Journal of Interactive Marketing

The decision on whether and to what extent they should implement cross-channel integration is a crucial and complex task for multi-channel retailers. Although prior studies have sought to identify key determinants of this decision, most are descriptive or draw on divergent theoretical perspectives. The authors provide a cohesive theoretical model from the perspective of innovation diffusion, including not only technology-related but also organizational and environmental factors. The empirical findings based on the observations in the U.S. retail sector indicate that retailers’ information-technology capabilities and private-label provision drive their cross-channel integration. Moderate diversity facilitates cross-channel integration more than does high or low diversity. Firms’ financial resources seem to be less important or unimportant at a low level of industry concentration, but may influence retailers’ cross-channel integration at a high level of industry concentration.

Online product reviews aid consumer decision making. Although many studies show that review characteristics have salient effects on review helpfulness, little research has investigated whether such effects change temporally. To bridge this research gap, we study the dynamic formation of review helpfulness by considering the behaviors of three major players in a typical review system: consumers, the review hosting firm, and reviewers. This study uses both dynamic and static drivers of review helpfulness to examine temporal changes in their effects on review helpfulness, along two time characteristics of a post: its lifespan and its timing. Daily data collected from Amazon show that for long post lifespans or late post timing, the effects of static drivers and the spillover effect of dynamic drivers weaken, but the carryover effect of dynamic drivers strengthens. For vendors to leverage user reviews of a product, high-quality reviews posted early are extremely important and should be cultivated diligently. Sorting by review quality attributes, such as review length, also can effectively prolong the time window for reviewers to write high-quality detailed reviews.

Seriously engaged consumers create and manage online communities dedicated to brands or consumption activities, but this type of engagement remains under-examined. This study explores the contextual triggers and individual drivers of serious engagement in online communities and explains how seriously engaged consumers navigate the intersection between work and play that characterizes serious engagement. We draw from qualitative data spanning over a decade on the trajectory of four seriously engaged consumers who created and/or managed an online brand community for players of Microsoft's Xbox. Three contextual triggers (market-specific practices, marketplace shifts, sociotechnical advancements), when aligned with individual drivers (relevant skills and expertise, entrepreneurial vision, personal commitment), motivate consumers who have been engaged with a brand or consumption activity to deepen their engagement, becoming managers of or launching an online brand community. Consumers can navigate the in-between space of serious leisure through knowledge development or searching for personal fulfillment and/or external recognition. These findings support several contributions to the literature on consumer engagement: demonstrating the vital role seriously engaged consumers play in online community development; drawing attention to contextual triggers and individual drivers of consumer engagement that have not been addressed in prior research; and exploring how consumers navigate the in-between space arising from serious engagement in online communities, finding routes that can lead to deeper engagement in the community itself or redirect it to alternative targets.

Touch has become an inseparable element of mobile platforms. This study examines the use of different touch features and the impact of these touch gestures on consumer engagement with a mobile shopping app. We focus on three informational touch features that are common among shopping apps: touch to zoom in on a page (zoom-page), to view product details (product-view), and to be directed to outside links (open-webpage). We develop a two-level model that captures (1) consumers’ decisions to stay with or leave an app and (2) their use of touch features. Our main results empirically demonstrate the strong explanatory power of informational touch gestures, especially their dwell time, in consumer app browsing decisions, whereas navigational touch gestures do not significantly affect app stay likelihood. A longer dwell time and early use of zoom-page within a session encourage the stay. Moreover, we observe strong synergy and antergy (negative synergy) among these touch gestures. The cumulative dwell time and temporal progression of touch gestures affect subsequent touch feature usage. Managerially, our results suggest that an early intervention that encourages the use of zoom-page increases app stay likelihood, and marketers may apply our model to quantify the impact of such interventions on consumer browsing decisions at the individual level. The results also shed light on how marketers can infer the stage of the shopping process based on touch gestures (segmentation) and guide consumers through the purchase funnel by promoting the use of zoom-page and product-view. Lastly, the findings provide insights into how marketers can promote the use of open-webpage, which has the lowest baseline usage rate yet is crucial for transactions, based on the synergy among touch gestures and through improving the non-native browsing experience.

Using a mixed-methods approach, the current research examines online incivility in relation to service recovery on social media. First, findings from a netnographic investigation suggest consumer-to-consumer (C2C) incivility results in some consumers holding the firm accountable to address uncivil exchanges on a firm-managed communication channel. Based on the netnographic findings, fairness theory, and justice theory, a follow-up experimental study assesses how online incivility negatively affects service recovery outcomes (firm–consumer justice) when a firm chooses (not) to respond to the incivility. Through these two studies, the current paper proposes a new form of justice (C2C interactional justice) and posits that online service recovery extends beyond direct victims of the incivility (first-party justice) to also include observers (third-party justice). This more nuanced view of justice associated with a service recovery is especially significant when considering the traditional relationships of justice with satisfaction, loyalty, positive word-of-mouth, and other desirable firm outcomes. For practitioners, this research suggests that firms must manage C2C interactional justice on corporate social media channels for both complainants and observers to avoid reputational damage and a loss of customers.

Despite the increasing use of gamification mechanics to engage customers in firms’ activities, the risks related to such use remain unclear. To address this knowledge gap, this research examines the impacts of losing a challenge, which is a phenomenon experienced by the majority of customers involved in gamified settings but underexplored in literature. We investigate the context of co-creation communities by combining two widely used gamification mechanics, competition and cooperation. Results from three laboratory experiments and one field experiment show that win/lose decisions weaken the benefits of gamification and, in the case of losing a competition, have negative impacts on customer experience and engagement. They also demonstrate that customers’ levels of prior engagement with the community moderate the negative impacts of losing a competition. Supported by equity theory, this research questions the effectiveness of gamification mechanics, identifies their limits, and provides guidelines on how to properly implement them.

Consumers can engage with brands online in a variety of ways, ranging from playing a branded game to writing a review or viewing branded content. This work presents a consumer-based taxonomy of these digital engagement practices. By means of a literature review and expert surveys, we created an overview of the ways in which consumers digitally engage with brands across different media formats and platforms. A consumer sample then classified all practices into five distinct types of digital engagement practices (for fun practices, learning practices, customer feedback, work for a brand, talk about a brand). A subsequent survey on another consumer sample showed that the five types of practices are differently related to the three motivational states of customer brand engagement (cognitive, emotional and behavioral). The taxonomy of digital engagement practices integrates prior research. We provide implications for managing digital customer engagement.

When consumers encounter uncertainty regarding their purchase decisions, they tend to perform a mental visualization process of creating a self-involved imaginative future incident about a product/service in which the consumption outcome is envisioned. The current study proposes a new measurement instrument to capture the process, namely self-transformative consumption vision (SCV) scale. Although similar theoretical constructs have been introduced, validity tests in more diverse media platforms and more elaborated measurement approaches are required. As today's marketing communications are increasingly oriented toward stimulating SCV through diverse rich and interactive media, it is considered scholarly and practically meaningful to propose a new scale. To this end, several pretests are conducted for initial item generations and stimuli developments. Studies 1 and 2 identify valid items that capture SCV and Study 3 establishes the SCV construct's nomological validity. Studies 4 and 5 apply this scale in an empirical study, thereby comparing it to existing scales to identify scale superiority.