When new products are announced, stakeholders often expect them to be congruent with the brand. Nevertheless, brands go against stakeholders’ expectations and announce less products. However, effects of brand congruence on consumers’ engagement (i.e., sharing commenting posts) not well understood. Drawing schema-congruity theory, we show that (1) consumers more curious about announced social me...

Brand management has become increasingly important, given the rapid changes in the global market and the elevation of competition. A sound brand image creates clear product differentiation, consumer preference and loyalty. In the beginning, the entire market of Chinese mobile telephone was occupied by the foreign companies. This phase has continued over ten years until the beginning of 1999, wh...

When product quality is unobservable to consumers, a manufacturer can convey the quality information using signals such as warranty and brand reputation. This paper develops a noncooperative duopoly model to study the interaction between warranty, brand reputation and product quality. Two competing manufacturers offer warranties on their respective product with different qualities, which is uno...

Online reviews have become a popular method for consumers to express personal evaluations and buyers to use as a source of product quality information in purchasing decisions. However, integrity of review systems is threatened by evidence about the prevalence of shill reviews. To understand the impact of shill reviews, an experiment was conducted to collect shill reviews and measure the impact ...

We show that adding entrant brands to a choice set compr ising of a predominantly promotion brand and a predominantly prevention brand can make both promotion and prevention-oriented consumers susceptible to the attraction effect. If an entrant targets the brand possessing superior promotion (prevention) feature, the resulting dominance relationship allows the promotion (prevention) focused con...

The authors investigate consumers’ willingness to switch from a preferred manufacturer brand to an unfamiliar private-label brand if taste is perceived as identical. Consumer decisions are examined through recordings of electrical brain activity in the form of electroencephalograms (EEGs) and self-reported data captured in surveys. Results reveal a willingness of consumers to switch to a less-e...

Understanding the degree of cannibalization and competition in online and offline markets is important to firms’ product line designs. However, few empirical studies have measured both effects simultaneously or have examined the factors that determine the extent of cannibalization and competition. In this study, we develop an empirical model to identify cannibalization and competition effects s...