Many launch strategies for new products now aim at building pre‐release consumer buzz (PRCB), defined as consumers' collective expressions of anticipation for an upcoming product. While a positive association of PRCB with innovation success has been established, little is known about how , under what conditions , and to what extent PRCB influences consumers' adoption decisions. This research sheds light on these issues by investigating PRCB's contagious nature as one of the concept's defining characteristics. Drawing on herding theory, the authors develop a conceptual framework and provide comprehensive experimental evidence that consumers' exposure to PRCB for a new product triggers distinct psychological mechanisms that influence their own adoption decisions: PRCB‐observing consumers exhibit both greater social attraction to the “buzz movement” (group‐related evaluation) as well as more curiosity and higher quality expectations about the new product (product‐related evaluation). Furthermore, these effects are particularly strong for consumers who are highly susceptible to social influence and for products with low popular appeal. The authors complement their consumer‐level analysis with an illustrative market‐level what‐if analysis that approximates the financial consequences of PRCB's contagious effects. Results suggest that the financial impact of PRCB can be substantial but differs significantly across scenarios, depending on product type and consumer segment. These findings have important implications for the management of innovations before launch.

Local news publishers increasingly face the challenge to develop viable revenue models. In this article we aim to optimise the three central metered model effects, namely the lead-in, cannibalisation and advertising effect. After a conceptualisation of the effects, we conduct two choice-based conjoint studies and a simulation to measure the effects empirically. We find that samples of 40, 50 and 60 free articles per month lead to an overall increase in total revenue, with 40 free articles showing the strongest positive impact. Conversely, offering 20 or 30 articles per month results in an overall decrease across all business model scenarios for local news publishers.

For over four decades, scholars have developed the field of entertainment science, establishing a thorough understanding of the business behind filmed, recorded, written, and programmed media products and services, encompassing consumer behavior and strategic decision-making. Building on six foundational characteristics that jointly define entertainment offerings (i.e., their hedonic, narrative, cultural, creative, innovative, and digital nature), we synthesize key findings from entertainment science research. Since each of these characteristics can be found individually in various industries, this review offers substantial potential for learning beyond the entertainment world. Leveraging the entertainment industry’s pioneering role in major cross-industry trends, including virtual worlds and generative AI, we then provide best practices for adapting to these developments. We conclude by proposing a comprehensive agenda for future research on each of the foundational entertainment characteristics within the field of entertainment science and beyond.

When governments mandated lockdowns to limit the spread of the coronavirus, the resulting reduction of face-to-face communication threatened many people's psychological well-being by fostering feelings of loneliness. Given social media's eponymous social nature, we study the relationship between people's social media usage and their loneliness during these times of physical social restrictions. We contrast literature highlighting the social value of social media with a competing logic based on the "internet paradox," according to which increased social media usage may paradoxically be associated with increasing, not decreasing, levels of loneliness. As the extant literature provides opposing correlational insights into the general relationship of social media usage and loneliness, we offer competing hypotheses and offer novel longitudinal insights into the phenomenon of interest. In the empirical context of Germany's initial lockdown, our research uses survey panel data from February 2020 (before the lockdown) and April 2020 (during the lockdown) to contribute longitudinal evidence to the matter. We find that more usage of social media in the studied lockdown setting is indeed associated with more, not less loneliness. Thus, our results suggest a "social media paradox" when physical social restrictions are mandated and caution social media users and policy makers to not consider social media as a valuable alternative for social interaction. A post-hoc analysis suggests that more communication via richer digital media which are available during physical lockdowns (e.g., video chats) softens the "social media paradox". Conclusively, this research provides deeper insights into the social value of social interactions via digital media during lockdowns and contributes novel insights into the relationship between social media and loneliness during such times when physical social interaction is heavily restricted.

The widespread closures of physical retail stores in the digital age significantly impact business outcomes, urban communities, and regional economies. Understanding this phenomenon is crucial for retailers, policymakers, and society at large. Drawing from literature on retail success factors, we derive a comprehensive set of factors that may help explain why some retail stores close while others survive. We test the relationships of these factors with store closures using a unique dataset that combines responses from a large-scale consumer survey with observational data on actual store closures in the apparel and media categories between 2015 and 2020. Rare-case regression analyses reveal that factors related to the store's product selection (e.g., assortment uniqueness), store environment (e.g., an accessible location), the offered experience (e.g., store atmosphere), and frictionless transactions (e.g., via convenient store hours) are significantly associated with store closures in our data. In contrast, several other established store success factors (e.g., service) show no such significant association. Additional empirical analyses highlight differences between stores that offer apparel versus media products, are smaller versus larger, and located inside versus outside city centers to provide context and specificity to the findings. (c) 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of New York University. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )

•Choice-based conjoint experiment and questionnaire using 2044 participants representative of German Internet population.•Empirical evidence supporting digital capital as a fundamental capital that significantly determines social status.•Status-enhancing effect similar to that of cultural capital, but less pronounced than for economic and social capital.•Factors influencing digital capital accumulation: digital upbringing, digitally savvy friends, gender, education, and age. Choice-based conjoint experiment and questionnaire using 2044 participants representative of German Internet population. Empirical evidence supporting digital capital as a fundamental capital that significantly determines social status. Status-enhancing effect similar to that of cultural capital, but less pronounced than for economic and social capital. Factors influencing digital capital accumulation: digital upbringing, digitally savvy friends, gender, education, and age.

In our study we explore sustainable business models for local newspapers by combining data from content analysis with data from a choice-based conjoint analysis and survey data from 160 readers of a German regional newspaper. Drawing from news value theory, we try to answer which content matters most to consumers of local newspapers, thus supporting local publishers' development of marketable value propositions. Based on multivariate regression analysis, our results suggest that consumers value articles covering local topics the most. We also find evidence for interaction effects of quality perception and reading behaviour on the willingness to pay.

Investments in new marketing offerings are notoriously risky, as they require firms to make judgments about an uncertain future. The authors develop an option-thinking framework for valuing and selecting new marketing offerings that combines real-options theory with virtual markets. They apply the framework and demonstrate its power empirically in the context of experiential content, where valuing marketing offerings constitutes a particularly challenging issue. Specifically, they test the proposed option-thinking framework in two experiential settings (movies and professional team sports) and compare it to current managerial practice. Each experiential setting deals with a common managerial marketing challenge. Study 1 examines extending a brand into a new category, and Study 2 investigates ingredient branding. The proposed framework provides managers with an empirical approach that enables them to consider the "value of waiting" when making investment decisions that involve uncertainty regarding future market developments.

Digitalization can help suppliers cut ties with their intermediaries and offer products directly to consumers. Such a digital disintermediation strategy likely affects both digital and non-digital incumbents in ways difficult to predict by current marketing theory. In our empirical investigation of digital disintermediation in the multibillion-dollar filmed home entertainment industry, we draw on consumers’ viewing behaviors before and after the launch of the streaming service Disney+. The findings show that access to Disney+ substantially increased the streaming category in the short run, accelerating the demise of non-digital linear television. However, only the new digital service benefited, while streaming incumbents suffered negative outcomes, despite public claims to the contrary. In addition to foreshadowing Netflix’s subsequent difficulties in defending its leadership position, these findings offer suppliers successful ways to liberate themselves from powerful intermediaries and help incumbents brace for the competitive upheavals that a digital disintermediation strategy is likely to trigger.

In the digital era, consumers choose among various types of word of mouth (WOM) when searching for product information. This research investigates how consumers allocate their search efforts across three key WOM types: face-to-face (e.g., offline communication among consumers), Internet opinion sites (e.g., product reviews), and social media platforms (e.g., recommendations on Facebook). The authors develop a conceptual framework of WOM types and derive hypotheses about the determinants of WOM search behaviors, which they test against representative data from more than 2,000 consumers. Several product and consumer characteristics have systematic effects on search effort allocation, as do WOM type–specific resources. A process-related analysis also suggests different roles of WOM types during customers’ search journeys, such that face-to-face conversations and Internet opinion sites tend to be consulted early, whereas social media mostly serve as final information sources. Overall, the results caution against assuming that the different WOM types are arbitrary or random substitutes.

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After facilitating the rise of streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon by licensing them high-quality content, America’s leading media conglomerates have radically changed course. They are increasingly implementing a new partial disintermediation strategy, which limits the licensing of content to linear TV broadcasters while serving streaming customers via their own direct-to-consumer offerings. Does this strategic shift facilitate the decline of linear television, as it increases the attractiveness of streaming? Or does the move threaten those who are currently dominating the streaming market? This study uses the launch of Disney+ to assess how Hollywood’s new offerings affect streaming and TV consumption. The authors use consumer panel data about their adoption and viewing times across several media formats before and after the launch of Disney+, and analyze changes in endogeneity-adjusted difference-in-differences models. Results show that right after its launch, the adoption of Disney+ increases consumers’ time spent with subscription streaming, at the expense of both free TV networks and streaming incumbents, although adopters maintain their existing subscriptions of Netflix and Amazon. In the longer run, adopters reallocate their viewing times mainly within subscription streaming, while other formats are less affected. Actionable implications for broadcasters and streamers are derived from the results.

The film industry rarely involves film anymore.The cameras and microphones use sensors.They translate the images and sounds into bits and bytes.Directors and editors manipulate the raw footage on computers, rather than with light boxes and scissors.Finished "films" get distributed as large files rather than as giant spools.Analog has given way to digital.Although the film industry has witnessed many technological changes-the introduction of sound, of color, the invention of television-digitalization, more than any of these others, has unleashed a radical transformation of the industry.It has changed not just the nature of production, but also the businesses of distribution and of exhibition.It has challenged decades-long industry rules and routines.COVID-19, if anything, has accelerated this transformation.When the pandemic kept people home, streaming services came to the rescue, providing audiences with filmed entertainment on their televisions, computers, tablets, and other digital devices.Since the advent of digitalization in the late 1990s, some of the more radical reconfigurations of the industry had been delayed by those with entrenched interests in the old system.But the pandemic has swept their objections aside.Major players have repositioned themselves, re-envisioning their business models.After nearly a century of reaching audiences through middlemen, Disney became the first studio to offer their content direct to the consumer.As of December 2020, only one Hollywood studio (Sony) has yet to launch its own streaming service.

Recent research reveals meaningful uses of digital marketing instruments, though without addressing internal, organizational antecedents of a firm’s social media performance. Drawing on resource-based theory and the concept of dynamic capabilities, this article identifies social media–specific resources and dynamic capabilities that can enhance social media performance. It also offers theoretically supported and validated scales to measure them. The authors empirically investigate their performance effects using different kinds of data pertaining to consumer brands, gathered from manager surveys, brands’ financial statements, Facebook fans, Instagram followers, YouTube subscribers, and brand image measures. The proposed social media resources and capabilities improve social media performance directly and brand perception indirectly. In particular, the impact of the social media strategy and measurement is moderated by firm size. A profile deviation analysis further reveals that the social media capabilities gap between top-performing versus other brands explains significant variance in social media performance. The advantages of developing social media capabilities early on also persist in the long-term, with substantial relevance for managers.

Managers frequently seek strategies to profit systematically from social media to increase product sales. By forming a brand alliance, they can acquire an installed social media base from a partner brand in an attempt to boost the sales of their composite products. Drawing from power theory, this article develops a conceptual model of the influence of the social media power of partner brands on brand alliance success. The proposed framework details the partner brand's social media power potential (size and activity of the social media network), social media power exertion (different posting behaviors and comments), and their interaction. The authors test this framework with an extensive data set from the film industry, in which films function as composite products and actors represent partner brands. The data set features 442 movies, including 1,318 actor–movie combinations and weekly social media data (including 41,547 coded Facebook posts). The authors apply a linear mixed-effects model, in which they account for endogeneity concerns. The partner brand's social media power potential, power exertion, and their interaction can all lead to higher composite product sales. By coding different types of product-related posts, this article provides estimates of their varying monetary value.