Due to its virtually unlimited technical possibilities, the Internet offers tremendous potential for the development and application of new survey methods in online market research. Thus, online questionnaires have become increasingly important. Nowadays in market research practice almost every third survey takes place on the Internet. The range of online surveys runs from self-selection surveys in virtual communities and list-based e-mail surveys to longitudinal studies in pre-recruited online panels. Given the high degree of anonymity on the Web, however, all forms of data collection are permanently exposed to a crisis of legitimation. Solely through an uncompromising focus on quality, this problem can be addressed. For this purpose basic methods research is required, which reveals the impact of online surveys on the quality of the data collected. Although initial research efforts have been made in this area in recent years, central design variables of online market research remain unconsidered. Hence, in an experimental study this paper analyzes both the influence of different types of recruitment and the effects of monetary incentives on data quality. Another research goal is to develop new methods for determining the quality of data, as the recent first generation approaches of operationalizing data quality are merely unsatisfactory. As a result of this study, innovative measurement approaches are presented and empirically validated regarding their usefulness. Using the methods of the first and second generation surprising results are shown and implications and recommendations for different stakeholders of online market research are given.

In times of global competition and recession refined premium printed advertising formats can help to differentiate brand communication. Marketers are facing erosion of customer attention using the leveraging advertising effect of refined premium print. We show that refined premium printed advertisements leverage both, affective and conative behavior.

This article addresses how sales representatives’ behavior in a retailing context influences customer trust - both in the salesperson and in the retail store – as key antecedents of consumer buying behavior. The salespersons’ behaviors analyzed are derived from commonly suggested personal selling techniques. However adaptive sales strategies are frequently discussed in marketing literature, the specific influence of those techniques on consumers is analyzed only rudimentary in empirical research. This gap is addressed by developing a conceptual framework incorporating important adaptive behavioral selling techniques which are perceived by consumers. Empirical data, computed in a structural equation model, demonstrates different influences of specific behavioral patterns of salespeople on consumer behavior. Findings show that especially techniques relating to salespersons’ support of the customer in making an optimal buying decision influence their buying behavior more than techniques focusing customers’ or salespersons’ characteristics. Results will provide managerial implications for both salespeople and management.

The majority of studies in branding research emphasize the relevance of brands and their benefits for both companies and consumers (e.g., Muniz and O’Guinn 2001). Although brand consumption involves many positive effects, negative influences should not be denied. However, only few scholars (e.g., Aaker, Fournier, and Brasel 2004) have engaged in research on such “dark” sides of brands.

The Internet has increasingly changed from a pure uni-directional information medium to a multi-directional exchange medium and thus nowadays holds a strong position in peoples’ daily life. Today, the worl-wide-web is used for information search and for vivid interchange of opinions and ideas amongst consumers. Especially the communication between users has experienced an enormous boom during the last decade. Out of the 140 billions monthly visited web sites, about 25

As in the last decade TV commercials have become less effective and viewers more and more eager to avoid them, below-the-line communication is becoming increasingly important within the communications mix of many companies. Techniques like sponsorship attract the attention of marketing practice more than ever. TV-Sponsorship is a special promotional tactic that shows the advertising message not within a cut-in commercial break, but at the beginning or the end of a movie or television broadcast. As it guarantees a visible flash of the sponsor’s brand at the outset of the current program, the focus lies predominantly on the communicative effect of placing the sponsor’s brand in connection with a certain content (Harvey 2001). The spreading of TV-Sponsorship in entertainment programs has raised the interest of advertisers to verify the effectiveness of this instrument. A comprehensive research of antecedents and consequences has not taken place so far; present studies merely focus on sport or cultural event sponsorship. In order to fill this research gap, the aim of this study is to assess the effectiveness of specific execution antecedents of TV-Sponsorship in terms of resulting sponsor’s brand attitude and purchase intentions.

We explore a relatively new concept in marketing, namely brand stress. In the current study, brand stress in understood as strain caused by the felt pressure to own and consume certain branded products. We first conceptualize the construct of perceived brand stress and suggest how we can operationalize it. Furthermore, we attempt to shed light on the various ways in which consumers cope with perceived brand stress.

Today’s consumer markets are characterized by an increasing market saturation and product homogenization, two factors that have led to fierce competition among companies. As a consequence, consumers are exposed to promotional clutter. This, in turn, decreases the probability that they become aware of a firm’s communication activities. The corporate website on Facebook, the so called “Facebook page” or “Fanpage”, has recently emerged as a novel communication instrument that offers companies the opportunity to break through promotional clutter by relying on the principle of communication pull. However, research and practice both lack evidence about the effective implementation and marketing potential of Facebook pages.

In the context of surveys, data quality is merely a function of the amount of error in the data. The more accurate the data ( i.e. the less erroneous the data), the higher the quality of the data (Biemer, Groves, and Lyberg 1991). Even though Weisberg (2005) elaborates on the importance of response behavior within the concept of total survey error, past research has mostly determined data quality through measures based on the sample error such as the number of omitted items (item-nonresponse) or dropout rate (Goeritz 2004; Tuten, Galesic, and Bosnjak 2004). Little or no attention has been paid to the motivation and attitude of respondents and whether those factors influence the accuracy of their answers to survey questions. For a full coverage of data quality in online surveys, it is necessary to widen the focus to the , and their cognitive and motivational processes in the context of answering survey questions. Thus, based on the social psychology literature, we introduce a new approach to examine and measure the response behavior of subjects. The new measures that we propose are divided into three categories or levels: instrumental, cognitive and motivational. These three levels are derived from the three motifs of satisficing (Krosnick 1991). By incorporating dimensions of these three levels into a questionnaire, we are able to check respondent motivation and manipulation attempts and thus response accuracy.

The appearance of interactive media environments is often deemed to cause a lack of trust. Our study investigates the potential role of Web portals in enhancing customer trust, reducing perceived risk, and improving the intention to purchase online. An online experiment (n=862) supports the hypothesized effects.

Sport clubs are increasingly shifting from non-profit organizations to business companies, making professional sports one of the most important and top-selling industries (Chadwick 2009). Like other business companies, sports clubs battle for customers and aim at gaining their commitment (Decrop and Derbaix 2010). With respect to antecedents of commitment, researchers have examined, for example, sports clubs' competitive performance. However, the future performance of sports clubs is very uncertain (Sainam, Balasubramanian and Bayus 2010) and characterized by "product-quality" information asymmetry between clubs and fans (Chen, Ganesan and Liu 2009). Therefore, customers in such markets look for signals of the club's future performance.

With an ever-expanding market for diversified health food products, marketers can formulate a unique selling proposition by differentiating their brands using organic labels issued by an independent accredited institution for organic product testing. Using in-depth interviews, we verify four main purchasing motives for organic food in Germany: healthiness, hedonism, environmental friendliness, and food safety. Moreover, in two experiments, we show that the use of an organic label affects consumers' perceptions of global, local, and private brands with regard to their main purchasing motives. The positive effects of organic labeling are also supported for consumers' purchase intentions and their willingness to pay a price premium. Notably, private brands are more adept at profiteering from the use of organic labels than global and local brands.