In recent years, online word-of-mouth (WOM) communication in the form of online consumer reviews has become a major information source for consumers planning to purchase a new product. With the help of online reviews, consumers can access diverse opinions from others who have bought or used the new products before making their purchase decisions. This study compares the impact of online reviews on the sales of two types of new products (experience vs. search products) over time, in terms of the volume and valence of online consumer reviews. Using the data collected from Amazon.com over a period of nine months, we find that the volume of online consumer reviews has a greater effect on the new product sales in the late stage of product life cycle (PLC) than in the early stage of PLC. Moreover, the effect of valence of online consumer reviews is greater than that of volume of online consumer reviews. Online negative consumer reviews affect new product sales more than online positive consumer review, but not in a negative way. The results also indicate that the volume and valence of online consumer reviews have greater impact on experience products than search products. The findings suggest that online consumer reviews provide a meaningful decision aid to consumers planning to purchase new products and that online WOM gains momentum over time and significantly affects the sales of new products beyond the initial period. Practitioners need to pay greater attention to online WOM, devise suitable marketing strategies, and promote consumer advocacy to generate positive reviews when they launch new products. They may also incorporate the valuable consumer feedback in the development of new products.

Given the accelerated technology innovations and shorter product lifecycles, explaining and predicting consumers’ adoption of technology innovations have been increasingly difficult. With new generations of the same products emerging every few years or less, consumers often face the dilemma of choosing between continuing to use the existing product and upgrading to a new version, and have increasingly experienced a certain level of technology fatigue. They may delay the adoption, frog-leap the new product, and simply ignore its existence. Thus, the traditional models of adoption based on product attributes and consumer innovativeness can no longer accommodate these new realities. Based on the concepts of uncertainty and paradoxes associated with new technologies, this study proposes a modified technology adoption model (TAM) by incorporating the concept of coping strategies, which include ignoring, rejecting, delaying, extended decision making, and pretesting. First, this study defines the concept of coping strategies and their measurements and specifies a revised TAM. Based on a survey of 219 consumers regarding the adoption of 3G mobile services in Hong Kong, the construct validity and external validity of coping is tested using confirmatory factor analysis and multiple regression. Using structural equation modeling, the study finds that consumer’ coping strategy is a significant predictor of their perceptions of product, which in turn affect consumer’s adoption decision. Moreover, the profiles of consumers enacting different coping strategies are delineated. The proposed model in this research provides more coherent explanations of consumers’ adoption decision process, can help build more accurate forecasting models, and furnish meaningful implications of marketing technology products to today’s tech-savvy and tech-weary consumers.

Although many foreign invested enterprises (FIEs) and consultants in China put the localization to a strategic level, management localization is still an emerging issue of human resource management in academic research. A few previous studies on management localization focused on the internal efficiency of the subsidiaries or parent-subsidiary relationship. The impact of management localization on the interaction between the subsidiary and local environment has received little attention. Moreover, localization lacks a consistent and valid definition. This thesis attempts to bridge the gap by systematically exploring the strategic impact of management localization. Management localization is defined as substituting expatriate managers with local managers. Based on resource-based view, local managers can be considered the vehicle of local managerial resources and thus can bring competitive advantage to the subsidiary. It is hypothesized that the effect of the management localization on the performance of the subsidiaries is contingent on cultural distance, localization emphasis, resource dependence, and decision participation of the local managers. In-depth interviews in China help to illuminate the concept validity and definition of management localization, and the data from a questionnaire survey in China are used to test the hypotheses. The results of hierarchical regression analyses provide partial support for the contingent resource perspective. The findings have meaningful implications for management localization at the multinationals’ subsidiaries and provide strong heuristics for future studies of this issue.

Dealing with service failure, one question is constantly asked: why certain consumers are still dissatisfied even though compensations are made? The effectiveness of recovery strategy has been discussed in the context of service failure paradox and second deviation in the past literature. In this thesis, these two issues were brought together under the same framework - from the perspective of expectation. We propose that expectation mediates consumers’ evaluation of recovery strategies, and leads to different levels of satisfaction and re-patronage intention. The expectation is further influenced by the type of resource spending consumers are reminded of and the failure type. Two studies were carried out to verify hypotheses. In study one, we used a 2 (resource spending: time vs. money) by 2 (high vs. low discount rate) by 2 (strong vs. weak apology) between subject factorial design to confirm the main effect and mediation effect of expectation on compensation strategies and overall satisfaction as well as re-patronage intention. Moreover, the framing effect of resource spending on time/money on expectation was also tested. In study two, we used a 2 (resource spending: time vs. money) by 2 (outcome vs. process failure) between subjects factorial design to validate the influence of resource spending type and failure types on expectation and satisfaction.

A major challenge in direct marketing is to build a customer-selection model that can help achieve higher response rate and greater profit at the same time. In this study, I adopt a bi-objective optimization (BOO) approach and propose a two-stage method using support vector machine (SVM) and support vector regression (SVR) to maximize response rate and profit simultaneously. To deal with the difficulty of learning models from imbalanced data, synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) is used to generate more balanced datasets. Experiments are conducted on two datasets, a direct marketing dataset and the KDD-98 dataset, to compare the predictive performance of the two-stage BOOSVM with other benchmark methods including logistic regression and the parallel Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithm (MOEA). The results of decile analysis suggest that the proposed two-stage BOOSVM model with SMOTE method is more effective and efficient than the competing models in improving response rate and profitability.

Consumer animosity may have a negative impact on consumers’ purchase behavior for foreign products. The consequences of the negative influence include boycotting and reluctant to purchase. This study explores the research on consumer animosity and focuses on how to attenuate the negative effect of consumer animosity towards consumers’ purchase behavior. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is considered to have a moderating effect on the relationship between consumer animosity and purchase intention. In addition, individual thinking styles are expected to influence the moderating role of CSR. In this study, a 2 (consumer animosity: high vs. low) x 2 (CSR: high vs. low) x 2 (thinking style: holistic vs. analytic) between-subjects factorial design was conducted. Participants were recruited in mainland China. Hypotheses were all supported by the results. The higher the level of CSR, the weaker impact of consumer animosity has on the purchase intention. Furthermore, when the holistic thinking style is dominant, the moderating influence of high (vs. low) CSR on the effect of consumer animosity is stronger. In contrast, when the analytic thinking style is dominant, the moderating influence of high (vs. low) CSR on the effect of consumer animosity is weaker. Managerial implications and limitations of the study are discussed.

Riding on the trend of globalization, a large number of new ventures have emerged deploying resources in multiple country markets so as to arrive at a competitive advantage. Studies that focus on such international new ventures grew to become a distinct research area: "international Entrepreneurship" that attracts much research attention but leaves a core issue namely "liability of newness" unaddressed. About 50 years ago, Stinchcombe (1965) coined this term to explain that most new ventures fail because their founders cannot switch their roles quickly enough to adapt to the changing environment. Although previous empirical studies have examined the entrepreneurial firms from the knowledge based view and organizational learning theory and tried to account for the varied ability of these entrepreneurial firms in switching roles in accordance of circumstances, little or no extant studies employs a Resource-based View (RBV) approach. This study will focus on INVs from emerging economics, trying to examine how INVs overcome liability of newness through “flexibility” to gain good performance during their internationalization. Based on the RBV of the firm, this study will address flexibility in form of a flexible configuration of firm resources consisting of cognitive, structural, and strategic flexibility as the predictors, arguing that these flexibilities would help INVs cope with liability of newness by fostering various dynamic capabilities that have been found to improve INVs’ performance. In addition, this study will focus on those INV firms located in industrial clusters, and examine how an INV's network ties within an industrial cluster moderate the relationships among flexibility and the involved dynamic capabilities. This study collected a sample of 192 Chinese international new ventures, and structural equation modeling was used to test the full model. The findings demonstrate that: (1) all the three dimension of flexibilities have positive impact on international performance; (2) exploratory learning capability and adaptive capability mediate flexibility-international performance relationship while information acquisition capability does not; and (3) an INV’s network ties positively moderates both cognitive flexibility-information acquisition capability relationship and information acquisition capability-exploratory learning capability relationship while negatively moderates information acquisition capability-adaptive capability relationship. On the basis of current findings, implications and future research directions are drawn.

Promotion attributes, such as giveaways, time limitation and exclusivity, are commonly studied separately. Previous studies may focus on how individual attributes (e.g. time pressure or price discounts) affect sales, but seldom consider the integrative effect of them. As individual attributes are often found to have a bilateral effect (both positive and negative) on sales, in this thesis, we explore how different attributes can be aligned with each other and integrated with different level of brand strength according to fit logic. That is how promotion elicits sales and generates word-of-mouth impact in terms of the configuration of promotional attributes and brand strength. We conduct a field study of 625 online promotion campaigns and discover several effective configurations of promotion attributes through qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). Based on the configurations we have found, we hypothesize that strong brands should adopt non-monetary promotion, while weak brands should adopt monetary promotion; exclusivity and time limitation should be kept mutually exclusive in a single promotion for sales stimulation. Three experiments are designed to test these hypotheses. Focusing on the integrative effect of promotional attributes allows researchers to have a holistic view of causally relevant conditions for designing an effective promotion. This study has important theoretical implications that can facilitate marketers’ understanding and predictions of deal recipients’ responses to promotions.

Mobile technologies enable users to discover and research products anytime, anywhere. Mobile devices allow consumers to create and share content based on physical location, facilitate seamless interactions, and provide context-relevant information that can better satisfy users’ needs and enhance their shopping experience. As consumers increasingly rely on mobile devices to search information and purchase products, they need immediate, updated, informative and credible opinions in concise forms. Meanwhile, marketers face unprecedented opportunities for mobile marketing, making ever important for them to understand the mobile word-of-mouth and its effect on the purchase behaviors of consumers on the mobile platform vs. those on other devices. Drawing from the media richness theory and the principle of compensatory adaptation, study one performs sentiment analysis of online product reviews from both mobile and desktop devices by analyzing over one million customer reviews from Dianping.com. We find that mobile reviews are naturally shorter, contain more adverbs and adjectives, and have smaller readership and less votes of helpfulness. The product ratings from mobile reviews are more polarized yet the average valence of mobile reviews is higher. By comparison, desktop reviews contain more pictures and are rated more helpful. Lastly, pricy products receive more desktop reviews than mobile ones. Study two draws from the construal level theory and posit that WOM from mobile devices reflects closer psychological distances (temporal and social), thus constitutes a lower construal level than that from desktop computers. Using a dataset of over one million product reviews from Dianping.com, we assess the value of online product reviews from mobile devices in comparison with those from the desktop computers. Our findings show that WOM is more helpful when it is socially and temporally closer to the users and this effect is amplified when using mobile devices, which bring the mental construal to a low level and make others’ opinions more relevant. Further, we show that product type moderates the effect of online reviews in that m-WOM is more influential for hedonic products and its value for the utilitarian consumption is the lowest. Study three deploys the observational learning theory to examine the effect of WOM across the mobile and desktop devices on the purchase behavior of online promotional offers. The findings suggest that the effect of WOM on the purchase of promotion offers varies significantly across the platforms, product categories, and discount rates. These findings help better understand the strengths, limitations and the effect of m-WOM as marketers attempt to offer consumers context-sensitive and time-critical promotions through mobile devices and make a significant contribution to the literature on interactive marketing. These studies render meaningful implications for theory development about the role of mobile technologies in marketing and can assist practitioners formulating effective promotional strategies through the electronic channels via mobile and desktop devices.

The study examines the effect of consumer co-creation in different new product development stages on consumer loyalty, purchase intention and word-of-mouth. It also examines (a) the mediating role of consumer perceived value, (b) the moderating effect of product type (search goods vs. experience goods) and (c) the influence of product newness (high-level vs. low-level) on the moderating effect of product type. Two scenario-based experiments on real luxury buyers in China were conducted to test the proposed hypotheses. The findings show that co-creation at the early (vs. late) stage have a greater positive impact on consumer loyalty, purchase intention and word-of-mouth. Moreover, consumer perceived value is found to mediate the relationship of consumer co-creation and consumer responses. Consumer value co-creation in the early stage has a greater positive effect on consumer loyalty and purchase intention for experience goods (vs. search goods). The moderating effect of the product type is influenced by product newness. When the level of the product newness is low, the moderating effect of the product type will be stronger. Managerial implications and recommendation for future research are discussed.