Category Archives: Papers and Articles
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Moblie Shopper Marketing: Key Issues, Current Insights, and Future Research Avenues
Shankar et al.
by Venkatesh Shankar, Mirella Kleijnen, Suresh Ramanathan, Ross Rizley, Steve Holland, and Shawn Morrissey
This article is forthcoming in Journal of Interactive Marketing
The intersection of mobile marketing and shopper marketing, known as mobile shopper marketing, is a rapidly evolving area. We formally define mobile shopper marketing as the planning and execution of all mobile-based marketing activities that influence a shopper along and beyond the path-to-purchase: from the initial shopping trigger, to the purchase, consumption, repurchase, and recommendation stage. However, not much is known about mobile shopper marketing. We plug this gap by first discussing mobile shopper marketing and its scope in depth and then presenting a process model that connects the mobile shopping journey with four key entities, i.e., shopper, employee, organization, and mobile technology. For each of these themes, we identify the challenges that offer future research opportunities.
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Pricing Strategies for Hybrid Bundles: Analytical Model and Insights
Meyer and Shankar
by Jeffrey Meyer and Venkatesh Shankar
This article is forthcoming in Journal of Retailing
Retailers are increasingly offering hybrid bundles — products that combine both good(s) and service(s). Some hybrid bundles, such as Lowe’s flooring that combines flooring material (good) and flooring installation (service) are sold in traditional stores, while others, such as Best Buy’s bundle that includes a computer (good) and tech support (service) are also offered online. The pricing strategy of a hybrid bundle is critical to its success. While pricing strategies for a goods bundle have been well-studied, those for a services bundle have been underexplored. Hybrid bundles, which fundamentally differ from bundles of goods or bundles of services, primarily with regard to quality variability and scalability, have received even less attention. Drawing from the pricing and bundling literatures for both goods and services, we develop an analytic model of optimal pricing for hybrid bundles by a monopolist retailer. We derive and illustrate many useful propositions, several of which are counter-intuitive. Our results show that an increase in quality variability of the service is associated with a higher optimal hybrid bundle price and a lower optimal price of the good, but a lower overall bundle profit. Our findings also reveal that the optimal price of the service (good) in a hybrid bundle is higher (lower) when the good has diminishing unit cost and the service has constant unit cost (i.e., the good is more scalable than the service). Our results also show that higher unit costs incurred to achieve lower service quality variability can result in higher (lower) profits when the cost increase is low (high). We discuss important implications of these insights for researchers and practitioners.
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The Dynamic Impact of Product-Harm Crises on Brand Preference and Advertising Effectiveness: An Empirical Analysis of the Automobile Industry
by Yan Liu and Venky Shankar
This article appeared in Management Science.
Product-harm crises (recalls) carry negative product information which adversely affects brand preference and advertising effectiveness. This negative impact of product-harm crises may differ across recall events depending on media coverage of the event, crisis severity, and consumers’ prior beliefs about product quality. We develop a state space model to capture the dynamics in brand preference, advertising effectiveness and consumer response to product recalls, integrate it with a random coefficient demand model, and estimate it using a unique dataset containing 35 automobile brands, 193 auto sub-brands, and 359 recalls during 1997-2002. Our results reveal that consumers respond more negatively to product recalls with greater media attention, more severe consequences, and higher perceived product quality. Furthermore, they show that sub-brand advertising effectiveness declines by a greater amount than parent-brand advertising and the decline in effectiveness of the recalled sub-brand’s advertising spills over to other sub-brands under the same parent-brand.
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Big Data and Marketing
by Venky Shankar
Marketers are faced with the challenge of transforming “Big Data” into insights and action. What is Big Data? What is the big deal about it? What are they typical marketing problems that can be solved by Big Data? What models are being used to analyze Big Data? What are some successful Big Data applications in marketing? What research projects relating to Big Data am I working on? What is the future of Big Data for marketers? This presentation addresses these questions.
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An Across Store Analysis of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Cross-Category Effects
by Venkatesh Shankar and P.K. Kannan
This article appeared in Customer Needs and Solutions.
An important part of the rapidly growing shopper marketing practice is cross-category retail management. In managing two related product categories,
retailers face some important questions: which category should be stocked more? How close to each other should they be stocked in the store (aisle adjacency)? which category should be promoted more often? and when should the two categories be sold as a bundle? To address these questions, we examine how purchases of related product and sub-product categories influence one another, and how the relative aisle locations of two related product categories influence their respective purchases. We consider both extrinsic (aisle location based) and intrinsic (affinity based) cross-category effects. Using aggregate store-level data together with store descriptor and store shopper demographic data, we estimate a simultaneous system of models for two related product categories, soft drinks and salty snacks. We also estimate a system of salty snack sub-category purchase models. We find that both extrinsic and intrinsic cross-category effects are asymmetric, that is, different categories and sub-categories have different effects on one another. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of these findings. -
Reimagining Change
by Venkatesh Shankar
This article was published in Business Standard.
Uncertainty is dominating the world agenda now. Economic and political uncertainties threaten to derail progress even as digital technologies and digitization are transforming the way consumers behave and businesses operate the world over. These trends assume special significance for India because its economic future depends on its demographic dividend characterized by half its population being 25 years or younger. Young Indians are increasingly digital savvy and face a future marked by widespread use of digital technology. However, they face an uncertain economic and political environment with nagging infrastructural, cultural, and ethical challenges. Using a five-step framework, companies can reshape their strategies in an increasingly uncertain world.
http://www.business-standard.com/article/management/reimagining-change-113122900634_1.html
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How Emerging Markets are Reshaping the Innovation Architecture of Global Firms
by Venkatesh Shankar and Nicole Hanson
This article was published in Review of Marketing Research
In recent years, there has been a fundamental shift in the innovation architecture of global firms. Rapid growth of the middle class in emerging markets, led by China, India, Brazil and Russia, is fueling the need to create affordable innovations in local markets. Such local innovations tend to have a wider global appeal due to commonalities in consumer demand and infrastructure across many developing markets. Additionally, the severity of economic downturns in developed markets is creating increased consumer demand for affordable innovations. Thus, these innovations are reshaping the innovation architecture of many global firms, such as G.E., PepsiCo, and Hyundai. We propose a framework for analyzing: the effects of emerging markets on the innovation architecture; the potential innovation strategies that leverage these effects; and the consequences of these innovation strategies. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our framework.
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Asymmetries in the Effects of Drivers of Mobile Device Brand Loyalty between Early and Late Adopters and across Generations of Mobile Technology
by Shun Yin Lam and Venkatesh Shankar
The article was published in Journal of Interactive Marketing
Mobile marketing activities are growing at a rapid pace. The success of mobile marketing hinges on consumers’ adoption of mobile devices. However, consumers’ mobile device adoption is not well understood at the brand (e.g., Apple, Nokia, Samsung) level. We propose a conceptual framework linking mobile device brand loyalty (repurchase intention) to its drivers including perceived value, brand satisfaction, brand attachment and trust, and develop hypotheses about the moderating roles of adopter type and mobile technology generation in some of these linkages. We test these hypotheses using structural equation modeling on a unique cross-sectional dataset of attitudes toward mobile phone brands spanning two technology generations, 2.5G and 3G. The results reveal important asymmetries between adopter types and between technology generations: early adopters of mobile devices emphasize perceived value, whereas late adopters rely on brand satisfaction in developing brand loyalty; and consumers depend more on trust and less on perceived value in developing loyalty for the new generation than for the existing generation. We outline how brand managers of mobile devices should adapt their marketing strategies to different adopter
types and technology generations. -
Are Multichannel Customers Really More Valuable? The Moderating Role of Product Category Characteristics
by Tarun Kushwaha and Venkatesh Shankar
The article is forthcoming in Journal of Marketing.
How does the monetary value of customer purchases vary by customer preference for purchase channels (e.g., traditional, electronic, multichannel) and product category? The authors develop a conceptual model and hypotheses on the moderating effects of two key product category characteristics—the utilitarian versus hedonic nature of the product category and perceived risk—on the channel preference–monetary value relationship. They test the hypotheses on a unique large-scale, empirically generalizable data set in the retailing context. Contrary to conventional wisdom that all multichannel customers are more valuable than single-channel customers, the results show that multichannel customers are the most valuable segment only for hedonic product categories. The findings reveal that traditional channel customers of low-risk categories provide higher monetary value than other customers. Moreover, for utilitarian product categories perceived as high (low) risk, web-only (catalog- or store-only) shoppers constitute the most valuable segment. The findings offer managers guidelines for targeting and migrating different types of customers for different product categories through different channels.