China’s mobile communications market presents unique market challenges. With a high subscriber growth rate but polarized and stratified consumer adoption trends, an investigation into the current status of this market will improve our understanding on how adoption of mobile communications is...

Recognizing the importance of privacy management as a business process and a business support process, this paper proposes the use of service level agreements (SLA’s) around privacy features, including qualitative and quantitative ones. Privacy metrics are defined by both parties with boundary...

The majority of studies on market orientation claim that compelling evidence exists that market orientation has a positive effect on business performance. This study takes a closer look at forty studies that have addressed the relationship between market orientation and business performance in...

In today’s multicultural societies, ethnic targeting is increasingly important for marketing. Two main approaches to target ethnic minorities have emerged: messaging consumers when their ethnic identity is most salient, and featuring spokespeople who have the same heritage as the target. We...

We develop two models to test hypotheses on the specific impact of brand and category characteristics on consumer stock-out responses. Our empirical results show that both characteristics are important determinants. Consumers are more product loyal in hedonic product groups than in utilitarian...

During the past decade, irrational exuberance has turned into a possibly equally irrational pessimism about what the Internet can accomplish. The fear of getting ruined through cannibalization losses has recently deterred many firms from deploying the Internet as a distribution channel. But do...

A commonly applied modeling tool for the analysis of promotional effects on weekly sales data is a linear regression model. Usually, such a model includes 0/1 dummy variables for promotions, where weeks with a promotion get a value of 1. When these variables are included in a model with...

The authors develop a four-dimensional scale to measure members' satisfaction with virtual communities. The dimensions consist of members' satisfaction with member-member interactions, organizer-member interactions, organizer-community interactions, and the community's site. Using a sample of...

This research investigates the specific influence of the emotion of surprise on customer transaction-specific satisfaction. Four empirical studies-two field studies (a diary study and a cross section survey) and two experiments-were conducted. The results show that surprise positively...

We ask various experts, who produce sales forecasts that can differ from earlier received model-based forecasts, what they do and why they do so. A questionnaire with a range of questions was completed by no less than forty-two such experts who are located in twenty different countries. We...