The current research considers dual branding, where national brand manufacturers produce store brands against which they compete. Although agreements are confidential, rumors about the practice emerge. Thus, the authors examine the influence of dual branding rumor exposure on consumers’ respective national and store brand evaluations. The results support positive (negative) serial indirect effects of rumor exposure on participants’ store (national) brand evaluations through dual branding beliefs and comparative quality perceptions. In addition, smart shopper perceptions amplify the indirect effects of dual branding rumor exposure on store, but not national, brand outcomes.

Increasingly, marketers rely on advances in technology to maintain competitive parity or gain competitive advantage. Yet, often, the adoption of technology is met with suboptimal results and even outright failure. Qualitative field research based on depth interviews with business managers responsible for technology adoption decisions within their respective firms is used to develop a theoretical framework explaining the technology adoption process within firms, how expectations are formed for the innovation’s performance and factors that can further influence those perceptions. Result suggest a firm’s dynamic capabilities play a central role in informing the firm’s perceptions of a technological innovation’s characteristics that drive the adoption decision. Findings also suggest that a firm’s expectations are influenced by perception of risk, internal micro-political actions, and the opportunity to observe or trial use of the technological innovation.

ABSTRACT This study examines the role of customer perceived justice in the product return process with a physical retailer. These experiences serve to form a perceived market orientation of the retailer – which has effects on retailer avoidance and negative WOM. The conceptual model is empirically tested using a main study of national panels for two U.S. retailers and a follow-up study with a national panel of customers of local retailers who had made memorable returns at a retailer’s physical location. Results illustrate that perceived justice during the return process impacts subsequent perceptions of the market orientation of the retailer.

Service provider absenteeism is defined as an instance in which a preferred service provider is not present at the expected time of service provision. Service provider absenteeism is a topic that has remained untouched in the relationship marketing literature, and yet instances of service provider absenteeism may represent possible transformational relationship events (Harmeling, Palmatier, Houston, Arnold, and Samaha, 2015). As such, this topic should be of concern to practitioners and academics alike. The purpose of the present research is to begin the process of understanding the effects of service provider absenteeism on business-to-consumer relationships. In order to understand absenteeism, we first conducted a review of teacher absenteeism and general workforce absenteeism. Next, we provide an overview of the research methodology and results. Due to the exploratory nature of this study, the authors utilize critical incident technique to examine themes among and categorize instances of service provider absenteeism. Using an internet-based platform, 178 incidents were collected. In these incidents, the authors find two emergent consequences of absenteeism (emotional consequences and resolutions). Based on these emergent themes, the authors identify three categories of service provider absenteeism effects. These are inconsequential, consequential-harbored, and consequential-settled. Inconsequential cases are cases in which the emotional response to the event was weak or nonexistent. Respondents sometimes made positive assumptions about why the provider was not present, but others demonstrated a jaded attitude toward service provision. In these cases, respondents were generally indifferent to future encounters. In consequential-settled cases, strong negative emotional responses were usually reported. Unique to these cases were that some form of settlement, understanding, or resolution seemed to be reached, or the respondent made assumptions about why the provider was not present so as to put negative feelings to rest. Often times, these respondents were not opposed to future interactions, but reservations or lowered expectations were often reported. In consequential-harbored cases, which are the largest group of cases, respondents harbor ill will toward the service provider. While it was not always clear whether or not service providers had made an attempt to provide an explanation or apology, it was frequently observed that respondents either did switch providers, wished that they could switch providers, or entertained the idea of switching service providers. The authors close with managerial implications and suggestions for future research. The authors specifically discuss working toward a model that explains the effects of service provider absenteeism on customer loyalty and switching behavior.

The firm’s ability to develop innovative products has been shown to be an important factor in developing strategic advantage (Webster 1969; Hult and Ketchen 2001); however, not all firms have the resources or capabilities to innovate new products. Thus, to remain competitive, firms must adopt innovations from sources external to the firm—often in the form of technological innovations. To gain competitive advantage, a firm may adopt “transformational” technology—technology that enables a fundamental change to the firm’s business model, a new value proposition or a new way to manufacture, distribute, and/or market an offering (Aaker 2011). However, not all technology adoption decisions are successful, which places firm performance and customer relationships at risk. Abrahamson (1991) argues that innovation research focuses too much on what drives adoption decisions and too little on what drives firms to adopt inferior innovations and reject superior ones. The tendency of researchers to “ignore the study of ignorance about innovations” (Rogers 1995; p. 100) has resulted in a significant gap in the adoption of innovation research. Using diffusion of innovation theory as a lens, this research examines how an adopting entity’s perceptions of an innovation’s relative advantage, complexity, and compatibility influence the decision to adopt the new technology (Rogers 1962; O’Neal et al. 1973; Davis 1989). Because unrealistic expectations for the performance of a technology can negatively influence attitudes and perceptions of adoption success (Oliver 1980), it is important to understand how the firm’s perceptions of a technology are informed.

Retailers increasingly utilize private label branding strategy in an effort to simultaneously increase store loyalty and compete with national brands (Ailawadi and Keller 2004; Nies and Natter 2012). Previous research suggests consumers are not only receptive to the notion of private label consumption but in many cases prefer retailer brands over their premium brand competitors (Neilsen 2011; Thomassen et al. 2006). From a supply perspective, many national brand manufacturers, or “dual branders” (ter Braak et al. 2013: 87), produce private label brands to optimize outcomes from the channel relationship (Chen et al. 2010; Kumar et al. 2010). Dual branders do not volunteer this information to prevent loss of the national brand market share due to narrowing gaps between quality perceptions of premiums and private labels (Sethuraman and Raju 2012; Steenkamp et al. 2010). Consequently, consumers are often only able to rely on superficial signals (e.g., packaging or price) to evaluate the origins and quality of private-label products. However, consumers can be inadvertently exposed to dual branding knowledge through other communications such as a manufacturer’s announced product recall or word-of-mouth from others. Thus it is important for marketing researchers to understand how consumers react to the knowledge that two differently priced, competing brands are sourced by the same manufacturer. In response, this research examines the influence of dual branding on customers’ respective brand evaluations through the mechanism of their comparative quality perceptions. Results of the analyses suggest that exposure to dual branding does influence consumers’ comparative quality perceptions between competing private and premium brands, which in turn significantly impacts respective brand evaluations. Specifically, comparative quality perceptions facilitate the indirect effects of dual branding information, which positively (negatively) influences private (national) label evaluations.

In this explorative paper we develop three dimensions of a new construct, Creepy Marketing (hereafter CM). First we discuss the impact of online personalized marketing on consumers. Based on this discussion a qualitative study examines both annoying marketing and creepy marketing from a consumer's perceptive. Results distinguish annoying marketing, defined primarily as tactics, from CM, defined predominately as feelings. Based on the study, CM consists of three dimensions: invasion of privacy, stalking behavior and violation of social norms. Each of these dimensions is discussed and directions for future research are provided.

Many new "networkable" devices, which constitute the Internet of Things, are low energy and lightweight. These devices must devote most of their available energy and computation to executing core application functionality, making the task of affordably supporting security and privacy quite challenging.

The bulk of self-service research has focused on customers' static attitudes toward the technology while failing to note that situational influences can often have just as much, if not more, influence on a customer's decision to approach or avoid a self-service technology (SST). Exploring the importance of these situational influences, the authors conceptualize and empirically test a model of situational influences on customers' perceived time pressure, shopping effectiveness, and attitude toward using an SST. The results of a national panel database study found that during the SST transaction, four situational variables—order size, wait-time tolerance, location convenience, and employee presence—all had a strong influence in customers' SST decisions. Managerial implications are provided about the importance of accounting for situational influences in the adoption and implementation of SSTs going forward.

The transition to Internet of Things depends on the ability to create small, simple applications that are easily written and can be flexibly combined into larger, more powerful systems. We have designed an infrastructure to meet this need and report on a year's experience expanding and using it in an open-plan academic office space with up to a hundred sensors enabling nearly a dozen applications ranging from announcing tea time in the break room, notifying users that the conference room is in use, to printing documents from a web-based map. Applications are simple to write, modular, easily reused, and can incorporate diverse data inputs in a heterogeneous sensing environment. We discuss our efforts to incrementally improve user interfaces and system management.

The transition to Internet of Things depends on the ability to create small, simple applications that are easily written and can be flexibly combined into larger, more powerful systems. We have designed an infrastructure to meet this need and report on a year's experience expanding and using it in an open-plan academic office space with up to a hundred sensors enabling nearly a dozen applications ranging from announcing tea time in the break room, notifying users that the conference room is in use, to printing documents from a web-based map. Applications are simple to write, modular, easily reused, and can incorporate diverse data inputs in a heterogeneous sensing environment. We discuss our efforts to incrementally improve user interfaces and system management.

Developing Internet of Things (IoT) applications can be a complex task for many developers, requiring knowledge of sensor hardware, deployment characteristics, network limitations, and multiple protocols. Because of this, IoT development has been largely centered around research scientists and domain experts, with only a limited number of simple applications coming from the broader community. We present a software architecture that seeks to simplify and accelerate the development of IoT applications, making them accessible to a larger community of developers. To keep the system simple yet flexible, it focuses on a limited number of abstractions, relying on the developers and administrators to enforce additional constraints where necessary. We present a model system and a prototype implementation, along with experiences developing applications.

Radio frequency based device-free passive (DfP) localization techniques have shown great potentials in localizing individual human subjects, without requiring them to carry any radio devices. In this study, we extend the DfP technique to count and localize multiple subjects in indoor environments. To address the impact of multipath on indoor radio signals, we adopt a fingerprinting based approach to infer subject locations from observed signal strengths through profiling the environment. When multiple subjects are present, our objective is to use the profiling data collected by a single subject to count and localize multiple subjects without any extra effort. In order to address the non-linearity of the impact of multiple subjects, we propose a successive cancellation based algorithm to iteratively determine the number of subjects. We model indoor human trajectories as a state transition process, exploit indoor human mobility constraints and integrate all information into a conditional random field (CRF) to simultaneously localize multiple subjects. As a result, we call the proposed algorithm SCPL - sequential counting, parallel localizing. We test SCPL with two different indoor settings, one with size 150 m2 and the other 400 m2. In each setting, we have four different subjects, walking around in the deployed areas, sometimes with overlapping trajectories. Through extensive experimental results, we show that SCPL can count the present subjects with 86% counting percentage when their trajectories are not completely overlapping. Our localization algorithms are also highly accurate, with an average localization error distance of 1.3 m.

The online marketplace has provided sellers an arena for marketing digital products and radically changing traditional distribution processes. Online sellers have also experimented with buyer-determined pricing schemes, such as the "Pay What You Want" model that is the focus of this study. Under this pricing scheme, buyers are allowed absolute control over the price of the transaction, including the amount of zero if desired. Using Social Exchange Theory as a guide, we explored the possibility that a buyer's price he or she is willing to pay and the price actually paid for a digital product on the iTunes marketplace can differ based on social and economic factors associated with the transaction. While this study offers an exploratory look into the PWYW model in an online setting, the results provide insight for product developers and marketers considering this pricing scheme.

PurposeBased on previous research in services, marketing, organizational behavior and psychology, this paper aims to identify four types of loyalty bonds that an individual can form with a firm as well as a select set of firm and situational variables which likely result in the formation of each bond. It then aims to examine the influence of each bond on the relationship strength between a customer and a service provider.Design/methodology/approachUsing a mail survey, female respondents over the age of 25 assessed shopping situations in two service‐provider settings – a grocery store and a beauty salon. Scenarios manipulated aspects of the service experience based on firm and situational variables.FindingsThis study confirms the existence of four primary types of loyalty bonds – utilitarian, affective, symbolic, and obligatory. Firm and situational variables maximally impact each type of loyalty bond. The bonds predict relationship strength with the service provider.Research limitations/implicationsComplex relationships are apparent between the different types of bonds. Further research is needed to understand how firm and situational variables interact in different service settings.Practical implicationsThe authors' research shows that customers may form different types of loyalty bonds with firms, some that are controllable by the firm and some which are less controllable. Results provide a starting point for tactical decision making regarding which bonds service providers would like to target in the development of their relationship marketing programs.Originality/valueThe authors contribute to the services marketing literature by examining when specific loyalty bonds are created and how these bonds impact relationship strength.

In contrast to traditional sensor networks, the "Internet of Things" focuses on interactions between humans and physical objects rather than on sensing and reporting low level information. While several middle-ware systems have been created to simplify the task of managing and aggregating data from multiple sensor networks that use different hardware and software, management of the data is not sufficient to build an Internet of Things. To build a smart home or office application, information from sensors and existing infrastructure, such as networked power supplies and printers, need to be associated with physical objects. As low-level data is processed, it can be fed back into the system to support higher-level results. In this paper we introduce Octopus, an open-source, dynamically extensible system that supports data management and fusion for Internet of Things applications.

iPhone Entrepreneurship Class: Bridging the Gap Between Engineering and Business to Create an Entrepreneurial CultureDiscovering ways to engineer innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship in a universitysetting are a constant focus of many entrepreneurial-focused researchers. TheEntrepreneurship Center at the University seeks to create an entrepreneurial ecosystem bycreating an atmosphere of entrepreneurship education and research, providing support forstart-up companies, and promoting entrepreneurship among students and facultymembers. In order to effectively create an entrepreneurial culture, faculty members are akey component in driving change in the current culture of the University. TheEntrepreneurship Center partnered with four faculty members in order to lead a changeamong other faculty and students by adding an academic curriculum component toenhance the entrepreneurial ecosystem. The new curriculum is a Field Study inEntrepreneurship course, which provides students with the opportunity to combineinnovation with entrepreneurship. The course is designed for students to learn,implement, and demonstrate entrepreneurship, innovation, and creativity by developingiPhone applications and marketing the applications through the Apple App Store. Thisnot only requires programming skills and technical knowledge, but also marketing andbusiness expertise. Throughout the course, students partner their skill-sets together inorder to effectively develop and market an app. Each spring the Entrepreneurship Centerprovides an opportunity for the student groups to enter their application in the campuswide Innovation Challenge. This paper will explore the affects the iPhone course has hadon the entrepreneurial culture at the University and the implications of the course oninnovation and creativity among students.

Electronic commerce (EC) research examines the process and consequences of conducting business electronically. By definition and scope, EC research is cross disciplinary in nature, yet past attempts to classify and synthesize EC research have been piecemeal with only a subset of a given field's journals being considered. This article presents the results of a business-oriented cross disciplinary review and classification of the first fifteen years of electronic commerce research from twenty-five leading journals in the traditional college of business fields of marketing, management and information systems. The purpose of this analysis is to answer three fundamental questions: 1) What are the overarching categories of EC research? 2) What are the dominant themes within those broad categories? 3) What are the seminal articles within each discipline? The answers to these questions provide researchers with a basis for understanding how EC research has evolved and identify research opportunities.