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This paper aims to discover how consumers process an innovative set of systematically varied service trial offers and how this affects their learning and interaction as precursors to customer engagement.

The research uses experiments that manipulate pricing, type of service and delivery method. A repeated-measures design was used with a sample of 396 participants.

Free (as opposed to cost or full price) service trials were more likely to be accepted, with perceived truthfulness of the trial offer and perceived obligation mediating the relationship. Credence service trials generate higher levels of perceived obligation than experience service trial offers, while personal services are more likely to lead to trial adoption.

The research can be extended to well-recognized brands and further mixed service contexts.

Trial offers of new services are best targeted at buyers who are in the likely buyer group. The trial offer may accelerate time to purchase and relieve perceived risks. The trials of credence services need further signals of quality in the trial itself for consumers to adopt the full service. With personal service trials, skeptical consumers need assurance as to what will happen after the trial experience. Free trials may actually devalue a service, threatening engagement.

Uniquely, service trial offers are systematically manipulated using experience versus credence and personal versus impersonal trials to determine their effect on acceptance of the trial offer and the full service. Additionally, the study compares free, cost price and full price trial offers.

Several studies have shown that superstitious beliefs, such as beliefs in “lucky” product attributes, influence consumer purchase behaviour. Still, little is known about how social influence, in particular mere social presence, impacts consumer superstition-related purchase decisions. Drawing on impression management theory, this paper aims to investigate the effect of social presence on consumer purchase decisions of products featuring lucky charms including the role of anticipated embarrassment as a mediator of the social presence effect.

In three studies, participants select products that feature or do not feature a lucky charm. They make these selections under varying conditions of social presence, as induced by the shopping setting in the scenario or through the use of confederates or fellow participants observing them make a real product selection. Participants are students from Australia and China.

The studies show that social presence makes consumers less likely to select products that feature a lucky charm. This suppressing effect is mediated by the consumers’ anticipated embarrassment.

The study investigates the effect of social presence but does not investigate different parameters of social presence such as the number of people present and their familiarity. The study investigates effects for purchase settings but does not include effects of usage and neither does it look into differences across product types or lucky charm types.

Marketers should be careful to not make lucky charms too publicly salient. Online settings are more suitable than mortar-and-brick settings for selling products featuring a lucky charm.

The present research is the first to investigate consumer purchase behaviour for a product featuring a lucky charm. It is also the first to investigate the impact of social influence on superstition-based decision-making.

This paper aims to study how price and sales level information influence consumer product perceptions and choices in online settings. It, in particular, tests whether displaying sales level information increases consumer price sensitivity, which is a potential strategic risk to retailers.

Study 1 uses eBay data to investigate whether the interaction effects between price and sales level can be observed in an existing market. Study 2 involves online experiments across three product categories. Participants choose from product pairs that are shown with either the same or different prices and with no, the same or different sales levels.

Study 1 shows strong effects of a product’s displayed sales and price level on its daily sales but finds no interaction effect. Study 2 shows strong effects of price and sales levels on product choice but similarly finds no evidence that sales level information influences consumer price sensitivity, although it reveals an effect on quality perceptions. The results show how perceptions of quality, sacrifice and popularity mediate the effects of price and sales level information on product choice.

Study 1 has limited control over prices and sales levels. Study 2 involves only hypothetical choices.

These findings indicate that businesses can use sales level information to manage consumer product quality perceptions and choices without having to be concerned that this will make consumers more price-sensitive.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to investigate how sales level information affects consumer responses to price differences in online contexts.

This paper aims to first investigate how unit pricing affects consumers’ grocery purchase decisions and perceptions of the shopping task’s information load. The second goal is to test how time pressure enhances the behavioural and perceptual effects of displaying unit prices.

Two on-line experiments were conducted using national samples of shoppers. In Study 1, participants indicated their choices and perceptions in an inter-brand shopping scenario where prepackaged products have conflicting positions on retail price and unit price. In Study 2, participants conducted the same shopping task but now under a condition of time pressure.

Study 1 shows that unit pricing shifts consumer choices towards the lower unit priced options and improves their perceptions of task information load. Study 2 shows that when consumers are under time pressure, unit pricing shows stronger effects on choices but not on perceptions.

The study comprised a fairly homogenous set of low involvement categories and relatively small assortments in a hypothetical purchase setting. Exploration of the role of unit pricing in more complex and more realistic purchase environments pose suitable avenues for future research.

This study shows that consumers benefit from unit pricing because it makes it easier for them to find the lower unit priced items and to more quickly complete their shopping task. Retailers will benefit from increased customer satisfaction and possibly an improved store image.

The study shows that consumers generally benefit from the presence of unit pricing and that unit price information does not create harmful effects in terms of increasing their information load.

This study uses a specifically designed and controlled but nevertheless realistic grocery choice task to study the effects of unit pricing in an inter-brand context where there are only small differences in size and price. The study contributes to the literature by showing that in such conditions, unit prices help consumers compare the economic losses associated with product options. Their heuristic role is more pronounced when consumers are under time pressure. The study shows that consumers generally benefit from the presence of unit prices.

Effects of stockouts on purchase decisions have been examined from a variety of perspectives; little is yet known about how consumers react to stockouts in online shopping contexts. The present study investigates how stockout reactions depend on a consumer's mindset and familiarity with a website and investigates the role of negative affect in determining a consumer's stockout reaction.

Shopping mindsets (deliberative vs. implemental) and website familiarity (high vs. low) were manipulated in an online experiment consisting of a simulated shopping task at an existing website which next was presented as having a stockout. The study observed the participants' switching responses and measured their negative affect.

Findings indicate that when encountering an online stockout, consumers in an implemental mindset are more likely to switch away from the website than those in a deliberative mindset and are more likely to search for additional items at a competing site. Consumers who are more familiar with the website where they encounter the stockout display a higher likelihood of defecting to a competing site; however, when they are in an implemental mindset, their inclination to defect decreases. The study also shows that the strength of negative emotions affects OOS responses in that buyers that experience more negative emotions are more likely to defect from the site.

The study's findings provide suggestions as to how retailers can manage and minimize defection behaviours associated with online stockouts. In designing operational and marketing strategies retailers need to pay close attention to how consumers' individual mindsets may vary by trait or circumstance and how they hence may respond differently to stockouts.

The authors introduce a novel perspective to the literature on stockout induced reactions and contribute by furthering investigation into previously unexplored specific consumer characteristics and intricacies of stockouts that drive particular stockout reactions.

The role of channels and their management in the eBusiness era is becoming increasingly important to customer relationship management. Traditional use of the application portfolio approach has been concerned with providing an appropriate basis for making investment decisions about IT applications for the firm. This paper argues that there is a gap between the established IS portfolio application theory and the requirements to support management investment decisions about eBusiness applications; Therefore, the paper proposes a channel benefits portfolio (CBP) approach to inform managers' channel investment decisions concerning business‐to‐customer channel interface. The suggested approach provides a conceptual framework and means to facilitate the alignment of the firm's portfolio with their customers' portfolio. The paper reports exploratory findings regarding customer channel preference and customer channel choice behaviour in the information search and purchasing stages during the customer decision‐making process on the basis of the CBP.

This paper explores the possible uses of online news discussions that emerge following the publication of news on the Internet. It is suggested that this medium provides those investigating consumer behaviour with a new, previously unavailable, source of information (at almost no direct cost). The unique attributes of this medium are presented, and examples of discussions are provided that emphasise possible implications for hotel managers and marketers.

Proposes the use of integrated conjoint experiments to measure perceived service quality. It also demonstrates the process of modelling the hierarchical relations between operationally defined service attributes, strategically relevant service dimensions, and overall preference for banks or banking products. The proposed method, which is based on hierarchical information integration theory, avoids some of the limitations and problems of SERVQUAL and traditional conjoint analysis. The approach is demonstrated with an application to retail banks involving four service dimensions and 28 attributes. Conclusions are drawn about which dimensions and attribute changes will yield the strongest improvements in a bank’s utility and competitive position. The paper ends with a discussion of topics for further research.

Conversion franchising is a strategy where franchisors recruit existing franchisees from rival systems or by converting independent businesses to franchisees. The present research aims to investigate the attractiveness of conversion offers and the likelihood of such offers being accepted under different conditions of the franchising agreement.

Based on commitment theory and agency theory, it is hypothesised that conversion likelihood will be larger if the conversion offer is more attractive in terms of relational benefits, relational costs, the management of control in the franchise relationship, or perception of brand strength. The study comprises a qualitative phase followed by a scenario experiment held among 415 Australian business format franchisees across six industries.

The qualitative findings reveal a predominantly calculative attitude towards the franchise relationship. The experimental findings support that relational costs and perception of brand strength are unconditional drivers of conversion likelihood; however, the effects of relational benefits and power and control depend on the details of the conversion offer. Effects of relational benefits depend on the level of power and control. More experienced franchisees and service-based franchisees are more likely to convert.

The use of experimental case scenarios limits the external validity but enhances the internal validity by allowing control for factors that are difficult to account for in survey-based approaches. The study includes only franchisees from Australia although from a range of industries. The proposed methodology can be easily modified for other contexts.

The results can help franchisors tailor conversion proposals to suit specific conversion targets based on experience and industry type. Franchisors should generally focus on developing conversion proposals that are attractive in terms of perceived brand strength and relational costs. Relational benefits and management of power and control appear to play a role only in particular circumstances. For example, when no other factors differentiate the competitor, the management of power and control can make a difference in indicating franchise support quality and level of control among franchisees.

The study extends franchising research to the franchisee perspective and to a non-American context. It utilises an experimental approach that hitherto had not been applied in franchising research, allowing rigorous testing of hypotheses about franchise behaviour. Hypotheses are tested for different industry groups.