Blogs

What does it take for marketers to reach customers who are already loyal to a particular brand? A new study, that examines brand loyalty and the way it affects perceptions of advertising, has discovered that consumer brand loyalty heavily influences responses to marketing from competing brands. "Consumers who are more loyal to a brand seem to search and process competitor brand information very differently than consumers who are less loyal to a brand," the researchers say. "When loyalty is high...

Consumers value goals they've chosen on their own more than those that are imposed on them. When people believe they have autonomously chosen to pursue a goal themselves, they feel the goal is increasingly valuable as they put in more effort, because they experience their own effort as signaling how much they care about it. When people believe a goal they are pursuing is imposed on them, they experience their efforts as a loss of autonomy. In other words, they value the goal less as they put in...

It is not the checking of one's bank account size that influences consumer behaviour; rather, it's the time that has elapsed since payday. A recent study, published in the Journal of Marketing, says that payday proximity means more than awareness of the amount of money in the bank and product prices. It actually changes consumer motives, response to messages and purchase behaviour, contend University of Utah marketing professors Himanshu and Arul Mishra. "Our findings are surprising because...

Why would someone choose a credit card with a one percent interest rate over another with a zero percent rate? The answer, says a new study, lies in the fact that consumers are often flummoxed when it comes to zero. "A reasonable assumption is that a product will be more attractive when it offers more of a good thing, such as free pictures (with a digital camera purchase), or less of a bad thing, like interest rates on a credit card," says Mauricio Palmeira of Monash University, Australia...

Can you forge an emotional bond with a brand so strong that, if forced to buy a competitor's product, you suffer separation anxiety? Researchers now insist that the answer is yes. In fact, they go on to assert, that the bond can be so strong that consumers are willing to sacrifice time, money, energy and reputation to maintain their attachment to that brand.That's what you call brand loyalty. The study indicates that brand attachment has much stronger impact on consumers than previously believed...

People are willing to pay more for products that elicit their envy — but that's only when they are motivated by a positive, benign form of envy. "Our studies showed that people who had been made envious of someone who owned an iPhone were willing to pay 80 Euros more on average," say researchers Niels van de Ven, Marcel Zeelenberg, and Rik Pieters (Tilburg University), whose findings have been published in the Journal of Consumer Research. The researchers made some important discoveries about...

Sometimes pride in an achievement can lead people to indulge in unhealthy choices. Indulgence often scores over self-control. Across four studies in the food consumptions and spending domains, researchers have shown that pride is associated with two opposing forces; it promotes a sense of achievement, which increases indulgence, and it promotes self-awareness, which facilitates self control. The authors set out to examine the effect of pride on consumer self-control decisions, and discovered...

In Ghana, a reporter goes to a press conference, and inside her press packet, there’s a brown envelope containing the equivalent of a $20 bill. Not surprised, she slips it into her purse before heading back to the office to write up the event. In Russia, public relations agency sends out a bogus press release about a fictitious company. Thirteen publications swallow the bait and agree to run the release just like a story, but only after demanding payment ranging from about $125 to nearly $2,000...

The Sanjay Dutt starrer Knock Out may have been released on Friday, but the Bombay High Court's judgment that eventually allowed Sohail Maklai Entertainment (SME) to release the film has been landmark in its own way. This the first time that an Indian court has admitted that Bollywood infringed a Hollywood copyright. That much, for sure, is landmark. Thursday had been a day of high drama. First, a single judge bench of the High Court of Justice Roshan Dalvi restrained the producers from...

Since the Nobel Prizes were instituted, 106 individuals have won the Nobel Prize in Literature on 102 occasions. It was shared four times. The youngest Literature Laureate is Rudyard Kipling, best known for The Jungle Book, who was 42 years old when he was awarded the Literature Prize in 1907. The Laureate till date is Doris Lessing, who was 88 when she was awarded the Prize in 2007. Twelve women have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, with Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf being the first...