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- Creators: Arizona State University
Description
Although it is commonly assumed that consumers eat more and find food to be more attractive when hungry, surprisingly little research has looked at how robust this effect might be and what could moderate it. Building on theories of hunger and self-control, this research examines which types of foods (hedonic or utilitarian) are more attractive and likely to be consumed by hungry consumers. Across a series of six experiments I find that when hungry and under reduced cognitive capacity, consumers find hedonic foods more attractive and consume them in larger quantities. However, when hungry and with high cognitive capacity, consumers have the ability to engage in counteractive self-control, thus limiting both the attractiveness and consumption of hedonic food items. Furthermore, I find that hunger is not likely to influence the attractiveness of utilitarian foods, but is likely to increase the consumption of these foods, regardless of cognitive capacity.
ContributorsRingler, Christine (Author) / Morales, Andrea C (Thesis advisor) / Nowlis, Stephen M. (Committee member) / Ward, James (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This study gathers the expertise of three reputable art teachers, through analysis of qualitative data collected during in-person interviews and classroom observations, as they share their experiences and insights regarding successful methods of motivating and engaging students in their beginning-level art classes. Various works of literature regarding educational motivation are reviewed, and this study begins to address the need for additional research involving this issue, as it applies to teachers of art. Commonalities between the motivational tactics of the participating teachers are discussed, as well as comparison of findings to existing literature. This may be useful to art teachers who are new to the field or who are seeking information regarding successful methods of encouraging motivation and engagement in their beginning -level art classes.
ContributorsClark, Erica (Author) / Young, Bernard (Thesis advisor) / Erickson, Mary (Committee member) / Stokrocki, Mary (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Industrial design is the practice of creating solutions by studying people and businesses. Originally centered on development of goods, industrial design uses methods rooted in human behavioral study, human factors, and strategic problem solving. As our economy and professional practice shift away from manufacturing towards a service-dominant landscape, industrial design must align its profession to formally include service design. The small service business setting is a microcosm in which the value of design and branding in business is magnified. This research reinforces design's ties with services marketing and business and is dedicated to finding solutions for the backbone of our economy. Micro-businesses with fewer than 20 employees often lack the sophisticated management, marketing, and strategies that bring about success. Despite the fact that 70% to 80% of small and micro businesses are service based, little research is dedicated to unique strategies for these small service firms. Research has shown that using strategic business design increases small business success. Given high small business failure rates, it behooves entrepreneurs to use intuitive planning tools that are appropriate for the dynamic startup years. When put within reach and context of small business owners, the tools used in design draw a clear map of insights into the "design" of small businesses. Through a literature review, interviews, and a new workshop method, the needs of small business owners and the challenges they face are used to design and implement an accessible, actionable strategic toolkit for small service businesses. This simple, interdisciplinary toolkit was designed with the goal of increasing the efficacy and likelihood of ongoing strategic business planning through context-specific, instrumental activities. The tools are shown to help a business owner form pragmatic, iterative problem-solving approaches that allow the business owner to plan in the face of uncertainty and find insights into her own business, brand, and services.
ContributorsGrimes, Lynelle (Author) / Takamura, John (Thesis advisor) / Peck, Sidnee (Committee member) / Wolf, Peter (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Social shopping has emerged as a popular online retailing segment. Social shopping revolves around online communities that bring consumers together to shop for deals. Online retailers have been making significant investments to encourage consumers to join online communities linked to their websites in the hope that social interactions among consumers will increase consumption rates. However, the assumption that social interactions increase consumption rates in social shopping remains largely untested in empirical settings. Also, the mechanisms of such an effect remain unclear. Moreover, extant literature has overlooked the role played by elements of the marketing mix, including product characteristics and the commercial context, in defining the effect that social interaction mechanisms have on consumption rates in this focused context. Furthermore, common knowledge in the operations management discipline challenges the largely held assumption, in the social interactions literature, that increasing consumption rates will always be beneficial to online retailers. Higher consumption rates may lead to stockouts, leading to lower service levels. This dissertation develops and empirically tests a theoretical framework that addresses these managerially relevant issues. Specifically, the investigation centers on the effects of social interaction mechanisms on consumption rates in social shopping. In turn, it assesses the nature of the relationship between consumption rates and service levels, after controlling for inventory provision. Finally, it assesses the role played by elements of the marketing mix in defining the relationship between social interaction mechanisms and consumption rates in this focused context. The research methodology uses experiments as the primary source of data collection, and employs econometrics techniques to statistically assess the conceptual framework. The results from the empirical analysis provide interesting insights. First, they unveil influential consumers in social shopping according to relational and structural elements of the social network of consumers and time of purchase. Second, the influence of early buyers' purchases on consumption rates becomes weaker when the quality of the products being offered as part of a deal increases, but it becomes stronger when the price of those products increases. Finally, as deals' consumption rates increase, their service levels decrease at a faster pace.
ContributorsSodero, Annibal (Author) / Rabinovich, Elliot (Thesis advisor) / Sinha, Rajiv (Committee member) / Maltz, Arnold (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Convergent products are products that offer multiple capabilities from different product categories. For example, a smartphone acts as an internet browser, personal assistant, and telephone. Marketers are constantly considering the value of adding new functionalities to these convergent products. This work examines convergent products in terms of the hedonic and utilitarian value they provide along with whether the addition is related to the base product, revealing complex and nuanced interactions. This work contributes to marketing theory by advancing knowledge in the convergent products and product design literatures, specifically by showing how hedonic and utilitarian value and addition relatedness interact to impact the evaluation of convergent goods and services. Looking at a greater complexity of convergent product types also helps to resolve prior conflicting findings in the convergent products and hedonic and utilitarian value literatures. Additionally, this work examines the role of justification in convergent products, showing how different additions can help consumers to justify the evaluation of a convergent product. A three-item measure for justification was developed for this research, and can be used by future researchers to better understand the effects of justification in consumption. This work is also the first to explicitly compare effects between convergent goods and convergent services. Across two experiments, it is found that these two products types (convergent goods versus convergent services) are evaluated differently. For convergent goods, consumers evaluate additions based on anticipated practicality/productivity and on how easily they are justified. For convergent services, consumers evaluate additions based on perceptions of performance risk associated with the convergent service, which stems from the intangibility of these services. The insights gleaned from the research allow specific recommendations to be made to managers regarding convergent offerings. This research also examines the applicability of hedonic and utilitarian value to a special type of advertising appeal: reward appeals. Reward appeals are appeals that focus on peripheral benefits from purchasing or using a product, such as time or money savings, and make suggestions on how to use these savings. This work examines potential interactions between reward appeals and other common advertising elements: social norms information and role clarity messaging.
ContributorsEaton, Kathryn Karnos (Author) / Bitner, Mary Jo (Thesis advisor) / Olsen, G. Douglas (Thesis advisor) / Mokwa, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Designing a hazard intelligence platform enables public agencies to organize diversity and manage complexity in collaborative partnerships. To maintain the integrity of the platform while preserving the prosocial ethos, understanding the dynamics of “non-regulatory supplements” to central governance is crucial. In conceptualization, social responsiveness is shaped by communicative actions, in which coordination is attained through negotiated agreements by way of the evaluation of validity claims. The dynamic processes involve information processing and knowledge sharing. The access and the use of collaborative intelligence can be examined by notions of traceability and intelligence cohort. Empirical evidence indicates that social traceability is statistical significant and positively associated with the improvement of collaborative performance. Moreover, social traceability positively contributes to the efficacy of technical traceability, but not vice versa. Furthermore, technical traceability significantly contributes to both moderate and high performance improvement; while social traceability is only significant for moderate performance improvement. Therefore, the social effect is limited and contingent. The results further suggest strategic considerations. Social significance: social traceability is the fundamental consideration to high cohort performance. Cocktail therapy: high cohort performance involves an integrative strategy with high social traceability and high technical traceability. Servant leadership: public agencies should exercise limited authority and perform a supporting role in the provision of appropriate technical traceability, while actively promoting social traceability in the system.
ContributorsWang, Chao-shih (Author) / Van Fleet, David (Thesis advisor) / Grebitus, Carola (Committee member) / Wilson, Jeffrey (Committee member) / Shultz, Clifford (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
This dissertation offers three essays that investigate consumers’ health-related food choices and behaviors from three different, yet complementary, angles. The first essay uses an eye-tracking experiment to examine consumers’ visual attention to the Nutrition Facts Panels for healthy and unhealthy products. In this essay, I focus on how involvement and familiarity affect consumers’ attention toward the Nutrition Facts panel and how these two psychological factors interact with new label format changes in attracting consumers’ attention. In the second essay, I demonstrate using individual-level scanner data that nutritional attributes interact with marketing mix elements to affect consumers’ nutrition intake profiles and their intra-category substitution patterns. My findings suggest that marketing-mix sensitivities are correlated with consumers’ preferences for nutrient attributes in ways that depend on the “healthiness” of the nutrient. For instance, featuring promotes is positively correlated with “healthy” nutritional characteristics such as high-protein, low-fat, or low-carbohydrates, whereas promotion and display are positively correlated with preferences for “unhealthy” characteristics such as high-fat, or high-carbohydrates. I use model simulations to show that some marketing-mix elements are able to induce consumers to purchase items with higher maximum-content levels than others. The fourth chapter shows that dieters are not all the same. I develop and validate a new scale that measures lay theories about abstinence vs. moderation. My findings from a series of experiments indicate that dieters’ recovery from recalled vs. actual indulgences depend on whether they favor abstinence or moderation. However, compensatory coping strategies provide paths for people with both lay theories to recover after an indulgence, in their own ways. The three essays provide insights into individual differences that determine approaches of purchase behaviors, and consumption patterns, and life style that people choose, and these insights have potential policy implications to aid in designing the food-related interventions and policies to improve the healthiness of consumers’ consumption profiles and more general food well-being.
ContributorsXie, Yi (Author) / Richards, Timothy (Thesis advisor) / Mandel, Naomi (Committee member) / Grebitus, Carola (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
This dissertation uncovers the negative aspects of aesthetics by examining when and how enhanced product and payment aesthetics can backfire and lead to unfavorable consumer responses. The first essay examines the downstream effects of nondurable product aesthetics on usage behavior and consumption enjoyment. Across a series of field and lab experiments, I document an inhibiting effect of aesthetics on consumption. I find that highly aesthetic products elicit greater inferences of effort in their creation, and that people have an intrinsic appreciation for such effort. Because the consumption process indirectly destroys the effort originally invested to make the product beautiful, people reduce consumption of such products because usage would involve destroying something they naturally appreciate. Further, I show that in cases where individuals do consume a beautiful product, they exhibit lower consumption enjoyment. These negative post-consumption outcomes are driven in parallel by concerns over having actually destroyed the effort that made the product beautiful as well as the decrements in beauty that become visible when aesthetic products are made less attractive through consumption. The second essay investigates how the aesthetics and design of a payment (e.g., beautiful gift card packaging) can influence the purchase experience. Three field and lab experiments reveal the negative impact of beautified payments on spending and purchase satisfaction, particularly in situations where usage involves compromising its aesthetic appeal. Specifically, when consumers must damage a payment’s appearance before using it (e.g., ripping gift card packaging), they are less likely to use that payment, and experience lower purchase satisfaction when they do, an effect driven by the pain of payment. In doing so, I identify aesthetics as a novel antecedent to the pain of payment that carries important consequences for spending behavior, purchase satisfaction, and the overall customer experience. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
ContributorsWu, Freeman (Author) / Morales, Andrea C. (Thesis advisor) / Samper, Adriana (Thesis advisor) / Dahl, Darren W. (Committee member) / Fitzsimons, Gavan J. (Committee member) / Mandel, Naomi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
In two independent and thematically relevant chapters, I empirically investigate consumers’ mobile channel usage behaviors. In the first chapter, I examine the impact of mobile use in online higher education. With the prevalence of affordable mobile devices, higher education institutions anticipate that learning facilitated through mobile access can make education more accessible and effective, while some critics of mobile learning worry about the efficacy of small screens and possible distraction factors. I analyze individual-level data from Massive Open Online Courses. To resolve self-selection issues in mobile use, I exploit changes in the number of mobile-friendly, short video lectures in one course (“non-focal course”) as an instrumental variable for a learner’s mobile intensity in the other course (“focal course”), and vice versa, among learners who have taken both courses during the same semester. Results indicate that high mobile intensity impedes, or at most does not improve course engagement due mainly to mobile distractions from doing activities unrelated to learning. Finally, I discuss practical implications for researchers and higher education institutions to improve the effectiveness of mobile learning. In the second chapter, I investigate the impact of mobile users’ popular app adoption on their app usage behaviors. The adoption of popular apps can serve as a barrier to the use of other apps given popular apps’ addictive nature and users’ limited time resources, while it can stimulate the exploration of other apps by inspiring interest in experimentation with similar technologies. I use individual-level app usage data and develop a joint model of the number of apps used and app usage duration. Results indicate that popular app adoption stimulates users to explore new apps at app stores and allocate more time to them such that it increases both the number of apps used and app usage duration for apps excluding the popular app. Such positive spillover effects are heterogeneous across app categories and user characteristics. I draw insights for app developers, app platforms, and media planners by determining which new apps to release in line with the launch of popular apps, when to release such apps, and to whom distribution should be targeted.
ContributorsLee, Mi Hyun (Author) / Park, Sungho (Thesis advisor) / Han, Sang Pil (Committee member) / Kim, Sunghoon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Total digital media advertising spending of $72.5 billion surpassed total television Ad spending of $71.3 billion for the first time ever in 2016. Approximately $39 billion, or 54% of the digital media advertising spend, involved pre-programmed software that purchased Ads on behalf of a buyer in Real-Time Bidding (RTB) settings. A major concern for Ad buyers is sub-optimal spending in RTB settings owing to biases in the attribution of customer conversions to Ad impressions. The purpose of this research is twofold. First, identify and propose a novel experimental design and analysis plan for to handling a previously unidentified and unaddressed source of endogeneity: count/quality simultaneity bias (CQB). Second, conduct a field study using data for Ad response rates, cost, and observed consumer behavior to solve for the profit maximizing daily Ad frequency per customer. One large online retailer provided data for Ad impressions, bid costs, response rates, revenue per visit, and operating costs for 153,561 unique users over 23 days. Unique visitors were randomly assigned to one of seven treatment groups with one, two, three, four, five, and six impressions per day limits as well as a final condition with no daily impression cap. Ordinary least square models (OLS) were fit to the data and a non-linear relationship between Ad impressions and site visits demonstrating declining marginal effect of Ad impression on site visits after an optimal point. The results of the field study confirmed the existence of negative CQB and demonstrated how my novel experimental design and analysis can reduce the negative bias in the estimate of impression quantity on customer response. Second, managers interested in improving the efficiency of advertising spend should restrict display advertising to only the highest quality inventory through specific site targeting and by leveraging direct buys and private marketplace deals. This strategy ensures that subsequent impressions are not of lower quality by restricting the pool of possible impressions from a homogenous set of high quality inventory.
ContributorsFay, Bradley (Author) / Mokwa, Michael P. (Thesis advisor) / Park, Sungho (Thesis advisor) / Han, Sang-Pil (Committee member) / Christopher, Ranjit M (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017