The tendency of internet users to intuitively ignore traditional online banner advertisements, called banner blindness, is well established in literature. New technical developments, such as the placement of advertisements in security elements on websites, might increase effectiveness of online advertising, as they stimulate user interaction with the advertisement. In an empirical study, we were able to show that participants' recognition of the advertisement could be vastly augmented. Further increasing user interaction led to a 5 times better recall of a previously unknown brand as compared to classical banner advertising. Practical implications are discussed.
Brand communities are a traditional concept to enhance customer attraction, loyalty and retention (e.g. Tupperware, Apple Macintosh). Brand communities are supported through either companies or customers themselves. Companies that are able to encourage their customers to interact stimulated by the brand could position the brand value proposition of their product as a link between their customers and employ the developing brand communities for marketing purposes. To stimulate this kind of interaction, companies have increasingly used Internet functionalities in the past years. Drawing on the overwhelming penetration rate of mobile devices of over 80 percent in Europe, we propose to employ the mobile channel to support this kind of brand community building process. We derive four constitutional elements of brand communities based on existing research and develop a structured and theoretically founded four step method to analyze the potential of mobile services for specific community building purposes and compare our findings to a mini case study.
In many industries, consumers are offered the opportunity to revise their initial decision in return for a superior but more expensive service option. This revenue management technique is referred to as upselling.
Upselling bears a financial potential for industries with fixed capacity decisions in the long run because it allows them to increase inventory utilization during low demand periods. Instead of using forecasting models, this work aims to develop a framework for a decision process and to experimentally clarify when/why consumers accept such offers from a consumer behavior perspective.
Upselling is a widely utilized sales tool especially in service industries like car rentals, hotels, and travel businesses. The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual clarification of the customer's decision process underlying an upsell choice as well as to give an an answer to the question of when and why consumers decide in favor or against an upsell offer. Drawing on the effort-accuracy framework and framing literature, we show that upsell arguments highlighting loss aspects moderate the relationship between effortful initial decisions and the probability of choosing the upsell.
