Negative online consumer reviews: effects of different responses

Purpose When consumers buy online, they are often confronted with consumer reviews. A negative consumer review on an online shopping website may keep consumers from buying the product. Therefore, negative online consumer reviews are a serious problem for brands. This paper aims to investigate the effects of different response options to a negative consumer review. Design/methodology/approach In an online experiment of 446 participants different response options towards a negative consumer review on an online shopping website are examined. The experimental data is analysed with simple linear regression models using product purchase intentions as the outcome variable. Findings The results indicate that a positive customer review counteracts a negative consumer review more effectively than a positive brand response, whereas brand strength moderates this relationship. Including a reference to an independent, trusted source in a brand or a customer response is only a limited strategy for increasing the effectiveness of a response. Research limitations/implications Additional research in other product categories and with other subjects than students is suggested to validate the findings. In future research, multiple degrees of the phrasing’s strength of the reference could be used. Practical implications Assuming high quality products, brands should encourage their customers to write reviews. Strong brands can also reassure consumers by responding whereas weak brands cannot. Originality/value This research contributes to the online consumer reviews literature with new insights about the role of brand strength and referencing to an independent, trusted source.

Avoiding the dark side of positive online consumer reviews: enhancing reviews' usefulness for high risk-averse travelers

The influence of positive online consumer reviews on a traveler's decision making remains unclear. To better understand the perceived usefulness of online reviews, this study conducts two experiments using positive and negative online consumer reviews. Study results suggest that high risk-averse travelers find negative online reviews more useful than positive reviews. For positive online reviews, high-risk averse travelers feel expert reviewers' postings, travel product pictures, and well-known brand names enhance usefulness of the positive online reviews. These findings offer interesting implications for both marketing theory and practice.

Bricks vs clicks: entrepreneurial online banking behaviour and relationship banking

Purpose – Little research has been conducted on the effects of information technology on financing entrepreneurial businesses or small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of entrepreneurial online banking and relationship banking on the severity of financial problems perceived by entrepreneurs and their interactive effect. It also investigates how characteristics of individual businesses and entrepreneurial demographics influence SMEs’ financial situation. Design/methodology/approach – An ordered logistic model is used on a UK dataset to empirically test the hypotheses derived in this paper. The empirical evidence is drawn from the 2004 UK survey of SME finances, which contains a sample of 2,500 firms. Findings – This paper finds that both entrepreneurial online banking behaviour and relationship banking alleviates the severity of financial problems perceived by entrepreneurs. The relationship affect is less evident for entrepreneurs who most frequently use an online approach to communicate with their banks than for those using traditional methods. Business and entrepreneur characteristics also have a strong impact on the severity of the financial problems suffered by SMEs. Originality/value – This paper provides evidence supporting the favourable impacts of the application of information technology on entrepreneurial finance from the perspective of entrepreneur/business. It also identifies a substitute relationship between entrepreneurial online banking behaviour and relationship banking, a relationship which contradicts existing evidence.

Consumer behaviour towards organic ready-to-eat meals: a case of quality innovation

Over the past decades, a significant number of peer-reviewed journal articles on the field of interest, has gradually grown mirroring the corresponding relevance. The purpose of this research is mainly to analyse the factors that could influence the choices of consumers’ when purchasing organic RTE meals while simultaneously identifies consumers’ attitudes regarding the ethical and green sounds towards such products. Particularly, special interest is placed on the dual nature of these products which on the one hand are characterized by high quality (organic) and on the other hand by the convenience factor. As a result, research has been carried out in order to examine both the potentiality of organic RTE meals in the food market and also the presentation of consumers’ behaviour and perceptions towards these products from a review perspective. Hence, a narrative literature review was performed in order to produce an overview of the most important outcomes and trends in this area being presented, compared and summarised based on authors’ experience. To put over a holistic approach of organic RTE meals purchase behaviour and attitudes, both key findings and other areas that have not been extensively documented, are presented.

Consumer trust, risk and food safety: a review

Consumers' attitudes to trust and risk are key issues in food safety research and attention needs to be focused on clearly defining a framework for analysing consumer behaviour in these terms. In order to achieve this, a detailed review of the recent literature surrounding risk, trust and the relationship between the two must be conducted. This paper aims to collate the current social sciences literature in the fields of food safety, trust and risk. It provides an insight into the economic and other modelling procedures available to measure consumers' attitudes to risk and trust in food safety and specifically notes the need for future research to concentrate on examining risk and trust as inter-related variables rather than two distinct, mutually exclusive concepts. A framework is proposed which it is hoped will assist in devising more effective research to support risk communication to consumers.

A typology of internet users based on comparative affective states: evidence from eight countries

Purpose - The role of affective states in consumer behaviour is well established. However, no study to date has empirically examined online affective states as a basis for constructing typologies of internet users and for assessing the invariance of clusters across national cultures. Design/methodology/approach - Four focus groups with internet users were carried out to adapt a set of affective states identified from the literature to the online environment. An online survey was then designed to collect data from internet users in four Western and four East Asian countries. Findings - Based on a cluster analysis, six cross-national market segments are identified and labelled "Positive Online Affectivists", "Offline Affectivists", "On/Off-line Negative Affectivists", "Online Affectivists", "Indistinguishable Affectivists", and "Negative Offline Affectivists". The resulting clusters discriminate on the basis of national culture, gender, working status and perceptions towards online brands. Practical implications - Marketers may use this typology to segment internet users in order to predict their perceptions towards online brands. Also, a standardised approach to e-marketing is not recommended on the basis of affective state-based segmentation. Originality/value - This is the first study proposing affective state-based typologies of internet users using comparable samples from four Western and four East Asian countries.

Behaviour change in the UK climate debate : an assessment of responsibility, agency and political dimensions

This paper explores the politics around the role of agency in the UK climate change debate. Government interventions on the demand side of consumption have increasingly involved attempts to obtain greater traction with the values, attitudes and beliefs of citizens in relation to climate change and also in terms of influencing consumer behaviour at an individual level. With figures showing that approximately 40% of the UK’s carbon emissions are attributable to household and transport behaviour, policy initiatives have progressively focused on the facilitation of “sustainable behaviours”. Evidence suggests however, that mobilisation of pro-environmental attitudes in addressing the perceived “value-action gap” has so far had limited success. Research in this field suggests that there is a more significant and nuanced “gap” between context and behaviour; a relationship that perhaps provides a more adroit reflection of reasons why people do not necessarily react in the way that policy-makers anticipate. Tracing the development of the UK Government’s behaviour change agenda over the last decade, we posit that a core reason for the limitations of this programme relates to an excessively narrow focus on the individual. This has served to obscure some of the wider political and economic aspects of the debate in favour of a more simplified discussion. The second part of the paper reports findings from a series of focus groups exploring some of the wider political views that people hold around household energy habits, purchase and use of domestic appliances, and transport behaviour-and discusses these insights in relation to the literature on the agenda’s apparent limitations. The paper concludes by considering whether the aims of the Big Society approach (recently established by the UK’s Coalition Government) hold the potential to engage more directly with some of these issues or whether they merely constitute a “repackaging” of the individualism agenda.

The national dialogue on behaviour change in UK climate policy: some observations on responsibility, agency and political dimensions

This chapter explores the politics around the role of agency in the UK climate change debate. Government interventions on the demand side of consumption have increasingly involved attempts to obtain greater traction with the values, attitudes and beliefs of citizens in relation to climate change and also in terms of influencing consumer behaviour at an individual level. With figures showing that approximately 40% of the UK’s carbon emissions are attributable to household and transport behaviour, policy initiatives have progressively focused on the facilitation of “sustainable behaviours”. Evidence suggests however, that mobilisation of pro-environmental attitudes in addressing the perceived “value-action gap” has so far had limited success. Research in this field suggests that there is a more significant and nuanced “gap” between context and behaviour; a relationship that perhaps provides a more adroit reflection of reasons why people do not necessarily react in the way that policy-makers anticipate. Tracing the development of the UK Government’s behaviour change agenda over the last decade, we posit that a core reason for the limitations of this programme relates to an excessively narrow focus on the individual. This has served to obscure some of the wider political and economic aspects of the debate in favour of a more simplified discussion. The second part of the chapter reports findings from a series of focus groups exploring some of the wider political views that people hold around household energy habits, purchase and use of domestic appliances, and transport behaviour-and discusses these insights in relation to the literature on the agenda’s apparent limitations. The chapter concludes by considering whether the aims of the Big Society approach (recently established by the UK’s Coalition Government) hold the potential to engage more directly with some of these issues or whether they merely constitute a “repackaging” of the individualism agenda.

Persuasive technology and users acceptance of e-commerce: users perceptions of website persuasiveness

Persuasive technologies have been extensively applied in the context of e-commerce for the purpose of marketing, enhancing system credibility, and motivating users to adopt the systems. Recognising that persuasion impacts on consumer behaviour to purchase online have not been investigated previously. This study reviews theories of technology acceptance, and identifies their limitation in not considering the effect of persuasive technologies when determining user online technology acceptance. The study proposes a theoretical model that considers the effect of persuasive technologies on consumer acceptance of e-commerce websites; with consideration of other related variables, i.e. trust and technological attributes. Moreover the paper proposes a model based on the UTAUT2, which contains relevant contributing factors; including the concept of perceived persuasiveness.

The determinants of online loan applications from small businesses

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine both the characteristics of the business customers and the types of venture which make use of online loan applications. Despite the growth in the use of technology in banking and the advent of online banking, little research has been conducted on the factors underlying online loan application behaviour amongst business banking customers. Design/methodology/approach – A multivariate analysis is conducted on a USA dataset to empirically test the hypotheses derived in this paper. The empirical evidence is drawn from the US Survey of Small Business Finances, which contains 3,561 sample ventures, representing 5.3 million small businesses in the USA. Findings – The paper finds that online loan behaviour is largely determined by the characteristics of the entrepreneur, rather than that of the venture. It is also found that factors that trust, evident in the length of the relationship between the applicants and their primary lender, is important. Moderating these effects is further evidence that suggests the number of lenders and distance between lenders and applicants has a marked effect on online loan behaviour. Originality/value – This paper identifies the factors determining small business online loan application behaviour. This is important because the nature of online loan behaviour is changing the existing relationships between banks and customers. Whilst online loan applications afford banks the opportunity to substantially reduce costs, the danger is that long term relationships with customers are harder to cement.

Interventions to promote healthy eating habits: evaluation and recommendations

Although in several EU Member States many public interventions have been running for the prevention and/or management of obesity and other nutrition-related health conditions, few have yet been formally evaluated. The multidisciplinary team of the EATWELL project will gather benchmark data on healthy eating interventions in EU Member States and review existing information on the effectiveness of interventions using a three-stage procedure (i) Assessment of the intervention's impact on consumer attitudes, consumer behaviour and diets; (ii) The impact of the change in diets on obesity and health and (iii) The value attached by society to these changes, measured in life years gained, cost savings and quality-adjusted life years. Where evaluations have been inadequate, EATWELL will gather secondary data and analyse them with a multidisciplinary approach incorporating models from the psychology and economics disciplines. Particular attention will be paid to lessons that can be learned from private sector that are transferable to the healthy eating campaigns in the public sector. Through consumer surveys and workshops with other stakeholders, EATWELL will assess the acceptability of the range of potential interventions. Armed with scientific quantitative evaluations of policy interventions and their acceptability to stakeholders, EATWELL expects to recommend more appropriate interventions for Member States and the EU, providing a one-stop guide to methods and measures in interventions evaluation, and outline data collection priorities for the future.

Can sentiment surveys pre-empt real estate market activities?

We evaluate a number of real estate sentiment indices to ascertain current and forward-looking information content that may be useful for forecasting the demand and supply activities. Our focus lies on sector-specific surveys targeting the players from the supply-side of both residential and non-residential real estate markets. Analyzing the dynamic relationships within a Vector Auto-Regression (VAR) framework, we test the efficacy of these indices by comparing them with other coincident indicators in predicting real estate returns. Overall, our analysis suggests that sentiment indicators convey important information which should be embedded in the modeling exercise to predict real estate market returns. Generally, sentiment indices show better information content than broad economic indicators. The goodness of fit of our models is higher for the residential market than for the non-residential real estate sector. The impulse responses, in general, conform to our theoretical expectations. Variance decompositions and out-of-sample predictions generally show desired contribution and reasonable improvement respectively, thus upholding our hypothesis. Quite remarkably, consistent with the theory, the predictability swings when we look through different phases of the cycle. This perhaps suggests that, e.g. during recessions, market players’ expectations may be more accurate predictor of the future performances, conceivably indicating a ‘negative’ information processing bias and thus conforming to the precautionary motive of consumer behaviour.

Consumption of welfare-friendly food products in Great Britain, Italy and Sweden, and how it may be influenced by consumer attitudes to, and behaviour towards, animal welfare attributes

The interest in animal welfare and welfare-friendly food products has been increasing in Europe over the last 10 years. The media, highlighting traditional farming methods and food scares such as those related to salmonella, bovine spongiform encephalopathy/variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (BSE) and avian influenza, have brought the methods of animal farming to public attention. Concerns about farm animal welfare are reflected in the increase in the number of vegetarians and vegans and an increase in consumers wishing to purchase food which is more animal welfare-friendly. This paper considers consumers’ attitudes to animal welfare and to marketing practices, such as product labelling, welfare grading systems and food assurance marks using comparative data collected in a survey of around 1500 consumers in each of Great Britain, Italy and Sweden as part of the EU-funded Welfare Quality research project. The findings suggest a need for the provision of improved consumer information on the welfare provenance of food using appropriate product labelling and other methods.