Existing international product diffusion studies have identified economic and cultural factors that influence consumers’ acceptance of new products, but they have not fully examined these factors’ roles in the international diffusion of global cultural products. The authors examine country-level economic and cultural factors that influence consumers’ acceptance of new global cultural products across countries. Using 846 recent U.S. movies’ box office performances in 48 national markets as the empirical context, the authors obtain the following key novel findings on product sales: (1) an inverse U-shaped impact of economic development status, (2) a positive impact of the cultural compatibility of the product and the market, and (3) a U-shaped impact of intercountry cultural distance in the presence of cultural compatibility and a decreasing linear impact of cultural distance in the absence of cultural compatibility.

Social media has been receiving attention as a cost-effective tool to build corporate brand image and to enrich customer relationships. This phenomenon calls for more attention to developing a model that measures the impact of structural features, used in corporate social media messages. Based on communication science, this study proposes a model to measure the impact of three essential message structural features (interactivity, formality, and immediacy) in corporate social media on customers' purchase intentions, mediated by brand attitude and corporate trust. Especially, social media platforms are believed to provide a good marketing platform for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) by providing access to huge audiences at a very low cost. The findings from this study based on a structural equation model suggest that brand attitude and corporate trust have larger impacts on purchase intention for SMEs than large firms. This implies that SMEs with little to no presence in the market should pay more attention to building corporate trust and brand attitude for their sustainable growth.

Choice decisions in the marketplace are often made by a collection of individuals or a group. Examples include purchase decisions involving families and organizations. A particularly unique aspect of a joint choice is that the group's preference is very likely to diverge from preferences of the individuals that constitute the group. For a marketing researcher, the biggest hurdle in measuring group preference is that it is often infeasible or cost prohibitive to collect data at the group level. Our objective in this research is to propose a novel methodology to estimate joint preference without the need to collect joint data from the group members. Our methodology makes use of both stated and inferred preference measures, and merges experimental design, statistical modeling, and utility aggregation theories to capture the psychological processes of preference revision and concession that lead to the joint preference. Results based on a study involving a cell phone purchase for 214 parent-teen dyads demonstrate predictive validity of our proposed method.joint decision making, preference revision, utility aggregation, Bayesian

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Purpose Virtual gifts have emerged as a common feature of online communities, social gaming and social networks. This paper aims to examine how network-related variables and gift-seeding impact virtual gift sales. The network variables include gift-giver centrality and gift-giving dispersion, capturing, respectively, the relative importance of gift-givers in a network and their tendency to give gifts to a greater or lesser number of network peers. Gift-seeding tactics capture social network firms’ attempts to stimulate virtual gift purchases by awarding virtual gifts to network members. Design/methodology/approach This study develops and estimates a fixed-effects panel data regression model to analyze virtual gift purchase data for a large social network service. Findings Gift-giver centrality, gift-giving dispersion and gift-seeding increase virtual gift purchases. Increases in consumers’ receipt of seed gifts from social network firms (“direct seeding”) and from other consumers (“indirect seeding”) increases virtual gift purchases. However, the extent to which consumers give seed gifts to their friends in the social network (“seed mediation”) does not affect sales. Greater gift-giver centrality amplifies (attenuates) the positive effects of direct (indirect) seeding. At greater levels of gift-giving dispersion, the effects of indirect seeding and seed mediation become negative. Furthermore, gift-seeding has spillover effects on virtual good (non-gift) purchases. Research limitations/implications This study’s data, drawn from a South Korean social network service, offer unique and valuable social network information on actual virtual gift purchases and their seeding. Future research should replicate the results of the study outside the South Korean context. Practical implications Given the effects reported in this study, social network firms can facilitate the purchases of virtual gifts by improving the targeting of consumers in social networks and gift-seeding tactics. Originality/value This study uniquely examines the individual and interactive effects of network-related variables and gift-seeding on virtual gift sales. The study is seminal in its examination of how gift-seeding can be used as a marketing tactic to increase virtual gift purchases.