Pet has become an important part of many familes and pet related consumptions grows steadly in many countries. However, it is surprising that so little academic attention has been directed to this particular field. Pet consumption reflects how people look at animal, self, and others. It reveals not only the relationship between self and animal, but also the relationships among people. Further, it provides a unique perspective for studying family consumption decision making. As such, scholars both in demostic and abroad have begun to recognize the importance and value of studying pet related consumption behaviors. This paper reviews extensively a variety of literatures of pet-related consumption and attempt to present a picuture of research development in this field. The topics we touch upon include the motivation for pet acquisition, pet acquisition decision-making process, pet-related consumption decision-making, self-construction and crowding-out effect etc. We also discuss such topics as how pets are used in marketing, and what outcomes pet brings to consumers’ welfares. Finally, potential academic contributions and future directions for pet consumpetion behavior study are outlined and discussed.

Viral marketing is widely used as a social marketing strategy in the era of social commerce. Previous research applied agent-based model to simulate the social influence and explored the viral marketing performance under social network. But transactional community, which developed in the era of social commerce, is different from traditional social network in its network structure (dual network system) and members’ psychologies (informational influence). This research, based on the platform of largest transactional website in China (Taobao.com), applied web crawling technique to extract data of consumers’ social relation and activities from two transactional communities (Taobao Bangpai) and used ABMS to explore the effects of social influence, homophily and network topology on viral marketing performance. The results shows: (1) regardless of heterogeneous customer value, the increase in seed size (from 0.5% to 5%) would not increase the performance of viral marketing strategy (due to the overlap effect of each seed)； (2) when the density is controlled in random network, the performance of viral marketing based on social influence is significantly different from homophily mechanism； (3) when the network topology is adjusted into real world relationships, the difference is still significant. Especially, the homophily mechanism would only speed up the viral marketing process in an early phase, it cannot spread as wide as social influence do in the long term. This is because the constraints of community activity in homophily mechanism； (4) the experiment of exploring the effect of types of seeds on viral marketing performance shows that, compared with randomly chosen seeds, the seeds who possess central position (degree centrality) both in two layers of networks can significantly speed up the viral marketing process until the point of saturation effect.

The paper initially uses stochastic model to fit data of customer behavior stickiness and customer value, then estimates the corresponding parameters and uses Bayesian rule to calculate its mathematical expectation. We use expectations of customer behavior stickiness as independent variable, expectations of customer value as dependent variable, motivations of consumption as moderator, and conduct regression analysis to research the relationship among the three. The results show that customer behavior stickiness has a significant effect on customer value, and the moderating effect of hedonic motivation of consumption on the relationship above is proved. The value of customers who hold high hedonic motivation of consumption is mainly driven from website’s single visit time, while the value of customers who hold low or middle hedonic motivation of consumption is mainly driven from website’s visit frequency.

The motion picture industry is a cultural and creative industry with tangible sales return and intangible social return. Based on new product diffusion perspective, this paper investigates the diffusion pattern, movie-going behavior, and interpersonal communication in U.S. and China markets. After comparing the difference between China and U.S. markets, this paper suggests that: (1) the production process should satisfy opinion leaders’ needs; (2) the produce process could not only focus the market spending before movie’s release, but also increase market spending at the opening week; (3) the exhibition process should simulate word-of-mouth communication between moviegoers and further attract much more opinion seekers.

Based on the theories of consumer sequential choices and choice between hedonic and utilitarian products, this paper investigates how hedonic purchase differs from utilitarian purchase in affecting consumer’s subsequent decisions to purchase, the underlying mechanism and the boundary conditions through three studies. The results of the studies show that a hedonic (versus utilitarian) driver can make people more likely to focus on an option’s justifiability rather than its desirability. Specifically, a hedonic (vs. a utilitarian) initial item (1) reduces the subsequent purchase probability; (2) facilitates purchase of options that are supported by best overall reasons or are easy to justify. The preliminary condition is that consumers feel guilty or pain of paying from hedonic consumption. To the extent that contextual justifications and the chronic tendency of feeling pain when spending eliminate such negative emotions, the effects might be weakened.

In the highly competitive market environment, the competitive advantage brought by knowledge about customers has been widely recognized. As the acquisition of customer knowledge often rely on front-line staff, this paper explores the antecedents of customer need knowledge of front-line employees. Matched data from 235 employees and 235 customers was collected from thirty-four retail stores of international travel agency located in Guangdong and Guangxi provinces. Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) was adopted and showed that the level of customer need knowledge were positively associated with employee service orientation and the degree of customer value co-creation, the degree of customer value co-creation partially mediated the relationship between service orientation and employees’ customer need knowledge. In addition, by constructing a hierarchical moderating effect model, this paper also found that interaction orientation positively moderated the relationship between customer value co-creation and customer need knowledge. The study concluded with a discussion of theoretical and managerial implication.

This article uses enneagram to rebuild the BDS (Brand Dimensions Scales).The author tries to use the dynamic condition of enneagram to analyze the brand’s personality connection. After two experimental studies of 40 brands, the author reveals the new feature of brand’s personalities: each brand has a core personality which connects with one or two different personalities and this connection type is same as the enneagram model. This research using dynamic personality model to analyze the brand personality dimensions and it is a good complement to brand personality theory. It will provide the measuring tool for the follow-up study: How consumers choose brand which is different from their personality.

Interaction is the most outstanding feature of modern service industry; service quality is rooted in the interaction between service company\employees and customers. However, the interaction chain between company\employees and customer is always at risk. Employee is on the core position of the chain, employee’s interaction response to the interaction strategy of the company is very important. This study aims to study the path how is employee’s interactive capability developed. Through a survey of 207 modern service companies with 414 middle managers and 828 employees, we found that transformational leadership has a direct positive effect on employee’s interactive response capability, organizational identification mediate the effect of transformational leadership on employee’s interactive response capability, service climate mediate the effect of organizational identification on employee’s interactive response capability. The results have important implications on how to improve service quality of the service company.

Based on 4 empirical study, the authors examine the role of online review’s tactile cues in consumer’s purchase intention. Specially, by analyzing the data from taobao, study 1 found that online review’s tactile cues can significantly affect the consumer’s perception of review usefulness; Study 2 further indicated participants in positive online review’s tactile cues group(vs no tactile cues group) report significant higher scores in purchase intention and participants in negative online review’s tactile cues group(vs no tactile cues group) report significant lower scores in purchase intention; The authors focus 2 types of tactile cues in study 3 and find that holistic tactile cues is more effective than concrete tactile cues in increasing purchase intention under search product and concrete tactile cues is more effective than holistic tactile cues in increasing purchase intention under experience product; In study 4,the authors further explore the boundary condition of these effect and predict that temporal distance can disturb the effect by shift consumer’s nature focus.