These days, making a purchase takes a village.
Between talking with friends, doing your research and reading reviews online, it is becoming increasingly clear that purchasing decisions have become more of a team effort. With so many choices to make throughout the customer journey, people are turning to their “traveling companions” for guidance, says a new article from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.
As consumers increasingly turn online to make purchases, online reviews from other shoppers are more important than ever when deciding what to buy. And for retailers, that makes Maryland Smith’s research that explains how consumers use online reviews – recently recognized with a top award from the American Marketing Association – more relevant than ever.
There’s a lot to learn from what you ask Alexa, Tweet to followers, post to Facebook, leave in an online review, or say over the phone to a customer service rep. Combine that with company news releases and reports, news stories in the media, government information, and anything else people are saying online, and that’s a lot of text.
Companies like crowdsourcing for ideas. Innovation tournaments helped Dell create rugged laptops for marine use and helped Lego concoct new toy themes. PepsiCo’s “Do Us a Flavor” tournament led to the creation of “cheesy garlic bread” chips and a brief 8% surge in sales.
But the tournaments don’t always go so swimmingly. (Side-eye to you, Boaty McBoatface.) Many fall short of what they hope to achieve.
Maryland Smith's Xian Gu, P.K. Kannan and Liye Ma, have been selected as a finalist for the 2018 Marketing Science Institute/H.
P.K. Kannan's paper, “The Informational Value of Social Tagging Networks,” has been selected as a finalist for the 2019 Sheth Foundation/Journal of Marketing Award. This award honors the best article published in the Journal of Marketing that has made long-term contributions to the field of marketing. An article will be eligible for consideration to receive this award in the fifth year after its publication.
It takes just a few seconds for a movie or series trailer to grab you — or to lose you.
Netflix and other content studios know this. It’s the reason why those micro-previews begin to autoplay when you hover your mouse over a title on menu screens for Netflix, Hulu or Amazon’s Prime Video. Those few seconds — critical to the studios — can convey so much. They can encapsulate the emotional content of a film, a bit of the story arch perhaps, a glimpse of the characters and more. That is, if they’re done right.
As our social lives increasingly flow from the real world to the online world, does it logically follow that, eventually, our shopping habits will flow that way as well? Or are our online social pursuits likely to make us too busy to spend time on shopping?
A design award signals quality and boosts business-to-consumer sales. The payoffs are less obvious in business-to-business markets. But research from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business shows the economic value of earning industry prizes for B2B excellence, despite doubts among managers who often bypass the application process.
Harvesting Brand Information from Social Tags
Among the many changes brought about by the evolution of social media is this one: Marketers now have a powerful new tool for assessing consumer perceptions of products and brands.
