The current research examined how posted pictures of online consumer reviews (consumer picture vs. product picture vs. no picture) influenced consumers’ product evaluation. Results showed that consumer pictures enhanced product evaluation. Study 1 testified that persuasive effect was the mechanism behind the main effect. Study 2 showed that for problem-solving product, consumer pictures increased product evaluation significantly; for enhancing product, there was no significant difference of product evaluation for consumer picture, product picture and no picture. Results of Study 3 showed that for unfamiliar brand, consumer pictures significantly enhanced product evaluation; for highly familiar brand, there was no significant difference for three experimental conditions. The present research used persuasive effect to examine the mechanism behind the interaction effects.

 With the development of more than 40 years of the reform and opening-up policy, China's service economy has made historic progress. The GDP of China's tertiary industry's contribution rate to the national economy is more than 50%. Thus, China is marching into the service economy era, and the development direction of China's service economy is gradually changing from high-speed development to high-quality development. With it, the service marketing theory is constantly evolving, and profound changes take place in the background of The Times. This paper aims to review and map the research streamline, provide future insights into service marketing in China in the past 30 years, and depict a panorama of service marketing research in China by applying statistical analysis and literature analysis tool CiteSpace. It shows the critical areas of service marketing research institutions and the leading network of cooperation between scholars. Furthermore, we extract the essential research topics and reveal the main direction by establishing the "creation—delivery—improvement" service value chain.

After the rapid development of the past 30 years, Chinese marketing has achieved preliminary achievements in four areas: first, academic institutions and discipline systems have been formed; second, the academic community and its research paradigm related to the former are becoming more mature; third, The dialogue mechanism between the academia with the practice and its social influence have begun to play; fourth, the international influence of the discipline and its academic research is beginning to see light. However, the development of China's marketing discipline has also made researchers in the field of marketing realize that the theoretical research of China's local marketing is weak, and has not yet developed a systematic theoretical perspective to guide China's marketing practices. At the end of the article, the future thinking about the development and innovation of China's marketing discipline is launched from three aspects: the rigor, relevance, and impact of scientific research.

Cause-related marketing as a form of corporate social responsibility has grown exponentially in the last 40 years. Existing research on cause-related marketing has mainly focused onits effectiveness by exploring the components and advertising factors that influence consumers participation intention, with less attention paid to the donation feedback. The development of digital technology has enabled more and more companies to conduct donation feedback to consumers. Based on social dentity theory and elaboration likelihood model, this article explored the interaction effect of cause-related marketing feedback framing and self-construal, internal mechanism and boundary conditions. With two experimental studies, we found that individual feedback(aggregate feedback)could induce independent (interdependent)consumers more positive attitude toward company. This is because the matching between feedback framing and self-construal could induce higher consumer-company dentification. However, this matching effect was only supported for high cause involvement, but not for low cause involvement. By focusing for the first time on the cause-related marketing's donation feedback, this study develops new research perspective of cause-related marketing and enriches feedback framing's research context and theoretical connotation. This research also offers practical insights to managers on how to design and execute donation feedback communication for cause-related marketing campaign.

Luxurious brands consumption in China is featured by clear conspicuous purposes. This research investigated the phenomenon from the indigenous perspective of social face consciousness. Drawing on Ho’s (1976) framework of gaining versus losing face dynamics, the authors broke down the construct of face consciousness into two dimensions of “desire to gain face” and “fear of losing face”, and developed measurement scales for them. The two scales were then used to examine their effect on conspicuous luxurious brand consumption behavior and found both of them had unique contribution in explaining why Chinese consumers buy luxurious brands.

Country of origin effect refers to the influence of country of origin on consumers’ perception and evaluation of a product. This research explores the impact of consumers’ power distance on country of origin effect. Through two experiments, the results suggest that power distance has a polarizing impact on country of origin effect. That means, for products with favorable country of origin, the higher the consumers’ power distance, the better their evaluation of the products; for products with unfavorable country of origin, the higher the power distance, the worse their evaluation of the products. The research also finds the moderating effect of consumers’ competence-related country related affect (CRA).When having positive competence-related CRA, for products with favorable country of origin, the higher the consumers’ power distance, the better their evaluation of the products. For products with unfavorable country of origin, consumers’ power distance has no effect. When having negative competence-related CRA, for products with favorable country of origin, consumers’ power distance has no effect. While for products with unfavorable country of origin, the higher the consumers’ power distance, the worse their evaluation of the products.

Based on the perspective of Chinese marketing scholars, this paper answers three questions about how to tell a good China story through case study (1) What is a good China marketing story through case study? To put it simply, marketing scholars describe China's marketing phenomenon and explore the law of China's marketing development through the method of case study, so as to realize the mission or goal of solving China's marketing problems and contributing to the world's marketing new knowledge. (2) Why do case studies tell China's story well? There are four reasons for this: the subjects of case studies are good for telling true and complete management stories; Case studies, by their nature, are suitable for telling interesting and credible management stories; From the type of case study, it is suitable to tell a rich and different management story; (3) How to tell a good marketing story in China through case studies? The right decisions need to be made in the following four aspects: clarify whether the mission of research is to serve China or to influence the world; Determine the topic of research is to solve the problem of China or to pursue the frontier of international theory; Whether the research object selected is the sample within China or the global sample; These questions are of great significance for Chinese scholars to fulfill their mission of serving China and influencing the world.

The success of User Generated Content Virtual Communities (UGCC) greatly depends on the voluntary participation and continued contribution of their members. Therefore, more and more community operators and companies reward contributors, but there is not well understood: Do incentives will diminish intrinsic motivation of participation? Our study contributes to classify the incentive policies to monetary and non-monetary incentive, and how they influence the motivation of participation. Drawing on theories of SDT, we develop a theoretical model relating the motivations, participation, and performance of community participants. Our results reveal several important ?ndings. First, the monetary incentive will diminish the intrinsic motive while have different influence on the two internal motives (reputation, own-use value); Second, non-monetary incentive has the same positive influence on both intrinsic and internal motives. Third, the intrinsic motive and internal motives have impact on participation behavior in different ways, the other-oriented motives (reputation, altruism) have the significant positive influence, while the self-oriented motives (the enjoyment, own-use) have the significant negative impact on participation. The study shows that monetary incentive has more crowding effect while non-monetary incentive exhibits more reinforcing effect in the UGCC. Lastly, the theoretical contribution and managerial implication were concluded.

Considering recent conflicts with some foreign countries such as Japan which induce consumer animosity and ethnocentrism among Chinese consumers, and the critical importance of adolescent consumers, this study focused on how consumer animosity would influence adolescent consumers’ purchase intention of domestic brands. Findings indicated that adolescent consumer animosity toward Japan and America promoted their purchase intention of domestic brands via their consumer ethnocentrism. Animosity toward Japan also moderated the impact of consumer ethnocentrism on their purchase intention of domestic brands.

It has been found that the ad location will affect the effectiveness of advertising, but the existing researches did not dig into how individual’s cognitive style influencing his ads reading habit. In this paper, field-dependence and field-independence are introduced in advertising research, which stands for cognitive styles in terms of psychology. Using eye tracking technology, it records eye movement of 37 college students with normal vision when they browse different locations of ads on the web. The results indicate that: for all the subjects, there is significant difference on fixation duration and fixation counts in advertisements of different location. And interaction effect is found between ad location and cognitive style. With different fixation duration and counts, it also affects recognition results. Other than theoretical contribution, this study can also enlighten web advertisers in making advertising strategy.

In social interactions, luxury goods usually work as signal revealing the users’ status. In a market with both authentic luxury and counterfeit goods, how the authenticity of luxury goods is perceived by others is an important issue not only for consumers, but also for producers and the whole society as well. Previous studies more focus on the luxury (or counterfeit) user, who sends out luxury information, to study the motivation of luxury consumption. However, how other consumers recode and interpret the luxury information gets inconsiderable less attention, this issue deciding whether and how the luxury goods user’s social motivation can come true. This article aims to explore how the information of luxury goods is interpreted by other consumers and then become influential. The authors find out that the perception of authenticity of luxury goods is a complicated process in which place scheme, character scheme, incident scheme and product scheme can all influence customers’ perception. Through exploratory and empirical study, this paper formed a theoretical model to explain customers’ perception of authenticity of luxury goods.

Consumers often pursue contradicted goals in one decision, rendering the decision into an ambivalent one. This is especially true for unplanned purchase decisions. Recognizing the dynamic nature of consumer decisions, we explore whether and how consumers’ past regret influences their decision-making in present. Through a pretest and two empirical studies, we find that consumers’ action regret on past purchase experience may decrease their present intention to purchase when unplanned desire occurs, whereas inaction regret from past non-purchase may increase the present purchase. Based on the justification theory, we go deeper to explore the underlying mechanism. We argue and find that past action vs. inaction regret experience entail consumers to pay attention to the gain vs. loss inherent in the present purchase, and then this differentiated emphasis in return affect their present purchase decision-making. Besides, the effect of action/inaction regret may vary with consumers’ regulatory focus.

There exist studies that focus on the possible negative emotion (depression for instance) brought by mere concentration on out-of-stock. Or others solely study on the attractive effect induced by phantom alternative. What effect, positive or negative, will out-of-stock alternative impact on the purchase intention of similar alternative is still without a definite conclusion. This paper holds that there is not a certain positive or negative effect on the similar alternative purchase intention. Also, a dual mediation pathway model and relevant moderator of such influence mechanism are proposed. Our research shows that when offered the out-of-stock alternative, consumers seem to experience the stronger emotion of perceived scarcity and psychological reactance compared with no information offered. The effects of out-of-stock message on consumers’ similar alternative purchase intention mediated by scarcity and psychological reactance separately are opposite (positive versus negative). In addition, the negative effect mediated by psychological reactance is moderated by the occupation levels of cognitive resource. Psychological reactance is a moderated mediator. Whereas, the positive mediating effect of perceived scarcity is not affected.

The increasing brand crisis draws attention of theorists and managers in terms of how to response it. Existing crisis researches aim at image repair theory and the crisis communication theory, but for many real crisis phenomenons these theories are still unable to make a satisfactory explanation. Based on social interaction to investigate the effects of brand crisis restoration, this study, focusing on the irrational behavior of consumers in the brand crisis repair, discusses the interaction ritual restoration effects of brand crisis and repair mechanism. What’s most important, the paper argues brand crisis restoration is a way of interaction ritual chain. Using experiments, the research shows two main results. Firstly, different interaction ritual has different effect. When under inability brand crisis consumers prefer compensation more than apology, while the difference of the emotional energy to repair crisis is of no significant difference; Under dishonest brand crisis, consumers focus on both enterprise's restore behavior and enterprise's emotional energy, the ritual of high emotional energy apology is optimal for crisis reparation. Secondly, the main factor about why different ritual has different effect is the value perception produced by rituals. In conclusion, this research provides a new perspective about the restoration of brand crisis, which enriches the theory of brand crisis restoration and previous research about crisis. Besides the theoretical contributions, practical implications are discussed.

Based on attribution theory, this paper empirically analyses the relationship between consumer perception of a firm’s motives for sport sponsorship and purchase intention by using structural equation model. The study reveals that consumer can clearly distinguish egoistic-driven, values-driven, strategic-driven and stakeholder-driven motives of sponsorship. Thereinto, egoistic-driven and stakeholder-driven motives have significantly negative influence on consumers' trust and purchase intention, while values-driven and strategic-driven motives have significantly positive influence on consumers' trust and purchase intention. Further, consumer trust plays a partial mediating role in the impact of a firm’s motives for sports sponsorship on purchase intention. Finally, the paper analyses the impact of consumers’ characteristics and corporate types on consumers’ attribution, and gives some suggestions about sponsoring marketing for the managers.

Based on the psychological compensation mechanism of consumer behavior, the current research examines how social comparison in ability domain influences people’s conspicuous consumption, and explores the possible interventions. Past research regarded conspicuous consumption as a way of signaling social-economic status, which often derived from wealth comparison. Our research proposes that besides wealth comparison, comparison in consumption unrelated domains would also lead to conspicuous consumption. In this mechanism, conspicuous consumption is a way to compensate for the self threat resulted from upward comparison. 2 studies were conducted to confirm our hypothesis. Study 1 indicates that consumers are more likely to spend on conspicuous items after comparing their own academic performance to those better counterparts. Study 2 replicates the result of study 1 using a more general conspicuous consumption measure. Furthermore, we found that the impact of ability comparison on conspicuous consumption diminished if people engaged in a prior self affirmation.

As the historical retrospect of the nearly 30 years' activities of China Marketing Association of University, this paper describes some major activities and achievements of CMAU in three stages: 9 years of arduous pioneering, 10 years of vigorous development and 11 years of secretariat in Beijing. To reflect the reality, the documentary mainly makes references to annual brief report of CMAU. What’s more, this paper evaluates three former presidents’ work and contribution based on what author observes and interviews in the thirty times to participate in the preparatory meeting and the annual meeting of CMAU.

Through our research based on survival model, we identify two major factors that significantly influence our decision making on product elimination, as well as their impact mechanisms. These two factors are, namely, the changing rate of sales in the early stage and the average sales in pre-elimination stage. Specifically speaking, the higher these figures are, the less likely it is for products to be eliminated, which also means the longer these product may survive. The results of our research also demonstrate that brands with different market shares serving as a moderator in this model are impacted by different factors. Different from our stereotyped understanding, results of our research show that products with lower market share actually survive longer (than those with larger market share), which can be explained by substitution effect. Overall, findings of our research have laid a theoretical foundation for companies' decision making on product elimination.

The digitalization has brought big changes to the economic society, namely, virtualization of market players, digitization of factors of production, dynamization of the production process and platformization of market organizations. These four features of digitalization have further reconstructed the real management world, resulting in disruptive changes of internal and external relationships between organizations, and the underlying logics of production and operation. The nature of marketing is to answer how to solve the interactive relationship between the supplier and the consumer in the best way to realize the value co-creation. Obviously, digital technology is disrupting the traditional interactive relationship, which greatly weakens the effectiveness of the 4P and 4C marketing matrix. Therefore, we are intended to put forward the 4I (Interaction, Interest, Interface, Iteration) framework to reconstruct the marketing matrix in the age of digital intelligence. Finally, we offer some future topics of marketing strategy research and the new development direction of the discipline.