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.

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.

Based on Social Network theory and Business Network theory, the authors interview 14 middle and senior channel managers from 14 firms which include manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, and conduct an exploratory study on following 4 primary questions: “is there a network view in the channel boundary person’s concept?”; “the structural configuration of the cognitive channel network”; “how does channel boundary person perceive the channel network?”, and “how the perceived channel network impact on the channel member’s decision and behavior?”. The research findings show that there is a relative clear channel network in the channel boundary person’s concept, and this cognitive channel network consists of two interwined networks, that is, inter-firm network and interpersonal network across firms. The information about the channel members and transaction terms which flows through the formal firm institution and organizational structure, and interpersonal network across firms is the basis on which channel boundary persons perceive and cognize the channel network. Furthermore, the inter-firm network and interpersonal network across firms influence on channel managers’ decisions, and in turn, impact on the channel members channel behaviors jointly. The research findings are valuable for the future researches on the channel behaviors from network perspective, and for the researches which integrate Chinese traditional cultural factors into the channel behavior framework. The authors also discuss the managerial implications of the research finding.

The paper explores the role of mental simulation in the relationship between the outcome valence and regret. Across two experiments, the paper discovers the mental simulation can serve as moderator. Specifically, the regret difference between bad result and good result when people are using outcome-focused mental simulation is stronger than the regret difference when people are using process-focused mental simulation. The paper also finds the mediation role of disconfirmation of product performance and anticipated result.

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.

Despite the prevalent use of loyalty program (LP), the effectiveness and underlying mechanism is not well understood. To this end, the authors introduce the construct of price ambiguity of reward—or the subjective experience of missing price information relevant to a reward—and articulate its important role in understanding LPs. Two relationship types are examined: exchange relationships in which benefits are given to others to get something back and communal relationships in which benefits are given to show concern for other’s needs. Study 1 found that price salient rewards work worse than price ambiguous ones in maintaining the loyalty of communal customers. Further, we try to find out the underlying mechanism of the price ambiguity. Results of Study 2 showed that in LPs, communal norms are vulnerable to salient price information. Price ambiguous (salient) rewards adhere (violate) to the norms of communal relationship and enhance (decrease) communal customer’s loyalty intention. Finally, we discuss the theoretical, practical, and future research implications of these findings.

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.

Nostalgia has a significant influence on consumption behavior. In previous studies, most researches took nostalgia as an element of advertisements or brands, which meant that the emotion of nostalgia was triggered by nostalgic advertisements or brands. Different from the past researches, this paper took nostalgia as an independent emotion which was not caused by the advertisements or products (termed incidental emotion) and investigated how it affected consumers’ decisions. To be specific, this research studied how nostalgia affects Chinese consumers’ evaluation of domestic and foreign brands through two experiments. The result indicated that nostalgia cannot elevate Chinese consumers’ evaluation of domestic brands, but it can weaken the evaluation of foreign brands by decreasing the consumers’ materialism. Lastly, the author discussed nostalgia strategies for both Chinese and foreign brands learnt from the result.

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.