Understanding how to more effectively advertise is an important area for practitioners, many of whom are struggling to stay in business. Nowadays, both product and corporate branding are important and given the increase in online advertising, additional research to better understand advertising avoidance is needed. Most advertising avoidance studies to date measure either task attention or attention to advertising. This paper contributes to a more holistic view of attention by examining two distinct online tasks, such as reading information and buying products, and two forms of advertising, such as product brand advertisements and corporate brand advertisements. An eye-tracking experiment with 121 respondents show that when reading, users look more at advertisements that increase the memory of the ads. Regardless of the task performed, the corporate brand ads are more memorable than the product brand ads even if the product ads attract more attention. The longer the user stays on a website, the more the user will look at the ads and the easier it will be to remember them. However, ads are considered to be distractors for online users, therefore, to increase their effectiveness they must be more engaging and provide value for the audience.
Value proposition can be an important source of competitive advantage for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Unlike large companies which follow a rational and sequential process, developing a value proposition in an SME is instead a trial and error process. Therefore, those companies are experimenting with various options. The purpose of this paper was to identify the value strategies used by SMEs based on value dimensions and attributes and to find specific groups of SMEs with a similar market approach. We present a theoretical framework on customer value creation and customer value communication, followed by a quantitative research on 399 Romanian SMEs. We used a principal component analysis to reduce the number of choices and afterwards we ran a cluster analysis to identify the distinct groups of SMEs using specific value propositions. We found that there are three major strategic options based on customer experience, affordability and customization, and four distinct clusters: customer delight (A), multiple sources of differentiation (B), one-to-one marketing (C) and cost—effectiveness (D). Three groups use distinct value propositions—A focuses on customer experience, C on customization, D on affordability—while B mixes all of them.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.