are drawn for technology adoption and e-marketing theory, and recommendations are made to government, the central bank and commercial banks to enhance the functionality and attractiveness of IB
An inductive investigation into relationships between geographically co-located actors : the contribution of relationship marketing to regional competitiveness
Full text linkThis thesis is grounded in the discipline of marketing and draws, substantively, on literature from within the regarded sub-discipline of relationship marketing. However, the literature drawn upon is firmly interdisciplinary, drawing heavily on theories from economic geography. The crucial construct drawn from this outwith literature is that of geographic co- location, the phenomenon of geographic proximity between businesses and other organisations. This thesis isolates and defines two modes of regional marketing activity, a defensive and an offensive variant. It is to the defensive variant that this thesis makes contributions by proposing a macro theory of relevant marketing geography, a regional relationship lifecycle that examines the notion of loyalty to a region and a competence-based view of regional relationship marketing activity between co-located actors. The conclusions and models presented here mark the first thesis in the discipline of marketing examining the contribution of the marketing discipline to regional competitiveness. The thesis also deploys a novel methodology within the marketing discipline to understand the research phenomena in time and space, and in terms of agency and structure. The methodology developed for, and deployed in, this thesis is based on Anthony Giddens' theory of structuration
Examining the Mere Exposure Effect in a Marketing Context
Full text linkAbstractThe mere exposure effect (MEE) was first identified by Zajonc (1968:1) who observed that, “the mere repeated exposure of the individual to a stimulus is a sufficient condition for the enhancement of his attitude towards it. By ‘mere exposure’ is meant a condition which just makes the given stimulus accessible to the individual's perception.” Since then, this robust experimental phenomenon has been demonstrated in over 300 studies in the psychology literature; most often in relation to changes in affective response to abstract, novel stimuli (for reviews see Harrison, 1977; Bornstein, 1989; Bornstein and Craver-Lemley, 2004). Given that it provides a theoretical and empirical framework within which to explore and explain the attitudinal effects of repeated, fleeting communication that receives minimal attention and elaboration, it has been deemed to be most important to the fields of marketing and consumer behaviour (Bornstein and Craver-Lemley, 2004). Indeed, it may be considered to be particularly relevant in the context of a contemporary consumption environment that is largely characterised by a proliferation of brands, media and messages, the fragmentation of traditional channels and audiences, and thus low levels of consumer attention, engagement and involvement. Under such conditions, it may be argued that the MEE constitutes a potentially important means by which to study, understand and shape the effects of simple, repeated brand communication. However, it is important to acknowledge that the nature of marketing stimuli, consumption-based evaluation and decision-making, and the context in which this occurs is often quite different from the laboratory conditions in which the MEE has been demonstrated in psychological research. As such, there is a need to robustly test the assumptions that may be drawn from four decades of experimental research in psychology before they can be confidently applied in the specific domain of marketing. At the same time, however, it is important to stress that the MEE represents just one of an array of potential influences on real-world consumer processing and decision-making. Furthermore, and within the constraints of current methodological alternatives, it is arguably impossible to isolate, identify and examine this phenomenon alone in such a complex natural environment. As such, it is necessary to take an incremental approach to the extension of abstract psychological research in the marketing domain; to carefully bridge the gap between pure psychological understanding and that which relates specifically to consumer behaviour. A relatively small body of experimental marketing research has endeavoured to begin this process; although (it will be argued) current findings regarding the occurrence and nature of the marketing-based MEE are somewhat limited, often equivocal and subject to some important limitations. The purpose of this thesis, therefore, is to underpin and extend the incremental development of first-principles mere exposure research in the marketing domain. To this end, it provides a comprehensive review of both the state of current psychological understanding and the degree to which it has been applied in the marketing literature, prior to a robust examination of the existence, size and nature of this phenomenon in a marketing context. This is achieved by marrying the highly controlled experimental methods of psychological mere exposure research with the use of typical marketing stimuli, brand-related evaluation and a relatively large sample (as is common in the broader field of marketing research but not, as yet, with regard to the MEE in particular). The results of this empirical work are somewhat surprising and challenge previous assumptions regarding the influence of recognition memory and the direction of the exposure-induced affect-bias. Taken together, they support a ‘dual-processing’ model of mere exposure, incorporating two forms of the MEE that are underpinned by the processes of implicit and explicit memory respectively. This model has potentially significant implications for theory, practice and further research in the fields of both psychology and marketing; all of which are discussed in the final part of the thesis
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
An exploration of the internal/external brand orientations of David Cameron’s Conservative Party
Full text linkThe majority of research in political branding has tended to adopt a measurable, singular, quantitative approach (French and Smith 2010; Schneider 2004). Furthermore research in this area deserves more attention (Peng and Hack 2009; Rawson 2007; Schneider 2004; Smith 2009; Van Ham 2001; White and de Chernatony 2002). This thesis fulfils an identified gap in the body of knowledge in that there is no in-depth understanding of a political brand from an internal and external orientation. Ultimately this thesis considers the question how can we understand the complexity of the UK Conservative Party brand from an internal and external perspective under the leadership of David Cameron? To answer this question this study explores the ‘brand identity’ and ‘brand image’ of the UK Conservative Party and considers the transfer potential (Schneider 2004) of Kapferer’s (2008) brand identity prism and Bosch’s et al. (2006) brand image framework. Thirty in-depth interviews with internal stakeholders of the UK Conservative Party along with eight focus group discussions with external stakeholders aged 18-24 years were conducted prior the 2010 UK General Election. The transcribed in-depth interviews and focus groups discussions were thematically analysed using a two-staged process based on the work of Butler-Kisber (2010). Just as Norton (1996) suggested that the UK Conservative Party is complex, this research demonstrates that the political brand is equally complex. This research highlights the lack of internal coherency to the UK Conservative Party ‘brand identity’. Furthermore the UK Conservative Party ‘brand image’ is ambiguous and remains associated with previously held perceptions. In addition, this research indicated some disparity between the concepts of brand identity and brand image. Nevertheless this study provided deep insight and highlighted some detoxification of the ‘Tory brand’. Finally, this research uncovered some key problems that still face the UK Conservative Party and that they focus upon the paradox of a ‘broad church’ whilst factional in nature
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