ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN

Advertising Campaign

Advertising Campaign

Introduction

In the last several years, the increased diffusion of computer and telecommunications technologies in businesses and homes has produced new ways for organizations to connect with their customers. These computer mediated environments (CMEs) such as the World Wide Web raise new research questions. In this paper, we examine the potential research issues associated with CMEs in five areas: (1) decision processes, (2) advertising and communications, (3) brand choice, (4) brand communities, and (5) pricing.

In the last several years, the world of the marketing has changed dramatically with the rapid diffusion of computer and information technologies throughout businesses and homes. With increased penetration of computers, particularly multi-media computers equipped with CD-ROM drives and modems, subscription-based services such as America Online (AOL), Prodigy, and Compuserve, where consumers are able to check airline flight schedules and make reservations, purchase a wide variety of products, and discuss product performance with other consumers, are becoming very popular (Lynch Howard and Michael 2008 169-184). Households in Chicago and San Francisco can purchase groceries from home using computer software marketed by Peapod, Inc. This latter service allows consumers to search within a product category using attributes such as price, calories, sugar content, and package size. Car manufacturers such as BMW regularly mail CD-ROMs to potential customers with video shots of the cars and data both about the cars and their competitors (Berners-Lee et. al. 1993).

Decision Processes

While CME environments permit users to perform many tasks such as accessing product-related information, many of the environments permit customers to search for and evaluate alternative products and brands by their attributes. Thus, the CME environment is a sophisticated version of the old information board or computer-based Mouselab (Wright 2005 60-67) experimental environments used to test decision processes and strategies in the 1970s and 1980s. The main differences between Mouselab and CMEs are that with CMEs, there are more attributes, there is more information available through hypertext links, the purchasing situation is real rather than artificial, and there may be interactions between sellers and customers or customers and customers.

One area of research in consumer behaviour that can be tested using CMEs is how sorting capabilities affects decision rules. However, it has not been previously possible to examine this topic in actual purchase situations; as a result, we have a good idea of the alternative processing strategies used in lab experiments, but we do not have a good understanding of the strategies that are used in practice (Brucks 2005 1-16). Given a large number of product attributes (calories, carbohydrates, cholesterol, fat, etc.) and the ability to sort brands easily on any of these attributes via a service like Peapod, we can examine whether decision makers use the capabilities, and if so, how. These new sorting capabilities may affect decision rules and ultimately brand choice (Rajendran and Gerard 2004 22-34).

In the last 20 years, a large body of research has emerged on context effects, in particular, attraction (asymmetric dominance) and compromise effects (Hauser and Steven 2003 ...