No abstract

F irms are increasingly engaging with customers on social media. Despite this heightened interest, guidance for effective engagement is lacking. In this study, we investigate customers' compliments and complaints and firms' service interventions on social media. We develop a dynamic choice model that explicitly accounts for the evolutions of both customers' voicing decisions and their relationships with the firm. Voices are driven by both the customers' underlying relationships and other factors such as redress seeking. We estimate the model using a unique data set of customer voices and service interventions on Twitter. We find that redress seeking is a major driver of customer complaints, and although service intervention improves relationships, it also encourages more complaints later. Because of this dual effect, firms are likely to underestimate the returns on service intervention if measured using only voices. Furthermore, we find an "error-correction" effect in certain situations, where customers compliment or complain when others voice the opposite opinions. Finally, we characterize the distinct voicing tendencies in different relationship states, and show that uncovering the underlying relationship states enables effective targeting. We are among the first to analyze individual customer level voice dynamics and to evaluate the effects of service intervention on social media.

Customers have predictable life cycles. As a result of these life cycles, firms that sell multiple products or services frequently observe that, in general, certain items are purchased before others. This predictable phenomenon provides opportunities for firms to cross-sell additional products and services to existing customers. This article presents a structural multivariate probit model to investigate how customer demand for multiple products evolves over time and its implications for the sequential acquisition patterns of naturally ordered products. The authors investigate customer purchase patterns for products that are marketed by a large midwestern bank. Among the substantive findings are that women and older customers are more sensitive to their overall satisfaction with the bank than are men and younger customers when determining whether to purchase additional financial services, and households whose head has a greater level of education or is male move more quickly along the financial maturity continuum than do households whose head has less education or is female.

In this paper, we develop a structural model of household behavior in an environment where there is uncertainty about brand attributes and both prices and advertising signal brand quality. Four quality signaling mechanisms are at work: (1) price signals quality, (2) advertising frequency signals quality, (3) advertising content provides direct (but noisy) information about quality, and (4) use experience provides direct (but noisy) information about quality. We estimate our proposed model using scanner panel data on ketchup. If price is important as a signal of brand quality, then frequent price promotion may have the unintended consequence of reducing brand equity. We use our estimated model to measure the importance of such effects. Our results imply that price is an important quality-signaling mechanism and that frequent price cuts can have significant adverse effects on brand equity. The role of advertising frequency in signaling quality is also significant, but it is less quantitatively important than price. In the printed version of , Vol. 27, No. 6, Erdem et al. (2008) was mistakenly identified as a Research Note. It is a regular article and has been corrected here and in the online table of contents.consumer choice under uncertainty, Bayesian learning, signaling, advertising and price as signals of quality, brand equity, pricing policy, dynamic choice

The authors investigate and find evidence for advertising and sales promotion spillover effects for umbrella brands in frequently purchased packaged product categories. The authors also capture the impact of advertising (as well as use experience) on both utility mean and variance across two categories. They show that variance of the random component of utility declines over time on the basis of advertising (and use experience) in either category. This constitutes the first empirical evidence for the uncertainty-reducing role of advertising across categories for umbrella brands. An Empirical Investigation o f the Spillover Effects o f Advertising and Sales Promotions i n Umbrella Branding Many companies widely practice umbrella branding. Also, a fair amount of managerial research argues that umbrella branding generates savings in brand development and marketing costs over time (e.g., Lane and Jacobson 1995; Tauber 1981, 1988) and enhances marketing productivity (e.g., Rangaswamy, Burke, and Oliver 1993). Wernerfelt (1988) has shown analytically that a multiproduct firm can use its brand name as a bond for quality when it introduces a new-experience product. Umbrella branding is posited to both increase expected quality (Wernerfelt 1988) and reduce consumer risk (Montgomery and Wernerfelt 1992). Consumers' use experience in one product category needs to affect their perceptions of quality in another for umbrella branding to serve as a credible signal of a new-experience product's quality, because a false signal would be costly if the quality of the extension turned out to be poor. Experimental research has shown some evidence that the parent brand's perceived quality affects the extension evaluations (Aaker and Keller 1990) and vice versa, which indicates that brand equity dilution may occur (Loken and Roedder John 1993). Although the cross-category learning effects for umbrella brands are a necessary condition for umbrella branding to function as a signal (Erdem 1998), the learning effects alone

Hydrophilic treatment of bulk graphene-like carbon nitride (g-C3N4) for future applications has aroused extensive interest, due to its enhanced specific surface area and unusual electronic properties. Herein, water-dispersible g-C3N4 with a porous structure can be obtained by chemical oxidation of bulk g-C3N4 with K2Cr2O7-H2SO4. Acid oxidation results in the production of hydroxyl and carboxyl groups on its basal plane and the formation of a porous structure of g-C3N4 at the same time. The porous g-C3N4 appears as networks with tens of micrometers in width and possesses a high specific surface area of 235.2 m(2) g(-1). The final concentration of porous g-C3N4 can be up to 3 mg mL(-1). Compared with bulk g-C3N4, the as-obtained porous g-C3N4 exhibits excellent water dispersion stability and shows great superiority in photoinduced charge carrier separation and transfer. The photocatalytic activities of porous g-C3N4 towards degradation of organic pollutants are much higher than those of the bulk due to the larger band gap (by 0.2 eV) and specific surface areas.

Over the years, researchers have found that promotion makes consumers switch brands and purchase earlier or more. However, it is unclear how promotion affects consumption, especially for product categories that are perceived to be versatile and substitutable. In this paper, we propose a dynamic structural model with endogenousconsumption under promotion uncertainty to analyze the promotion effect on consumption. This model recognizes consumers as rational decision makers who form promotion expectations and plan their purchase and consumption decisions in light of promotion schedules. Applying the proposed model to packaged tuna, we find that endogenous consumption responds to promotion as a result of forward-looking and stockpiling behavior. This finding has important implications for managers who plan to better take advantage of the promotion effect on consumption. This is the first empirical paper that recognizes consumption as an endogenous decision variable and proposes a structural model, which offers behavioral explanations on whether, how and why promotion encourages consumption for product categories with elastic consumption.

We estimate the joint impact of the frequency reward and customer tier components of a loyalty program on customer behavior and resultant sales. We provide an integrated analysis of a loyalty program incorporating customers' purchase and cash-in decisions, points pressure and rewarded behavior effects, heterogeneity, and forward-looking behavior. We focus on four key research questions: (1) How important is it to combine both components in one model? (2) Does points pressure exist in the context of a two-component loyalty program? (3) How is the market segmented in its response to the combined program? (4) Do the programs complement each other in terms of the incremental sales they produce? Our most basic message is that the frequency reward and customer tier components of loyalty programs should be modeled jointly rather than in separate models. We find strong evidence for points pressure for both the customer tier and frequency reward components using both model-based and model-free evidence. We find a two-segment solution revealing a “service-oriented” segment that highly values cash-ins for room upgrades and staying in “luxury” hotels, and a “price-oriented” segment that is more price sensitive and highly values the frequency reward aspects of the loyalty program. Furthermore, we find that both components generate incremental sales. Also, there was slight synergy between the programs but not a huge amount. Overall, each component contributes to increased revenues and does not interfere with the other.