Avatars are becoming increasingly popular in contemporary marketing strategies, but their effectiveness for achieving performance outcomes (e.g., purchase likelihood) varies widely in practice. Related academic literature is fragmented, lacking both definitional consistency and conceptual clarity. This article makes three main contributions to avatar theory and managerial practice. First, to address ambiguity with respect to its definition, this study identifies and critically evaluates key conceptual elements of the term avatar, offers a definition derived from this analysis, and provides a typology of avatars’ design elements. Second, the proposed 2 × 2 avatar taxonomy suggests that the alignment of an avatar’s form realism and behavioral realism, across different contingencies, provides a parsimonious explanation for avatar effectiveness. Third, the authors develop an emerging theory of avatar marketing, by triangulating insights from fundamental elements of avatars, a synthesis of extant research, and business practices. This framework integrates key theoretical insights, research propositions, and important managerial implications for this expanding area of marketing strategy. Lastly, the authors outline a research program to both test the propositions and insights as well as advance future research.

Extant research has focused on the role of hub users (e.g., individuals with a large number of ties to other people) in social media-based product adoption or information diffusion processes to the neglect of non-hub users. Drawing on the strength-of-weak-ties perspective and social capital theory, we (1) reveal systematic differences in characteristics of hub users vs. non-hub users in terms of user type, follower type, as well as user-follower relationships and (2) demonstrate differential effects of non-hub users versus hub users contingent upon contextual factors. Using a dataset collected from a popular Chinese micro-blog website, we find that hub users are more likely information disseminators than non-hub users, that followers of hub users are more likely information disseminators themselves than followers of non-hub users, and that there are more reciprocal ties between non-hub users and their followers than relationships between hub users and their followers. More importantly, results confirm contingent effects of hub users vs. non-hub users on reposts. Specifically, relative to hub users, the effect of non-hub users on reposts becomes much less weak when content topics are of high personal relevance to followers' lives or when content has high emotional valence. By contrast, hub users, relative to nonhub users, become even more impactful when many of their followers happen to be active online when an original post is seeded.

As firms continue to invest in IT resources and collaborate with key suppliers, many fail to benefit from these activities. Drawing on resource orchestration theory and the relational view of interfirm competitive advantage, we examine the contingent relationships among IT resources, key supplier involvement, and the focal firm's performance. Using a multi-informants dataset from the manufacturing sector in China, we find that supplier involvement mediates the positive effect of IT resources on the focal firm's performance only when there is a high level of mutual trust and when competitive intensity is low in the focal firm's environment. In a highly competitive environment, however, mutual trust dampens the positive effect of supplier involvement on the focal firm's performance, which reveals the "hidden costs" of interfirm trust. In contrast, the direct positive effect of IT resources on the focal firm's performance is amplified by mutual trust when competitive intensity is high, suggesting that the focal firm will fare better without supplier involvement under these conditions. Therefore, key supplier involvement in the focal firm's IT-enabled operations does not always lead to improved performance and its effect on performance is contingent on relational and environmental variables.

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