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• 20 Aug 2024
• Cold Call Podcast

Angel City Football Club: A New Business Model for Women’s Sports

Angel City Football Club (ACFC) was founded in 2020 by venture capitalist Kara Nortman, entrepreneur Julie Uhrman, and actor and activist Natalie Portman. As outsiders to professional sports, the all-female founding team had rewritten the playbook for how to build a sports franchise by applying lessons from the tech and entertainment industries. Unlike typical sports franchises that built their teams and track records over many years before extending their brand beyond a local base, ACFC had inverted the model, generating both global and local interest in the club during its first three years. The club’s early success was reflected in its market valuation of $250 million as of its sale in July 2024 — the highest in the National Women’s Soccer League. Equally important, ACFC had started to bend the curve toward greater pay equity in women’s sports — the club’s ultimate goal. But the founders knew there was much more to do to capitalize on the club’s momentum. As they developed ACFC’s first three-year strategic plan in 2024, they weighed the most effective ways to build value for the franchise. Was it better to allocate the incremental budget to investments in digital brand building or to investments in the on-field product? Senior Lecturer Jeffrey Rayport is joined by case co-author Nicole Keller and club co-founder Kara Nortman to discuss the case, “Angel City Football Club: Scoring a New Model.”

Why Competing With Tech Giants Requires Finding Your Own Edge

In the new book Smart Rivals, Feng Zhu and Bonnie Yining Cao show business leaders how to create competitive advantages by uncovering their hidden strengths and leveraging their individual capabilities.

• 06 Aug 2024

How EdTech Firm Coursera Is Incorporating GenAI into Its Products and Services

In early 2023, Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera, started developing the EdTech firm’s strategy for incorporating GenAI into their offerings. By early 2024, the firm had made significant progress in bringing four key capabilities to market, but GenAI was evolving quickly and Coursera needed to continuously improve its offerings. While the firm had been an early mover, competitors were adapting fast. Was Coursera taking full advantage of the opportunities presented by the technology? What more could it do to remain competitive?

• 09 Jul 2024

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and Brand Building

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which allow individuals to own their digital assets and move them from place to place, are changing the interaction between consumers and digital goods, brands, and platforms. Professor Scott Duke Kominers and tech entrepreneur Steve Kaczynski discuss the case, “Bored Ape Yacht Club: Navigating the NFT World,” and the related book they co-authored, The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform The Way We Buy, Sell, And Create. They focus on the rise and popularity of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs and the new model of brand building created by owning those tokens.

• 07 May 2024

Lessons in Business Innovation from Legendary Restaurant elBulli

Ferran Adrià, chef at legendary Barcelona-based restaurant elBulli, was facing two related decisions. First, he and his team must continue to develop new and different dishes for elBulli to guarantee a continuous stream of innovation, the cornerstone of the restaurant's success. But they also need to focus on growing the restaurant’s business. Can the team balance both objectives? Professor Michael I. Norton discusses the connections between creativity, emotions, rituals, and innovation – and how they can be applied to other domains – in the case, “elBulli: The Taste of Innovation,” and his new book, The Ritual Effect.

• 29 Feb 2024

Beyond Goals: David Beckham's Playbook for Mobilizing Star Talent

Reach soccer's pinnacle. Become a global brand. Buy a team. Sign Lionel Messi. David Beckham makes success look as easy as his epic free kicks. But leveraging world-class talent takes discipline and deft decision-making, as case studies by Anita Elberse reveal. What could other businesses learn from his ascent?

• 17 Jan 2024

Psychological Pricing Tactics to Fight the Inflation Blues

Inflation has slowed from the epic rates of 2021 and 2022, but many consumers still feel pinched. What will it take to encourage them to spend? Thoughtful pricing strategies that empower customers as they make purchasing decisions, says research by Elie Ofek.

• 05 Dec 2023

What Founders Get Wrong about Sales and Marketing

Which sales candidate is a startup’s ideal first hire? What marketing channels are best to invest in? How aggressively should an executive team align sales with customer success? Senior Lecturer Mark Roberge discusses how early-stage founders, sales leaders, and marketing executives can address these challenges as they grow their ventures in the case, “Entrepreneurial Sales and Marketing Vignettes.”

Tommy Hilfiger’s Adaptive Clothing Line: Making Fashion Inclusive

In 2017, Tommy Hilfiger launched its adaptive fashion line to provide fashion apparel that aims to make dressing easier. By 2020, it was still a relatively unknown line in the U.S. and the Tommy Hilfiger team was continuing to learn more about how to serve these new customers. Should the team make adaptive clothing available beyond the U.S., or is a global expansion premature? Assistant Professor Elizabeth Keenan discusses the opportunities and challenges that accompanied the introduction of a new product line that effectively serves an entirely new customer while simultaneously starting a movement to provide fashion for all in the case, “Tommy Hilfiger Adaptive: Fashion for All.”

• Research & Ideas

Are Virtual Tours Still Worth It in Real Estate? Evidence from 75,000 Home Sales

Many real estate listings still feature videos and interactive tools that simulate the experience of walking through properties. But do they help homes sell faster? Research by Isamar Troncoso probes the post-pandemic value of virtual home tours.

• 17 Oct 2023

With Subscription Fatigue Setting In, Companies Need to Think Hard About Fees

Subscriptions are available for everything from dental floss to dog toys, but are consumers tiring of monthly fees? Elie Ofek says that subscription revenue can provide stability, but companies need to tread carefully or risk alienating customers.

• 29 Aug 2023

As Social Networks Get More Competitive, Which Ones Will Survive?

In early 2023, TikTok reached close to 1 billion users globally, placing it fourth behind the leading social networks: Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Meanwhile, competition in the market for videos had intensified. Can all four networks continue to attract audiences and creators? Felix Oberholzer-Gee discusses competition and imitation among social networks in his case “Hey, Insta & YouTube, Are You Watching TikTok?”

• 26 Jun 2023

Want to Leave a Lasting Impression on Customers? Don't Forget the (Proverbial) Fireworks

Some of the most successful customer experiences end with a bang. Julian De Freitas provides three tips to help businesses invest in the kind of memorable moments that will keep customers coming back.

• 31 May 2023

With Predictive Analytics, Companies Can Tap the Ultimate Opportunity: Customers’ Routines

Armed with more data than ever, many companies know what key customers need. But how many know exactly when they need it? An analysis of 2,000 ridesharing commuters by Eva Ascarza and colleagues shows what's possible for companies that can anticipate a customer's routine.

• 30 May 2023

Can AI Predict Whether Shoppers Would Pick Crest Over Colgate?

Is it the end of customer surveys? Definitely not, but research by Ayelet Israeli sheds light on the potential for generative AI to improve market research. But first, businesses will need to learn to harness the technology.

• 24 Apr 2023

What Does It Take to Build as Much Buzz as Booze? Inside the Epic Challenge of Cannabis-Infused Drinks

The market for cannabis products has exploded as more states legalize marijuana. But the path to success is rife with complexity as a case study about the beverage company Cann by Ayelet Israeli illustrates.

• 07 Apr 2023

When Celebrity ‘Crypto-Influencers’ Rake in Cash, Investors Lose Big

Kim Kardashian, Lindsay Lohan, and other entertainers have been accused of promoting crypto products on social media without disclosing conflicts. Research by Joseph Pacelli shows what can happen to eager investors who follow them.

• 10 Feb 2023

COVID-19 Lessons: Social Media Can Nudge More People to Get Vaccinated

Social networks have been criticized for spreading COVID-19 misinformation, but the platforms have also helped public health agencies spread the word on vaccines, says research by Michael Luca and colleagues. What does this mean for the next pandemic?

• 02 Feb 2023

Why We Still Need Twitter: How Social Media Holds Companies Accountable

Remember the viral video of the United passenger being removed from a plane? An analysis of Twitter activity and corporate misconduct by Jonas Heese and Joseph Pacelli reveals the power of social media to uncover questionable situations at companies.

• 06 Dec 2022

Latest Isn’t Always Greatest: Why Product Updates Capture Consumers

Consumers can't pass up a product update—even if there's no improvement. Research by Leslie John, Michael Norton, and Ximena Garcia-Rada illustrates the powerful allure of change. Are we really that naïve?

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Making Your Marketing Strategy Work

• Thomas V. Bonoma

Should we emphasize price or quality? Do we want to stay with smaller, upscale retailers or seek market expansion through large discount chains? Will our proposed new product take sales away from our existing line? These are the kinds of questions—ones of strategy—that marketers agonize over. But what happens once a particular strategy is agreed […]

The marketing literature is replete with research and analysis to help managers devise marketing strategies tailored to the marketplace. Yet when it comes to implementing those strategies, the literature is silent and the self-help books ring hollow. What top management needs in the 1980s is not new answers to questions about strategy but increased attention to marketing practice, to the signposts of good marketing management that direct clever strategies toward successful marketplace results.

• TB Thomas V. Bonoma was a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, in Boston, and the founder of Renaissance Cosmetics, in Stamford, Connecticut. He authored several books and HBR articles.

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• v.12(2); Apr-Jun 2019

The impact of marketing strategies in healthcare systems

The dynamic evolution of life has inevitably affected the healthcare systems generating significant changes and imposing healthcare marketing as an indispensable element of health brands. Healthcare is a field in a permanent evolution, the plethora of opportunities stimulating creativity, enthusiasm, and will exploit the specialists in the field.

As the philosophy and marketing techniques in other fields cannot find applicability in the healthcare services, healthcare need their own approach and present certain features that are not found in other industries (Thomas RK. Health Services Marketing, A Practitioner’s Guide, 2008, Ed. Springer).

Through its specificity, healthcare marketing is an interdisciplinary field because it uses certain concepts, methods, and techniques specific both to classical and social marketing. The specificity of healthcare marketing is that there are services and markets but no money equivalent. This means the effectiveness of its application can be found in the image of a healthy population, the detection of a chronically ill category of people, ensuring the treatment of ill people by going through the whole rehabilitation process, professional reintegration, social reintegration of ill people, etc. The application of marketing in the field of healthcare was imposed by the problems in the health of the society.

An effective marketing approach involves in-depth investigation of the patients’ needs, identifying latent needs and offering new health services that patients have not explicitly requested (Purcarea VL. Marketingul Ingrijirilor de Sanatate - curs Universitar, 2017, Ed. Universitara “Carol Davila”).

Patients’ involvement in the achievement of the medical act has become a necessity of present life with wide and complex meanings, not only beyond changing the mentality of the providers but also with significant changes like lifestyle, consumption habits and medication of beneficiaries. As the daily process evolves, change will be fundamental to the fundamental purpose of our existence: life. In addition, this will undoubtedly bear the hindrance of how the relationship will harmonize the need for health. Structural changes forces health systems to accelerate towards the future, considering the current needs, and the future strategy cannot be viable without performing management and marketing abilities (Popa F, Purcarea Th, Purcarea VL, Ratiu M. Marketingul serviciilor de ingrijire a sanatatii, 2007, Ed. Universitara “Carol Davila”).

The marketing of healthcare services differs primarily through the nature of demand for health services. Secondly, the beneficiary may not be the target of the marketing campaign, the physician being the one who decides what, where, when, and how much will be provided for a particular service. The decision-maker may be the doctor, the health plan representative, a family member. Healthcare services also differ where the product can be very complex and may not be easily conceptualized. Many of the procedures used in healthcare, especially those based on technology, are complicated and difficult to explain to a person who is not specialized in that particular field.

Another healthcare challenge, especially for service providers, is that not all potential clients are considered “desirable” for a particular service. While service providers are required to provide services to all applicants, regardless of their ability to pay, there are certain categories of patients whom the marketer may not encourage to request a particular service. The marketer faces the challenge of attracting customers to healthcare organizations, however, without attracting too many from the category of those who are likely to represent economic debts.

Over the past decade, healthcare has experienced many marketing trends that have fundamentally altered marketing. These trends are the follows:

• — From a mass marketing approach to a more specific approach.
• — From image marketing to service marketing.
• — From “one measure for all” to personalization.
• — From the emphasis on a health episode to a long-lasting relationship.
• — From “ignoring” the market, to market intelligence.
• — From low-tech to high-tech (Thomas RK. Health Services Marketing, A Practitioner’s Guide, 2008, Ed. Springer).

Marketing plays an important role in helping healthcare professionals to create, communicate, and provide value to their target market. Modern marketers start from customers rather than from products or services. They are more interested in building a sustainable relationship, than in ensuring a single transaction. Their aim is to create a high level of consumer satisfaction so that they return to the same supplier. Marketers have used many traditional methods that include marketing research, product design, distribution, pricing, advertising, promotional sales, and sales management. These methods need to be joined by new ones, related to new technology and new concepts, to attract customers through messages and offers.

Although the consumer typically receives most of the information about a product through the commercial media. The most important information comes from recommendations or from publicly available independent authorities. The two categories of sources provide complementary functions; commercial media – informs, while personal or expert sources legitimize or potentiate the evaluation process. For example, physicians often find out about new drugs from commercial sources, but they turn to other physicians for legitimate opinions.

Although much has been written about subliminal decisions, current models look at the process from a cognitive perspective, which means the consumer/patient, makes his own judgements on a rational basis (Kotler P, Shalowitz J, Stevens RJ. Strartegic Marketing for Health Care Organizations. Building a Customer Driven Health System, 2008, Ed. Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Imprint).

In an attempt to meet a need, the patient expects certain benefits from the chosen health service and provider. The patients’ attitudes, judgements, and preferences about certain brands through a procedure of evaluating the attributes of these brands, develop a set of beliefs about the attributes that correspond to each brand (Kotler P, Rackham N, Krishnaswamy S. Ending the War between Sales and Marketing, July 2006, Harvard Business Review).

The main actor who marks the process of production and delivery of healthcare services is the patient and his presence is part of the delivery system .

In the field of healthcare services, the performance occurs only in the presence of the healthcare consumer and his wiliness to the service. Thus, the consumer becomes an indispensable factor for any service; the consumer interacts with the supplier, becomes co-provider of the service, participating with time and effort in the delivery process (Popa F, Purcarea Th, Purcarea VL. Ratiu M. Marketingul serviciilor de ingrijire a sanatatii, 2007, Ed. Universitara “Carol Davila”).

Healthcare consumers are actively or passively involved in delivery, but their presence has implications for the medical organization’s activity because any specialist who meets the patient will contribute to the service production. In addition, any tangible element, which the healthcare consumer meets, is part of the health service delivery process; in fact, any changes occurring at the place of service delivery, will lead to changes in the patient’s behavior.

From a marketing perspective, the process of providing healthcare services must be conducted in full compliance with patient requirements, activities are being designed to meet these requirements. However, achieving such a goal implies the identification of all points of interference of healthcare staff with the healthcare service consumers and the assessment of the extent to which the activities carried out at these points correspond to the needs and expectations expressed by the patients. Since the behavior of the health services consumer is difficult to predict, the presence of the patient in the delivery process may be a source of major uncertainty.

Far from having a passive behavior, the consumer has multiple functions in the production of services as a “co-producer”, which determines many specialists to consider him an “ external human resource ”.

Patient satisfaction must be the main objective of any healthcare organization and this requires a thorough knowledge of their needs and expectations. Providing a high-quality healthcare service is based on meeting certain requirements so that the service attains the level desired by the patient. In order to gain the trust of healthcare consumers, the specialized staff of the organizations in the field must be more receptive to the wishes, suggestions, patient complaints and, at the same time, become more sensitive to their concerns. The effectiveness of this approach depends on how the medical organization has an effective communication with patients, presents a correct image of the health service, and delivers the promised service properly, and presents a permanent concern for the continuous improvement of the service provided to exceed the expectations of the patients (Ciurea AV, Cooper CL, Avram E. (coord). Managementul sistemelor şi organizaţiilor sănătăţii, 2010, Editura Universitară “Carol Davila”, Bucureşti).

By acting in a dynamic and unpredictable environment, (in order to survive) the health service provider must be able to detect the opportunities and threats of the market on which it operates. In this context, the formulation of a realistic, coherent, and explicit strategy by the medical unit is of crucial importance in anticipating its future and reducing uncertainty in the activity.

The marketing strategy is the way an organization acts under the influence of environmental factors. In practical terms, marketing strategies outline a path following the analysis of environmental factors. The marketing policy defines its general framework of action in order to carry out its entire activity, including several strategies.

Developing the marketing policies and strategies specific to health services providing units is a complex process. Taking into account many internal and external factors, the interdependencies and conditioning links between them, as well as the favorable or unfavorable impact they can exert on the health unit, they must be analyzed in depth, interrelated, and interpreted for making strategic and firm decisions regarding the future development of the medical institution.

The core of the marketing strategy in the field of health services is represented by the quality of services. Successful organizations in the healthcare field have a clear, competitive, strategy that empowers and forces them to adapt to environmental conditions. The marketing strategy in the healthcare services field is in fact the attitude of the medical organization in relation to the marketing environment and, at the same time, its position in relation to its components.

At present, patients have so many options regarding the choice of healthcare services and providers that the only way the healthcare practices can really be distinguished is by establishing a well-differentiated, memorable, and unique proposal alongside a marketing strategy adapted to the digital era.

A valuable proposal must have the following characteristics:

• — It is true
• — The value offered is superior to the one of the competition
• — It is important to the target public
• — It is memorable and easy to remember
• — It is difficult to copy by the competition.

According to a Harvard Business Review, 64% of the consumers have “genuine common values” as the main influence on their relationship with the brand (Hirsch L. The 8 Most Important Marketing Strategies for a Healthcare Practice – Part 1, November 22, 2017, retrieved from: https://hirschhealthconsulting.com/8-important-marketing-strategies-healthcare-practice-part-1/ ).

Today, major healthcare organizations focus on content to win the race of digital supremacy. Content marketing strategies for the healthcare field are not just about blogging and producing tangible results. Since hospitals are linked to patients and physicians, digital marketing is the way to bring this process to a completely new level.

At present, digital content helps build positive brand impressions. The use of new digital marketing strategies is essential to maximize the efficiency of marketing expenses and generate higher return rates. By applying innovative health marketing principles to reinvigorate the medical organization’s marketing initiatives, organizations will be able to better position their service offers to consumers.

For healthcare providers, the use of informative blogs or articles published on social media can be effective ways to stay relevant to patients. Moreover, infusing targeted keywords into the content can add a marketing boost.

For organizational marketing to be effective, the digital platforms in which the organization will operate on must be identified, the target public will have to be segmented correctly, and customized marketing messages will have to resonate with the audience.

Marketing strategies for marketing a healthcare practice in the healthcare field. Source: Hirsch Healthcare Consulting, https://hirschhealthconsulting.com/8-important-marketing-strategies-healthcare-practice-part-1/ .

To understand the impact of marketing strategies on the quality of healthcare services, it is important to understand today’s medical consumer who prefers to look for medical information online, where he also has a wealth of healthcare services, healthcare providers, reviews from patients who contacted the provider, etc.

With digital marketing, almost everything can be tracked and measured. Healthcare professionals and healthcare organizations no longer need to insight what works and what does not work. With the help of marketing performance information, healthcare professionals, and healthcare organizations can make an informed decision on how to improve their efforts, along with the ability to continually measure and evaluate them.

The healthcare industry has the potential to significantly increase its coverage and effectively engage consumers with digital marketing tactics.

As the marketing progress grows, organizations are moving towards more digital approaches to remain relevant to consumers. Digital marketing expenses have been the highest of all time, with healthcare companies spending over $ 2.5 billion on marketing, estimated at $ 4 billion by 2020 (Health Works Collective, Digital Marketing Dominates Healthcare Advertising, October 20, 2018, retrieved from: https://www.healthworkscollective.com/digital-marketing-dominates-healthcare-advertising/ ).

In this context, 44% of the marketing costs for health-related products and services are dedicated to mobile and digital platforms. TV advertising costs have dropped to less than 33% and are expected to continue to decrease, as the cost-effectiveness of placing a product or service on TV seems to no longer justify the investment.

The way consumers use the internet to find hospital units and healthcare providers evolves in favor of smart devices. With more than 80% of the patients who frequently use smartphones, to either identify or interact with physicians, it is essential to reconfigure marketing initiatives to better fit the era we live in. In addition, as Google reconfigures its search algorithms to favor mobile-friendly websites, now it is the right time to prioritize rethinking digital ads.

At the same time, the marketing mix strategy is necessary in medical organizations to ensure their success. Thus, the strategy leads to a significant impact on the medical organization, including its performance measured by patient satisfaction, the co-ordination of planned marketing efforts to address organizational performance being essential.

Therefore, the benefits of implementing marketing strategies are

• — to improve the competitive advantage,
• — to increase the visibility,
• — to create a solid reputation among patients,
• — to understand the needs and expectations of consumers,
• — to understand the patients’ perceptions of the quality and results of their experience within the medical organization, offering memorable experiences to patients and, of course, building a strong, effective, dominant brand on the health services market.

HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article

Research on the impact of marketing strategy on consumers’ impulsive purchase behavior in livestreaming e-commerce.

• 1 School of Foreign Languages for Business, Guangxi University of Finance and Economics, Nanning, China
• 2 School of Business, Guilin University of Electronic Technology, Guilin, China
• 3 School of Economics, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, Islamabad, Pakistan

Livestreaming e-commerce has emerged as a highly profitable e-commerce that has revolutionized the retail industry, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, research on livestreaming e-commerce is still in its infancy. This study sheds new light on impulsive purchase behavior in livestreaming e-commerce. Based on stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theory, this study introduces the “People-Product-Place” marketing strategy for livestreaming e-commerce from the perspective of consumer perception and aims to understand the impact of marketing strategy on impulsive purchase behavior in e-commerce livestreaming shopping scenes, and to examine the mediating effect of involvement. The study conducted SEM analysis, in Amos, on 437 response sets from an online anonymous survey. The results show that perceived e- commerce anchor attributes , perceived scarcity , and immersion positively influence impulsive purchase behavior; that “People-Product-Place” marketing strategy is important; and that effective marketing triggers impulsive purchase. Perceived e-commerce anchor attributes, perceived scarcity , and immersion positively influence involvement , which positively influences impulsive purchase. Involvement mediates between perceived e- commerce anchor attributes , perceived scarcity and immersion , and impulsive purchase. These findings guide marketers to improve the profitability of livestreaming e-commerce and provide some references of economic recovery for many other countries that also suffered from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Introduction

New consumption patterns derived from the Internet, network, and information systems technology have emerged in recent years ( Corcoran and Andrae, 2013 ). These developments have led to changes in individuals’ concepts of consumption and their consumption habits. After the web portal era of Web 1.0 and the social media era of Web 2.0, we have entered the scene media era of Web 3.0 ( Zhang, 2020 ). The emergence of online shopping has greatly improved consumers’ shopping experience ( Helm et al., 2020 ). Online shoppers are not restricted by time, location, or travel/transportation. However, in “traditional” online shopping, shoppers receive information only through images, text, and prerecorded video ( Wongkitrungrueng and Assarut, 2020 ). Thus, in the Web 3.0 era the development of this e-commerce has entered a bottleneck ( Wu Q. et al., 2020 ). Intentionally designed promotional videos and excessively beautified images of online products make it difficult for consumers to obtain true information. This “asymmetry of information” between online consumers and merchants contributes to consumer doubt and distrust in purchase decision-making ( Demaj and Manjani, 2020 ; Lamr and Dostál, 2022 ; Utz et al., 2022 ). Lagging customer consultation services further frustrate the online shopping experience ( Othman et al., 2020 ). Thus, innovation that emphasizes a comprehensively good consumer experience is needed.

China is the largest Internet market in the world ( Akram et al., 2018a ). In 2016, a new online retailing model integrating e-commerce with online livestreaming shopping emerged in China ( Rui and Kang, 2016 ). This marketing model is based on e-commerce, uses livestreaming as a marketing tool ( Ding et al., 2020 ), and provides direct and efficient communication to minimize information asymmetry ( Wongkitrungrueng et al., 2020 ). This enables online shoppers to get a real three-dimensional experience in the virtual network environment and increases adhesion and trust between users, merchants, and platforms ( Li, 2020 ). Professional selection of products, anchor persona, live product display, and real-time interaction is integrated into a retailing model that attracts users to watch, interact, and purchase ( Liu L. et al., 2020 ). The COVID-19 pandemic has driven rapid change in product consumption patterns ( Liu L. et al., 2020 ; Zwanka and Buff, 2021 ). Since 2020, the “home economy” trend has further stimulated the growth of livestreaming e-commerce. In 2020, China’s livestreaming e-commerce market exceeded ¥1.2 trillion, with an annual growth of 197.0% ( IResearch, 2021 ). Livestreaming shopping has become a new engine of economic growth in China ( Ma, 2021 ). According to CNNIC (2022) , there were 1.032 billion Chinese netizens at the end of 2021, and 99.7% of these netizens were mobile device users. By the end of 2020, there were 388 million e-commerce livestreaming users, accounting for 39.2% of the total netizens ( China Live E-Commerce Industry Research Report, 2021 ). A large number of netizens provides a vigorous driving force for the development of e-commerce. The sales volume during the “618” promotion period (1–18 June) of Jingdong livestreaming increased by 161% year-on-year ( CNNIC, 2022 ). The first-hour sales volume on Taobao livestreaming on 1 June 2021 exceeded the whole-day sales volume for the same day in 2020 ( Sina, 2021 ). The Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) of major B2C e-commerce platforms in China during the Double 11 period in 2021 was ¥952.3 billion, to which livestreaming shopping contributed over ¥73 billion ( Syntun, 2021 ).

According to eMarketer’s Global E-Commerce Report, China continued to lead the global e-commerce market in 2021 with 792.5 million digital buyers (33.3% of the global total) and $2.779 trillion e-commerce sales (56.8% of the global total). The e-commerce share of total retail sales in China is the highest compared to other countries. China has become the first country to account for more than 50% of total transactions through e-commerce retail sales ( Ethan Cramer-Flood, Global Ecommerce Update, 2021 ). Live commerce or live video shopping generated sales of $171 million in 2020 in China ( Utsi, 2022 ). Compared to China, the United States and Europe are taking baby steps in the expansion of livestreaming commerce. Amazon and YouTube advanced capabilities of their websites and reviewing consumers’ reaction toward livestream shopping ( Ryan, 2020 ). Livestreaming e-commerce generated $60 billion sales in 2019 globally, but the US market contributed less than $1 billion ( Kharif and Townsend, 2020 ). However, the US market is growing fast, especially in certain products, for instance, apparel, makeup, and alcoholic beverages ( Kharif and Townsend, 2020 ). In the European market, few consumers understand the concept of live video shopping, which is one of the main reasons why live commerce is not as popular as in the Chinese market ( Andersson and Pitz, 2021 ). Live video service providers Zellma and Bambuser 1 suggest that companies in Europe need education on how to apply livestreaming e-retailing into their business, and they are confident that European consumers are ready to embrace new online shopping forms ( Andersson and Pitz, 2021 ). In 2021, an online survey conducted in Poland, Spain, France, and the United Kingdom reported that 7,261 respondents were interested in livestreaming on e-commerce website/app and 6,602 were interested in social media livestreaming ( Forrester, 2021 ). Hence, investigation would provide insight into how e-tailers promote featured products on live commerce platforms in China, and how consumers perceive this marketing.

E-commerce livestreaming shopping re-establishes the relationship between merchants, commodities, and consumers ( Liu, 2021 ). In a livestreaming shopping room, the anchor creates an immersive experience for consumers ( Luo et al., 2020 ) and stimulates impulsive purchase through a series of strategies ( Xu et al., 2020 ). In e-commerce livestreaming shopping, it takes only a moment for consumers to be attracted by live product promotion introduced by anchors regardless of whether consumers are hedonistic or utilitarian in outlook ( Xu et al., 2020 ). Triggered consumption behavior is mostly impulsive purchase ( Li, 2020 ). According to the iMedia Research report “User Research and Analysis of China’s Live Streaming E-commerce in the First Half of 2020,” 65.2% of livestreaming viewers purchased goods in the livestreaming shopping room, and 49.5% admitted that their purchases were impulsive ( IMedia Research, 2020 ). A recent study on online purchase intention in China asserts that online shopping in the social commerce setting is driven more by hedonistic than utilitarian motivation ( Akram et al., 2021 ), and that impulsive buying contains hedonic features ( Akram et al., 2018b ). IMedia Research (2020) considered that the most direct support for the incremental performance of e-commerce is to trigger more consumers to purchase impulsively for unplanned needs when watching livestreaming. Awakening unplanned consumption is a long-term and deep driving force for e-tailers using livestreaming. Thus, this study investigated the practical significance of impulse purchase behavior in e-commerce live broadcasts to inform marketing strategy aimed at impulsive buying.

Good sales performance is inseparable from effective marketing strategy ( Akram et al., 2018a ; Varadarajan, 2020 ). The continuing growth of livestreaming shopping makes it important for e-commerce investors and managers to understand influencing factors for impulse buying in livestreaming shopping. Livestreaming e-commerce aims to sell products and services to consumers ( Hu and Chaudhry, 2020 ; Wongkitrungrueng et al., 2020 ). This business model contains the basic elements of the “People-Product-Place” theory essential in retailing ( Guo and Xu, 2021 ), but in different forms. E-commerce livestreaming shopping reconstructs a retail scenario comprising “People-Product-Place” to realize the real-time, situationalization and visualization of communication in the entire process of e-commerce livestreaming shopping, and to bring remarkable features of strong interactivity and authenticity ( Duan, 2020 ). Researchers have suggested that anchor promotion, product promotion, and livestreaming atmosphere are likely to trigger strong emotions in consumers, leading to impulsive purchases ( Xu et al., 2019 , 2020 ; Lee and Chen, 2021 ; Ming et al., 2021 ). Empirical studies find that online consumers are easily triggered by marketing stimuli to make impulsive purchases, and rich marketing methods help consumers avoid monotony and frustration, thus enhancing the shopping experience ( Sundström et al., 2019 ).

Purchase behavior in live-broadcast shopping rooms has become a popular research topic. Researchers have investigated external stimuli such as atmosphere clues ( Gong et al., 2019 ), IT affordances ( Dong and Wang, 2018 ), discounted prices and scarcity ( Wang S. Q., 2021 ; Yan, 2021 ); and inherent characteristics of livestreaming marketing, including the attributes of anchors ( Han and Xu, 2020 ), their communication styles ( Wu N. et al., 2020 ), their identity and information source characteristics ( Liu F. J. et al., 2020 ), relationship ties and customer commitment ( Peng et al., 2021 ); opinion leaders ( Yin, 2020 ; Lakhan, 2021 ); interaction ( Wang S. Q., 2021 ; Yan, 2021 ); perceived enjoyment ( Lakhan, 2021 ; Lee and Chen, 2021 ); and perceived product usefulness ( Lee and Chen, 2021 ). There are few studies on the impact of livestreaming marketing strategies on impulsive purchase. Livestreaming is jointly constructed by various stakeholders, including those from the three retail marketing elements “People-Product-Place.” Clearly, effective multiparty relationships are central to any effective livestreaming marketing strategy.

In this context, based on stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theory, this study introduced the “People-Product-Place” marketing strategies for livestreaming from the perspective of consumer perception, to study how livestreaming influences impulsive purchasing. This study aimed to more comprehensively explain the perspective for research on the impact of consumer impulsive purchase behavior. As well as to enhance the understanding of the “People-Product-Place” marketing model of e-commerce livestreaming, guide marketers to improve the profitability of livestreaming e-commerce, and provide reference for the healthy and sustainable development of e-commerce livestreaming industry. Then, hopefully to provide reference of economic recovery under the impact of the normalization of the COVID-19 epidemic for many other countries.

The rest of the article is structured as follows: the theoretical framework and hypothesis development are discussed in the following section. Research design and methodology, and data analysis and hypotheses testing are described in the subsequent sections. The findings and their implications, study limitations, and further research are discussed in the final section.

Theoretical Framework and Hypothesis Development

Theoretical framework.

SOR theory ( Mehrabian and Russell, 1974 ) underpins the study. Stimulus refers to external stimuli; Organism represents the internal state of an individual when that individual perceives a stimulus; and Response is the behavior of the individual in response to stimuli. The SOR model is a mediation model in which a stimulus provokes a response through the mediating effects of the organism. The SOR model has been applied to studies of online purchasing behavior ( Hashmi et al., 2019 ; Huang and Suo, 2021 ; Karim et al., 2021 ; Lee and Chen, 2021 ; Ming et al., 2021 ). Impulse purchases are unplanned and occur when consumers are stimulated internally and/or externally ( Rook, 1987 ; Lim et al., 2017 ). Piron (1991) believed that stimuli can come from products, the shopping environment, or the people who accompany you for shopping. This is consistent with the elements “People-Product-Place.” Stimuli in livestreaming have some similar and some different characteristics with traditional online and offline shopping ( Gong et al., 2019 ). This study used “People-Product-Place” as the stimulus factor (S), involvement as internal state of an individual (O), and explored the effect on impulsive purchase behavior (R).

Hypothesis Development

Impulsive purchase behavior.

Impulse buying is a popular subject in the domain of consumer decision-making. Researchers claim that impulse buying accounts for 40–80% of all purchases ( Rodrigues et al., 2021 ). Lee and Chen (2021) stress that instant reactivity and convenience trigger impulsive purchase in mobile commerce. Studies have identified products that are bought impulsively, including groceries ( Inman et al., 2009 ; Bellini et al., 2017 ), financial products ( Lučić et al., 2021 ), milk tea ( Guo et al., 2017 ; Wu et al., 2021 ), necessities during COVID-19 pandemic ( Islam et al., 2021 ), “unhealthy” foods ( Verplanken et al., 2005 ), and brand-related user-generated content products ( Kim and Johnson, 2016 ). Some studies are keen to discover how different purchase channels influence impulsive buying, for instance, online markets ( Kim and Johnson, 2016 ; Guo et al., 2017 ; Aragoncillo and Orus, 2018 ; Pal, 2021 ; Rejikumar and Asokan-Ajitha, 2021 ; Wu et al., 2021 ), mobile commerce ( San-Martin and López-Catalán, 2013 ; Chen et al., 2021 ), and offline/in-store shopping ( Rook and Fisher, 1995 ; Inman et al., 2009 ; Tendai and Crispen, 2009 ; Sharma et al., 2010 ; Aragoncillo and Orus, 2018 ). However, few studies focus on impulsive purchase through the livestream shopping channel ( Lee and Chen, 2021 ; Wang S. Q., 2021 ).

There are various definitions of impulse buying. Rook (1987) describes impulse buying as spontaneous and hedonic purchase driven by an urgent, forceful, and persistent craving, regardless of possible consequences. Lučić et al. (2021) assert that impulsive purchase is actuated by irrational emotions. Researchers also claim that impulsive purchase is the result of an irresistible reaction that is triggered by often deliberately designed stimuli ( Stern, 1962 ; Rook, 1987 ; Liu et al., 2013 ; Kim and Johnson, 2016 ; Aragoncillo and Orus, 2018 ). Aragoncillo and Orus (2018) summarized and categorized features that induce impulsive purchase in offline and online channels, from previous studies. They argue that “greater product assortment and variety, sophisticated marketing techniques, credit cards, anonymity, lack of human contact, and easy access and convenience are the encouraging factors to online impulsive purchase” ( Aragoncillo and Orus, 2018 , p. 47). Akram et al. (2017) believe that “impulsive purchasing is an immediate, unplanned, compelling, and sudden purchase behavior while shopping” (p. 76) ( Akram et al., 2017 ). When comparing characteristics of online store to livestreaming shopping, it is not difficult to notice that livestreaming shopping contains all the encouraging factors mentioned and offers higher levels of stimuli. Specifically, payment is made easier by biometric fingerprint scanning on smart mobile devices, bypassing typed-in credit card passwords. Livestreaming provides for more comprehensive product display by e-commerce anchors than predesigned images and text on webpages. In livestreaming shopping rooms, there is instant interaction and sharing of product experience between anchors and customers, and between customers. Free shipping and unconditional returns or refunds encourage impulse buying. Big data analytics facilitate tailor-designed promotions and accurate/precise targeting of individual consumers. Therefore, based on discussion above, this study assumes that marketers use effective strategies to stimulate impulse buying on livestreaming shopping platforms. Specific constructs of interest include perceived e-commerce anchor attributes, perceived scarcity, immersion, and involvement.

Marketing Strategies Applied to Livestreaming E-commerce

The success of livestreaming retailing lies in its high interactivity, entertainment value, authenticity, and visibility ( Bründl et al., 2017 ). As shown in Figure 1 , livestreaming ( Figure 1C ) is different from shopping in a physical store ( Figure 1A ) and online shopping ( Figure 1B ) because consumers can watch, interact, comment, and purchase using a mobile device anywhere and anytime ( Liu L. et al., 2020 ). Traditional online shopping is search-based, requiring searching, comparing, and choosing before purchasing. Traditional online retailing thus relies on consumer initiative, and retailing success relies to a significant extent on consumers looking for products, with clear objectives in mind ( Virdi et al., 2020 ). In livestreaming retailing, consumers are guided by anchors who actively promote products to them ( Bründl et al., 2017 ; Ang et al., 2018 ). Figure 1 illustrates the three types of shopping experience:

Figure 1. Three types of shopping experience.

Marketing strategy is the most direct embodiment of merchants facing consumers. Effective marketing strategy in retailing is to provide effective stimuli for buying ( Zhu et al., 2019 ), and specific stimuli often lead to impulse buying ( Floh and Madlberger, 2013 ). In traditional e-commerce, users browse the goods on a shopping platform and typically spend considerable amounts of time considering purchase: this is “decision-making consumption” ( Rezaei, 2015 ). In livestreaming, consumers are provided with various designed entertainments. Whether they are hedonic or utilitarian consumers are readily attracted by personal charm, product introduction, promotion information, and livestreaming scenes deliberately designed to lead to consumption behavior ( Liu F. J. et al., 2020 ; Xu et al., 2020 ). Impulsive purchase is awakened by marketing strategies planned by anchors.

The success of livestreaming retailing lies in the good coordination of the elements “People-Product-Place” ( Luo et al., 2020 ), which is a perspective that should not be ignored when studying marketing strategy ( Wang K., 2021 ). “People” represents the anchor, who is the key factor to attract “followers” to watch. Anchor attributes is an important influencing factor in purchase decisions in livestreaming shopping Liu F. J. et al., 2020 ; Meng et al., 2020 ; Xu et al., 2020 ). Anchor attributes marketing becomes one of the major streams in livestreaming e-commerce by introducing products to their audience ( Liu, 2021 ). “Product” represents promoted goods recommended by the anchor. The main marketing method for “goods” is hunger marketing through the creation of availability stimuli, “limited time,” and “limited quantity.” The anchor creates the phenomenon of “short supply” that increases consumer perceived time pressure and product scarcity, stimulating impulsive purchase ( Gupta and Gentry, 2019 ; Cheng et al., 2020 ). “Place” is the final presentation of the e-commerce livestreaming scene. With the support of “people” and “product,” the internet platform built a communication scene integrating shopping, livestreaming, communication, and other functions. In the broadcast room, the extraordinary sense of temporal presence allows participants to sink into the immersive experience. Immersive marketing develops consumption into an “entertainment game” of shopping ( Luo et al., 2020 ). Therefore, we studied the influence of three elements in marketing strategy on impulsive purchase: anchor attributions, hunger marketing, and immersive marketing.

Perceived E-commerce Anchor Attributes and Impulsive Purchase Behavior

E-commerce anchors are the core of marketing strategy in livestreaming retailing. An e-commerce anchor is one who introduces and displays products comprehensively to customers ( Zhu et al., 2021 ). Unlike traditional television broadcasters, e-commerce anchors provide guidance to customers by sharing experiences based on their own consumption of the promoted products, answer viewers’ questions in real time, and interact with viewers based on their requests, and display products in ways that static images and texts cannot ( Sun et al., 2019 ; Han and Xu, 2020 ). Research has shown that the attributes, features, or characteristics of e-commerce anchors significantly influence purchase decisions or impulsive purchase on livestream shopping platform ( Li, 2021 ; Zhao and Feng, 2021 ; Zhu et al., 2021 ). Zhu et al. (2021) classify anchors’ characteristics into physical attractiveness, professional ability, and social attractiveness. Zhao and Feng (2021) assert that interactivity, professionalism, and charisma are important characteristics of e-commerce anchors who are opinion leaders. Their findings indicate that anchor characteristics positively influence consumer purchase intention. In their qualitative study, Han and Xu (2020) interviewed 68 livestreaming shoppers and summarized the attributes of e-commerce anchors. These authors argue that charisma, recommendation attributes, and display and interaction attributes are essential attributes of an e-commerce anchor. In summary, the literature discusses important attributes of e-commerce anchors, but studies on how these attributes influence impulsive purchase behavior are still limited. In addition, because of recent tax evasion by several famous livestream anchors in China, the essential requirements for becoming e-commerce anchors have been raised. As discussed, consumers’ perception of e-commerce anchor attributes is important. In this study, these attributes are defined in terms of how consumers/viewers perceive the presented image of an anchor. These attributes consist of whether the anchor observes discipline and law, his/her communication and professional skills, and whether consumers find the anchor reliable and have professional knowledge on the products being promoted. Thus, this study proposes the following hypothesis:

H1a: Perceived e-commerce anchor attributes have a positive effect on impulsive purchase behavior.

Perceived Scarcity and Impulsive Purchase Behavior

Studies show that perceived scarcity significantly affects panic buying ( Islam et al., 2021 ; Li et al., 2021 ) and influences decision-making in impulse buying ( Wu et al., 2021 ). By deliberately manipulating the supply of products, anchors create an ambiance of the shortage of goods in livestreaming shopping. In this study, perceived scarcity is intentional creation of limited time and quantity scarcity by anchors in livestreaming shopping ( Aggarwal et al., 2011 ; Gupta and Gentry, 2019 ; Islam et al., 2021 ). Following introduction of product functions, quality, and any other information consumers need to know, anchors specifically emphasize the limited availability of the products for on-the-spot purchase, especially when viewers significantly outnumber product units. Anchors also magnify the countdown process, which signals urgency to buy as soon as the countdown ends. Such a situation creates perceived product scarcity and competitive purchase pressure ( Guo et al., 2017 ).

Perceived scarcity has been studied as an independent variable ( Guo et al., 2017 ; Akram et al., 2018b ; Gupta and Gentry, 2019 ; Islam et al., 2021 ; Wu et al., 2021 ), a mediating factor ( Li et al., 2021 ), and a moderating factor ( Cheng et al., 2020 ) purchase decision, panic buying, urgency to buy, or impulse buying. These studies indicate that perceived scarcity positively influences panic buying ( Li et al., 2021 ) and indirectly influences panic or impulse buying through perceived arousal ( Guo et al., 2017 ; Islam et al., 2021 ; Wu et al., 2021 ). Perceived scarcity is shown to strongly predict online impulsive buying in Chinese social commerce ( Akram et al., 2018b ). Interestingly, studies find in in-store consumers, perceived scarcity does not directly affect urgency to buy, but perceived scarcity triggers in-store hording behavior (e.g., holding the clothes in hand while shopping) and in-store hiding behavior (e.g., hiding clothes somewhere else other than the place they should be) ( Gupta and Gentry, 2019 ). These authors assert that the relationship between perceived scarcity and urgency to buy is mediated by anticipated regret ( Gupta and Gentry, 2019 ). A moderating effect of perceived scarcity was not found in Cheng et al.’s (2020) study. Because the literature reports various results and inconsistent findings, this study aimed to contribute more evidence on perceived scarcity as both a direct and indirect influencing factor on impulsive purchase. Thus, this study postulates the following hypothesis:

H1b: Perceived scarcity has a positive effect on impulsive purchase behavior.

Immersion and Impulsive Purchase Behavior

In a study about viewers’ complete absorption of co-viewing experience on video websites, immersion is described as a joyful feeling that one is deeply absorbed in a mediated world, meanwhile forgetting or failing to pay attention to people or environment around him/her ( Fang et al., 2018 ). In a virtual reality environment, the use of augmented reality is expected to give users a higher level of immersion. In this context, immersion is described as a complete engrossing feeling of neglecting the actual environment ( Yim et al., 2017 ). Hudson et al. (2019) argue that individuals’ perceived levels of immersion differ, hence, their study focused on subjectively experienced immersion. Previous research has focused mainly on the mediating role of immersion in various activities. For instance, Yang et al. (2021) examined the mediating effect of immersion between social presence and customer loyalty intentions toward recommendation vlogs. Their findings confirm the proposed hypothesis and indicate that increased consumer immersion positively influences customer loyalty. In a study of try-on experience of wrist watches with augmented reality, Song et al. (2020) found that immersion mediates the relationship between environmental embedding and feelings of ownership. Immersion and perceived benefit have been found to mediate between social presence and customer loyalty on co-viewing experience in video websites ( Fang et al., 2018 ). In a study of fashion product purchase intention, immersion was studied as a mediator between five characteristics of fashion influencers and their followers’ purchase intentions ( Kim et al., 2021 ). Evidence that immersion in augmented reality positively affects online tourists’ willingness to pay was found in a study about AR tourism destination experience, without highlighting the mediating role of immersion ( Huang, 2021 ).

The literature indicates that the immediate relationship between immersion and impulsive purchase is rarely studied. A study of interactive marketing ( Kabadayi and Gupta, 2005 ) showed that deeply immersed customers tend to indulge in longer hours of digital media. A study in Taiwan provides evidence that high level of the absorbed-in state greatly influences unplanned buying online, and consumers are willing to pay more in such situations ( Niu and Chang, 2014 ). Thus, this study defines immersion as a joyful state of being absorbed and engrossed, losing awareness of time and forgetting about one’s surroundings when watching livestream promotions. The following hypothesis was proposed:

H1c: Immersion has a positive effect on impulsive purchase behavior.

Involvement

Involvement is an important variable affecting consumers’ purchase decision-making. Zaichkowsky (1985 , p. 32) defines involvement as “a person’s perceived relevance of the object based on inherent needs, values, and interests” and suggests that this definition could be applied to research on purchase decisions. Much research has evaluated “product” involvement in purchase decisions. For instance, Cheng et al. (2020) adapted Zaichkowsky’s (1985) 10 measurement dimensions to evaluate product involvement in livestreaming shopping. A study on online ordering behavior for food delivery measured product involvement based on nine external cues for action. These external cues are mainly concerned with nine different aspects of safety and customer rating, including food safety, advertisement safety, and safety of food retailers ( Mehrolia et al., 2020 ). A study on purchase decisions of halal products measured product involvement in two aspects: consumer perceptions of the degree of importance of targeted products and the number of attributes of a halal product that consumers regard as imperative ( Rachmawati et al., 2020 ).

To measure the involvement construct more comprehensively, some researchers extend the definition of involvement by including more aspects of involvement besides product attributes. In a study of customer satisfaction in mobile commerce, “buying-selling environment” was included as a measurement item for involvement ( San-Martin and López-Catalán, 2013 ). Mou et al. (2019) studied the influence of product involvement, characterized as cognitive and affective involvement, and platform involvement, characterized as enduring and situational involvement, on consumer purchase intention in cross-border e-commerce. Based on the foregoing discussion, this study defines involvement as a variable that includes aspects of consumer’s interests and valuation of promoted products and services, and perceived relevance and importance of the shopping environment (livestreaming shopping).

Marketing Strategies and Involvement

To create strong bonding between consumers and shopping platform, e-commerce managers have worked on measures to make consumers feel connected or intrigued. E-commerce managers design marketing to attract, retain, and connect viewers in livestreaming shopping, with the aim of increasing their involvement, and inducing impulse buying. In the literature, antecedents of involvement include product description ( Mou et al., 2019 ) and innovativeness in new technology ( San-Martín et al., 2017 ). In the domain of livestreaming shopping, there are likely to be more antecedents of involvement to be discovered. Thus, this study postulates the following hypotheses:

H2a: Perceived e-commerce anchor attributes positively affect involvement.

H2b: Immersion positively affects involvement.

H2c: Perceived product scarcity positively affects involvement.

Involvement and Impulsive Purchase Behavior

Studies have also examined the direct impact of involvement on behaviors such as consumer satisfaction, purchase intention, or decision-making ( San-Martin and López-Catalán, 2013 ; Mehrolia et al., 2020 ; Rachmawati et al., 2020 ). Several studies provide evidence that high involvement induces purchase intentions/decisions ( San-Martin and López-Catalán, 2013 ; Siala, 2013 ; Mehrolia et al., 2020 ; Rachmawati et al., 2020 ). Thus, this study postulates the following hypothesis:

H3: Involvement positively affects impulsive purchase behavior.

The Mediating Role of Involvement

Involvement has been studied as a mediating factor between product description and purchase intention in cross-border e-commerce. Three out of four dimensions of involvement are found to mediate between product description and purchase intention in that study ( Mou et al., 2019 ). To contribute empirical evidence for the mediating effect of involvement between relationships various variables and impulsive purchase, this study postulates the following hypotheses:

H4: Involvement mediates the relationship between marketing strategies applied in livestreaming shopping room and impulsive purchase behavior.

H4a: Involvement mediates the relationship between perceived e-commerce anchor attributes and impulsive purchase behavior.

H4b: Involvement mediates the relationship between immersion and impulsive purchase behavior.

H4c: Involvement mediates the relationship between perceived scarcity and impulsive purchase behavior.

Research Design and Methodology

This study adopts a positivist paradigm. Data were collected online using self-reporting questionnaires, and structured equations were used to evaluate the relationship between variables and to test study hypotheses. This topic focuses on the research on the influence mechanism of consumers’ impulsive purchase behavior in the context of livestreaming e-commerce. To ensure the validity of the research results, people who have had an online livestreaming shopping experience are selected as the target group, which is conducive to objectively assessing consumers’ impulsive purchase behavior on livestreaming e-commerce.

Research Design

The study focuses on the marketing-generated stimuli that influence impulse purchase in livestreaming retailing: anchor attributes, hunger marketing, and immersive marketing. Perceived anchor attributes , perceived scarcity , and immersion are independent variables; impulsive purchase behavior is the dependent variable; and involvement is a mediator. Figure 2 shows the framework that links these variables.

Figure 2. Research model.

Instrument Development

The study constructed a SOR model and attempted to explain consumer impulsive purchase from a psychological and behavioral perspective. Data were collected through an online self-administered questionnaire. To ensure validity reliability of measurement of the variables, the study defined these variables, and identified and adapted/modified measurement items from the literature to fit the context and object of the study from the literature. All the measurement items were rated on a 5-point Likert scale anchored on 1 (strongly disagree) and 5 (strongly agree). Table 1 shows the measurement items.

Table 1. Measurement items.

The online questionnaire comprised three parts: an introduction describing the purpose of the questionnaire, to dispel respondents’ concerns, and to enable respondents to recall live e-commerce shopping by describing live shopping. The second part comprised the questionnaire that measured perceived anchor attributes, perceived scarcity, immersion, and impulsive purchase behavior. The third part elicited respondent demographics, i.e., gender, age, education level, income, and occupation.

Data Collection

We conducted online questionnaire survey by using Questionnaire Star 2 , which is a platform with 2.6 million database members, covering more than 90% of universities and research institutions in China. Convenience sampling was used, and we elicited voluntary responses from individuals with experience of shopping in live e-commerce. We asked respondents to respond to the items based on their live e-commerce shopping experience. Screening of the 456 response sets received yielded 437 sets for analysis, giving an effective response rate of 94.96%.

Table 2 shows the demographic characteristics of respondents.

Table 2. Demographic data of respondents.

Women accounted for 79.6% of respondents, a relatively large percentage. In four age groups, participants are mainly between 18 and 30 years, reaching 52.2 and 97.5% of participants are younger than 50 according to the statistics. This shows that most of the people participating in live shopping are younger groups, and they are more likely to embrace new shopping channels. From the perspective of education level, 80.8% have a bachelor’s degree or above, indicating that the participants’ education level is relatively high. The highest monthly income is less than or equal to 2,000, accounting for 41.4%, and the proportion of students is 41.9%, which is consistent with the proportion of monthly income less than or equal to 2,000. This suggests that the young student group is the backbone of livestreaming shopping.

Data Analysis

SPSS and AMOS statistical software were used to analyze the data. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to test the reliability validity of the measurement model. We then verified the model using structural equation modeling (SEM) in AMOS software, using regression analysis to analyze the relationship between variables, and bootstrapping to test the hypothesis of the mediating effect.

Results and Findings

Construct validity and reliability.

CFA is usually used to test data reliability and validity of data to evaluate questionnaire quality ( Hou et al., 2004 ). In this study, AMOS software was used to establish a measurement model with five latent variables, including three independent variables, one dependent variable, and one mediator, and CFA was conducted. The test results of the measurement model are shown in Tables 3 – 5 .

Table 3. Goodness-of-fit statistics of the measurement model.

Table 4. Reliability and validity results of measurement mode.

Table 5. Analysis of discriminant validity.

The indices of fit ( Table 3 ) for the measurement model were chi-square fit statistics/degree of freedom (CMIN/DF) = 1.79, comparative fit index (CFI) = 0.971, goodness of fit index (GFI) = 0.939, TFI = 0.966, normed fit index (NFI) = 0.9011, and root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.043. According to the criteria in Table 3 , the model fit is good. As shown in Table 4 , individual item loadings are required to be above 0.50 for adequate and Cronbach’s alpha and CR value are higher than the recommended value of 0.700. The average variance extracted (AVE) scores were higher than the recommended value of 0.500, indicating the internal consistency and component reliability of each variable are good. Table 3 also shows that inter-construct correlations are all smaller than the square root of AVE, indicating the data have good discriminant validity. The reliability and validity of the data were therefore good and suitable for further analysis.

Hypothesis Testing

Before hypothesis testing, degree-of-fit testing is carried out to test the relationship between variables in the structural model. The model fit statistics were CMIN/DF = 2.573, CFI = 0.942, GFI = 0.914, TFI = 0.932, NFI = 0.942, and RMSEA = 0.06. According to the judgment criteria shown in Table 3 , the model fit is good.

Path Coefficient Testing

AMOS software was used to test path coefficients to verify the hypothesis of direct relationship. Table 6 shows the standardized path coefficients.

Table 6. Results of direct effects.

In the relationship between consumer-perceived marketing strategy and impulsive purchase behavior, perceived anchor attributes (β = 0.122, p = 0.01), immersion (β = 0.522, p = 0.000), and perceived scarcity (β = 0.105, p = 0.02) positively influence impulsive purchase behavior, supporting H1a, H1b, and H1c. In the relationship between consumer-perceived marketing strategy and impulsive purchase behavior, perceived anchor attributes (β = 0.322, p = 0.000), immersion (β = 0.469, p = 0.000), and perceived scarcity (β = 0.236, p = 0.000) positively influence impulsive purchase behavior, supporting H2a, H2b, and H2c. In the relationship between involvement and impulsive purchase behavior, involvement (β = 0.273, p = 0.000) positively influenced impulsive purchase behavior, supporting H3.

Testing for Mediating Effect

In the bootstrap method to detect a mediating effect, the bootstrap iteration was set to 2,000 times. Whether the mediating effect is significant is judged by whether the 95% confidence interval contains 0. The three mediation paths are perceived anchor attributes → involvement → impulsive purchase behavior , immersion → involvement → impulsive purchase behavior , and perceived scarcity → involvement → impulsive purchase behavior; the analysis results are shown in Table 7 , as follows:

Table 7. Results of mediating effects.

In the path perceived anchor attributes → involvement → impulsive purchase behavior , the 95% confidence intervals [0.041, 0.16] did not include 0, p = 0.000. The mediating effect was thus significant, supporting H3a. The 95% confidence intervals for total and direct effects were respectively, [0.091, 0.329] and [0.005, 0.245]; both sets of intervals did not contain 0, so involvement partially mediates the relationship between perceived anchor attributes and impulsive purchase behavior.

In the path perceived scarcity → involvement → impulsive purchase behavior , the 95% confidence intervals [0.025, 0.117] do not contain 0, p = 0.000, indicating that the mediation effect is significant and H3b is supported. The 95% confidence intervals of total effect [0.055, 0.279] do not contain 0, but the 95% confidence interval of direct effect [-0.015, 0.213] contains 0, so involvement fully mediates the relationship between perceived scarcity and impulsive purchase behavior.

In the path immersion → involvement → impulsive purchase behavior , the 95% confidence intervals of total effect [0.063, 0.204] do not contain 0, p = 0.001, indicating it is significant. The 95% confidence intervals of total and direct effects [0.551, 0.732] and [0.404, 0.636], respectively, both do not contain 0. Therefore, involvement partially mediates the relationship between immersion and impulsive purchase behavior.

Discussion and Implications

Based on SOR theory, this study used a framework of “marketing stimulus—involvement—impulsive purchase behavior” to investigate consumer impulsive purchase behavior in livestreaming shopping. By introducing the “People-Product-Place,” three elements of marketing stimulus as a marketing strategy of the livestreaming shopping platform, this study investigates the influencing mechanism and examines the influencing effects of perceived e-commerce anchor attributes, perceived scarcity, and immersion on consumers’ impulsive purchase behavior based on user perception perspective. Moreover, this study also examines the mediating effect of involvement between the three stimulus elements and consumers’ impulsive purchase behavior. Therefore, to explain the influencing mechanism of different marketing strategies in the livestreaming room on consumers’ impulsive purchase behavior. Findings of this research are discussed as follows.

Perceived e-commerce anchor attributes, perceived scarcity, and immersion positively influence impulsive purchase behavior. These findings are similar to previous studies, which report that e-commerce anchor attributes ( Li, 2021 ) and scarcity influence impulsive purchase behavior ( Akram et al., 2018b ). This study indicates that building e-commerce anchor attributes, creating pressure to purchase, and developing immersion are important and effective measures to trigger impulse buying. This finding is similar to previous studies that claim that sales promotion significantly affects online impulsive purchasing ( Akram et al., 2018a ).

Involvement mediates between perceived e-commerce anchor attributes, perceived scarcity, and immersion and impulsive purchase behavior. Partially mediating effects of involvement are found between perceived e-commerce anchor attributes and consumer impulsive purchase behavior; and between immersion and impulsive purchase behavior. Involvement fully mediates between perceived scarcity and impulsive purchase behavior. The findings indicate that perceived e-commerce anchor attributes and immersion can directly or indirectly affect impulsive purchase behavior through involvement. However, perceived scarcity only influences impulsive purchase behavior through involvement.

Implications for Theory

Technological innovations in the Internet and information systems seem to have driven changes in concepts and habits of consumption. A major development of online shopping is livestreaming shopping that is centered on consumer experience, and this study provides an understanding of consumer purchase behavior in livestreaming shopping. Consumer decision-making is greatly influenced by stimuli carefully designed by marketers. The study extends behavioral theory in two aspects.

First, this study innovatively combined the SOR theory of environmental psychology with the “People-Product-Place” marketing model and established a research framework of “marketing method stimulus-involvement-impulsive purchase behavior” corresponding to the three elements of “People-Product-Place.” The study investigated the influencing mechanisms of perceived e-commerce anchor attributes, perceived scarcity, and immersion on impulsive purchase behavior from the consumers’ perspective. The study enriches the theoretical understanding of impulsive purchase behavior in livestreaming shopping and provides a theoretical basis for further research.

Second, previous studies have mostly considered immersion as a mediating factor. This study considered consumers’ perceptions of immersion in livestreaming shopping rooms as an independent variable, expanding the research scope of immersion.

Implications for E-commerce and Its Regulation

Path analysis indicates that immersion is the strongest predictor of involvement and impulsive purchase behavior. Involvement is a significant predictor of impulsive purchase behavior. Thus, anchors, merchants, and platforms should actively expand shopping scenarios, enrich consumers’ experience of watching livestreaming, and fulfill their diverse consumption needs. The consumer experience can be enhanced or optimized using virtual reality, artificial intelligence and big data analytics, enabling consumers to experience immersive shopping, enhancing their sense of authenticity and their trust in online shopping. Marketers can focus on creating a joyful atmosphere in livestreaming shopping rooms so as to infect consumers with the ambience when they watch and experience immersive shopping. Anchors should avoid applying the same marketing strategy to all products but should use different strategies to keep consumers feeling fresh, integrate themselves into the shopping atmosphere, and increase their involvement, and eventually purchase. Perceived scarcity is also a significant predictor of involvement and impulsive purchase. In practice, creating a limited-time-quantity promotion atmosphere is key. Consumers are led by the idea of “what is scarce is valuable.” Perceived scarcity increases perceived value, increases the desire to buy, and enables the goal of product promotion to be achieved.

In China, rapid development and tax evasion by several e-commerce livestreaming shopping anchors have recently brought stricter regulatory standards to the industry, and thus higher implications for its managers. It seems essential for government to strengthen regulation of the five main participants in the livestreaming shopping industry: merchants, anchors, platform operators, anchor service agencies, and consumers. Regulation needs to clarify the rights and responsibilities of these parties and standardize online livestreaming marketing. Relevant regulatory legislation for the livestreaming shopping industry to improve supervision is expected in the future. For platforms, it is necessary to strictly review the qualifications of merchants and anchors, increase the legal awareness and integrity of anchors, and improve their professionalism. The accounts of anchors who deceive and mislead consumers should be banned or closed in a timely manner. The platform should also strictly monitor for livestreaming data fraud, establish an anti-false data supervision mechanism, and purify the e-commerce livestreaming ecosystem. Anchors must promote products according to objective facts; not fabricate or exaggerate effects or facts. As influential public figures, anchors must abide by the law and regulations, be socially responsible, and accept public oversight. Anchors should strive to improve their professionalism by improving product selection standards and product quality, so as to guarantee consumer satisfaction. It is necessary for e-commerce anchors to strengthen their livestreaming image. The greater the charm of the anchor, the more psychological pleasure it can bring to consumers. Anchors should pay attention to the creation of personal image by strengthening their characteristics, creating more interaction with consumers and increasing their stickiness, establishing an emotional connection with fans, and creating a warm and charming anchor image.

China’s livestreaming shopping industry has made remarkable achievements, especially in assisting economic recovery in the current postepidemic period. The success of this industry stems from the reshaping of the established “People-Product-Place” retailing strategy. Hopefully this experience may provide valuable lessons for the livestreaming industry in other countries.

Study Limitations and Further Research

There are three methodological limitations. One is that respondents are from China. This limitation does not restrict application of the study findings to livestreaming shopping platforms in China. Consumers are stimulated by the “People-Product-Place” marketing strategy. Impulse buying in livestreaming shopping rooms is significantly affected by perceived e-commerce anchor attributes, perceived scarcity, immersion, and involvement. The second methodological limitation is the use of convenience sampling, and more systematic sampling should be used in future studies. Despite these limitations, this study contributes to the literature on impulsive purchase behavior in livestreaming shopping platforms. Thirdly, this study used self-reported data that might not reflect actual decision-making. For instance, consumers may not willingly admit to being impulsive. Further studies could use quasi-experimental methods or a data analytics approach using data provided by shopping platforms.

Further research should also consider different types of e-commerce anchor, including key opinion leaders, celebrities, famous e-commerce anchors, and merchant-employed anchors. These types of anchors might employ different marketing strategies and factors that influence impulsive purchase might differ. Thus, it is recommended to investigate how different factors influence consumer purchase behavior from different types of e-commerce anchors and the specific strategies they apply. Finally, this study selected perceived anchor attributes, perceived scarcity, immersion, and involvement as predictors of impulsive purchase behavior. Further exploration is needed to identify and characterize other influencing factors for impulsive buying and extends the theoretical framework.

Data Availability Statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Author Contributions

BC and JW: conceptualization, methodology, software, formal analysis, resources, data curation, writing—original draft preparation, visualization, and project administration. LW and HR: validation, writing—review and editing, and supervision. LW: investigation. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Keywords : e-commerce live streaming shopping, impulsive purchase behavior, People-Product-Place, marketing strategy, COVID-19

Citation: Chen B, Wang L, Rasool H and Wang J (2022) Research on the Impact of Marketing Strategy on Consumers’ Impulsive Purchase Behavior in Livestreaming E-commerce. Front. Psychol. 13:905531. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.905531

Received: 27 March 2022; Accepted: 09 May 2022; Published: 16 June 2022.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2022 Chen, Wang, Rasool and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Jun Wang, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Advancing marketing strategy research

• Published: 04 October 2018
• Volume 46 , pages 983–986, ( 2018 )

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• Robert W. Palmatier 1  

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An outgoing editor’s last editorial offers an opportunity to recognize the efforts of key people, reflect on the journal’s accomplishments and challenges, and pass on any potential insights gained in the journey. It was an honor and significant learning experience to be given the opportunity to steward the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science ( JAMS ) over the past three years. In turn, my three objectives for this editorial are to (1) recognize the key people who have and continue to support JAMS , (2) provide a snapshot of the state of the journal, and (3) highlight some potential insights gained in the journey, to help advance marketing strategy research. In pursuing these objectives, I also seek to emphasize JAMS ’s raison d’être, achieved through the considerable efforts of authors and editorial team members, namely, to generate marketing knowledge and advance the practice of marketing .

Any progress that this journal has made would not have been possible without the excellent efforts contributed by the distinguished group of past Editors-in-Chief (EIC) in the past two decades, including William R. Darden, Rajan Varadarajan, David Stewart, and Tomas Hult. The critical importance of Area Editors (AEs) also must be recognized; they were instrumental in enabling many of the initiatives that we launched and guiding the process of developing the manuscripts that JAMS has published in the past three years. The strength and expertise of JAMS ’s AEs are highlighted by their editorial paths: seven of the founding AEs subsequently were selected as editors of top marketing journals. I take pleasure in passing on the thanks of the JAMS community, as well as my personal appreciation, to this distinguished group of marketing scholars:

Michael Ahearne, University of Houston

Dipayan Biswas, University of South Florida

Michael Brady, Florida State University

Marnik Dekimpe, Tilburg University

Eric Fang, University of Illinois

Dhruv Grewal, Babson College

Satish Jayachandran, University of South Carolina

Constantine S. Katsikeas, University of Leeds

V. Kumar, Georgia State University

Son K. Lam, University of Georgia

Martin Mende, Florida State University

Vikas Mittal, Rice University

Neil A. Morgan, Indiana University

J. Andrew Petersen, Pennsylvania State University

Rebecca Hamilton, Georgetown University

Kelly L. Haws, Vanderbilt University

Mark B. Houston, Texas Christian University

John Hulland, University of Georgia

Tomas Hult, Michigan State University

Shailendra P. Jain, University of Washington

Linda Price, University of Oregon

Lopo Rego, Indiana University

Anne Roggeveen, Babson College

Maura L. Scott, Florida State University

Shrihari Sridhar, Texas A&M University

Raji Srinivasan, University of Texas at Austin

Rajkumar Venkatesan, University of Virginia

Stefan Wuyts, Koç University

Although its members are too numerous to list, the expanded Editorial Review Board (ERB) of 185 academics processed more than 1500 manuscripts during my tenure, to help achieve an average turnaround time of 22.6 days for all submissions (including desk rejections) and 46 days for full first-round reviews (ERB/AE/EIC). Every journal depends on its voluntary editorial team, and the marketing community appreciates their dedication. Finally, Anne Hoekman has been Managing Editor of JAMS across the past two editors and will continued to support John Hulland as the next EIC; she has been exceptional in managing the journal through many changes, including vast increases in submissions.

State of the journal

In my reflections on the state of the journal, I considered past editorial initiatives, key performance metrics, and some challenges that will be passed on to the next editorial team.

Editorial initiatives

The editorial initiatives during my tenure primarily focused on increasing the number, diversity, and quality of submissions to JAMS while effectively processing manuscripts across broad domains of managerially relevant, substantively focused research. In the past three years, we held six Thought Leaders’ Conferences dedicated to an array of topics and in five different locations around the world (Paris, Amsterdam, Beijing, Hyderabad, Oslo); the corresponding Special Issues focused on Customer Engagement and Customer Relationship Management; Service Marketing Strategy ; Consumer-Based Strategy ; Marketing Strategy in Digital, Data-Rich, and Developing (D 3 ) Market Environments ; Managing Business and Innovation in Emerging Markets ; and Generalizations in Marketing: Systematic Reviews and Meta Analyses . Footnote 1 These efforts primarily sought to expand our research scope to include substantive or managerially impactful papers from different domains of the marketing discipline and geographically diverse authors. As an example, I want to highlight a forthcoming managerially relevant consumer-based strategy paper since it has been a focal domain for JAMS over the past few years, with a dedicated special issue edited by Rebecca Hamilton and Linda Price still forthcoming. The paper titled “Sounds like a healthy retail atmospheric strategy: Effects of ambient music and background noise on food sales,” by Biswas et al. ( 2018 ) generated an overwhelming amount of media attention, with over 80 media mentions and interviews in TV, radio, and newspapers including The New York Times , Washington Post , The Today Show, Newsweek , and Food & Wine magazine. This managerially relevant, high impact consumer-based strategy research is well suited to JAMS .

We also instituted a new AE structure and expanded the number of ERB members to provide the bandwidth required to process more papers and achieve better coverage in novel domains. By implementing an AE process structure, JAMS can work with authors and reviewers more closely, to develop a manuscript to its full potential. At the end of each year, we provide each AE and ERB member with an individualized report card, benchmarking her or his performance in terms of quality and responsiveness, relative to peers, to encourage and enable continuous improvement.

We succeeded in our campaign to add JAMS to the Financial Times (FT 50) list. It is now one of only six marketing journals on that list, which is crucial in increasing JAMS ’s impact; many universities use the FT 50 list to select “approved” journals. To that end, we continually update the Benchmark Report, initially developed for the FT 50 campaign, so that authors may use it to substantiate JAMS ’s impact when their business schools evaluate the different journals. Footnote 2

Finally, my last editorial initiative focused on adding two new “editorial thrusts” to JAMS to help differentiate it from other premier marketing journals and ensure that we were advancing marketing strategy. First, we increased the number of invited editorials and commentaries by leading scholars to give JAMS a “voice in marketing” and be more relevant to the marketing community, enlarge its readership, and signal more diversity of thought. These invited editorials and commentaries focused on topics that we believed would be of interest to a broad audience, authored by experts such as John Deighton, Darren Dahl, Rebecca Hamilton, Mark Houston, Chris Moorman, Leigh McAlister, John Hauser, Gerry Tellis, Rajan Varadarajan, Dave Stewart, O.C. Ferrell, Raj Venkatesan, V. Kumar, Gary Lilien, Mike Ahearne, Donald Lehmann, Russ Winer, Mike Hanssens, J.B. Steenkamp, Manjit Yadav, and John Hulland. The JAMS community appreciates their efforts and insights. Second, reflecting our belief in the importance of review papers for advancing the scientific process, we sought out leading scholars to contribute such manuscripts, in an effort to make JAMS the recognized outlet for substantive, methodological, and theory-focused review papers (for a detailed overview of this initiative, see Palmatier et al. 2018 ). The Thought Leaders’ Conference and Special Issue on Generalizations in Marketing: Systematic Reviews and Meta Analyses formalized this initiative. An analysis of articles published in marketing journals that appear on the FT journal list also shows that in the past three years JAMS has become the primary outlet for such reviews, publishing nearly one-third of all review articles.

Performance metrics

Before starting this discussion of journal performance metrics, I acknowledge that every measure has specific strengths and weaknesses, and none of them should be used as a sole proxy for a journal’s or article’s impact. With this caveat in mind, JAMS performs well across different metrics that frequently inform evaluations of journals, including the number of submissions, number of papers published, rejection rates, 2- and 5-year impact factors (with and without self-citations), and independent journal rankings. Specifically, the number of submissions has grown from 487 in 2015 to 582 in 2017, representing a 20% increase. We increased the number of papers published from 42 in 2015 to 56 in 2017, a 30% increase, and we will publish 60 papers in 2018 (including editorial, empirical, conceptual, and review papers).

For 2017, the impact factor (IF) for JAMS was 8.5, increasing from 5.9 in 2016, representing a 30% increase. Footnote 3 This IF moves JAMS to 3rd of all business journals and represents its second year as the highest ranked FT 50 marketing journal ( Journal of Marketing 7.3, Journal of Marketing Research 3.9, Journal of Consumer Research 3.5, Journal of Consumer Psychology 2.8, Marketing Science 2.8). JAMS remains the leading marketing journal in IF after removing self-citations and in the 5-year metric. Perhaps most salient to international scholars, in 2018 JAMS advanced to a top category of 4* in the Chartered ABS Academic Journal Guide (the most widely used non-FT 50 ranking outside the United States) Footnote 4 ; it is one of just six marketing journals to earn this ranking.

One of the greatest challenges facing the journal, and perhaps the discipline, is the shift exhibited by some marketing departments, away from marketing strategy or managerially focused research in general, which undermines JAMS ’s primary research domain. This trend also may reduce the number of managerially focused scholars, as fewer doctoral students are being trained in this area, which threatens to decrease the supply of papers to JAMS . In addition, JAMS will need to continue balancing emerging methodological hurdles against substantively important and managerially relevant research questions, which do not always lend themselves to the new methods’ requirements. I recommend a focus on providing insights into substantive research questions, using appropriate methods in support of the efforts to answer key research questions or substantive issues, not vice versa (for more discussion of these issues, see Houston 2016 ; McAlister 2016 ; Moorman 2016 ).

Encouraging greater inclusion of JAMS in promotion and tenure decisions by universities also remains a work in progress, especially at schools where researchers mainly focus on consumer behavior/psychology or quantitative/economics areas. Providing more opportunities for these researchers to publish managerially relevant research and review papers in JAMS will be important in this effort. In addition, efforts to support and encourage doctoral students working in JAMS ’s underlying research domains will remain important.

Universities outside of the United States increasingly require their faculty to publish in FT 50 journals, representing both an opportunity and a challenge for JAMS . The journal can expect to process more submissions, and JAMS should work to increase its global presence, recognition, and support offered. For example, China’s Ministry of Education recently changed the way it ranks and funds business schools, focusing primarily on the FT 50 and University of Dallas journal lists. A similar shift is occurring in other nations (e.g., Australia), reflecting the use of premier publication counts by many MBA ranking and accreditation organizations. From 2015 to 2017, the number of submissions from researchers outside the United States to JAMS has increased significantly. However, their rejection rates are also higher than average, suggesting the need to devote more effort to integrate these global scholars into the JAMS community.

Insights to advance marketing strategy research

Broadly speaking, JAMS publishes managerially relevant research that addresses substantive marketing questions; work in this domain is often labeled strategy, managerial, or substantive research. I use the label marketing strategy research to reflect the focus on managerial actions, adopted to improve performance, but with the recognition that the unit of analysis can be the consumer, employee (e.g., salesperson), or firm. Footnote 5 After processing more than 1500 manuscripts at JAMS and meeting with many other scholars, I have developed a few thoughts that may be worthwhile to help advance marketing strategy research.

Avoiding common research pitfalls

Each month, JAMS continues to desk reject between 40 and 60% of new submissions; the overall rejection rate remains between 91 and 92%. By highlighting the most common reasons for rejection, I aim to help researchers increase their chances of publishing in JAMS . Positioning and contributions continue to be the top two causes of rejection. First, papers that have not been positioned to match JAMS ’s editorial focus (e.g., behavioral research without meaningful managerial insights or relevance) tend to be rejected. Behavioral effects can be relevant to managers, but only if they clearly relate to important performance outcomes and managerial interventions (e.g., managerially relevant moderators). Scale development and pure methodological papers often do not fit the journal’s positioning, unless the paper is exceptionally relevant to JAMS readers. Therefore, authors should ensure that any paper they submit to JAMS offers insights relevant to managers (ideally, ones that are unknown or surprising at some level), featuring a conceptual model that has both actionable levers and meaningful outcomes for business, consumers, or public policy decision makers.

Second, the failure to generate sufficient contributions—such as testing a model with mostly main effect hypotheses, using cross-sectional survey data, such that common method variance provides a strong alternative explanation for the findings—will lead to rejection. Papers that replicate known effects or theories in a narrow context (different country or market segment) often offer limited contributions too. The contributions and methodological hurdles continue to increase in academia, as they should; successful authors will continuously refine their skills and research designs to meet these escalating requirements. Authors new to JAMS should model their manuscripts on the most recent publications in JAMS or Journal of Marketing ( JM ) that use a similar research design or method, because that approach can help them understand the requirements from both positioning and contribution perspectives.

Collaborating with business practice for impact

Successful marketing strategy researchers recognize that sales and marketing managers are the key stakeholders and consumers of their papers’ insights and implications. However, insights can flow both ways. As a strategy researcher, editor, and past AE at JM , I feel that the benefits of closely collaborating with businesses to develop and execute academic research are often underestimated. Rapid changes in technology, globalization, legislation, and “big data” are evoking vast shifts in sales and marketing activities and strategies at an accelerating rate, and firms often face business issues that the academic community has not yet addressed—or even recognized in some cases. In my experience, researchers who work most closely with firms, perhaps through affiliations with research centers, are also working on the most interesting, emerging topics, with excellent access to data that enable them to address their research questions convincingly (e.g., longitudinal consumer data, randomized field or natural experiments). Focusing on current business problems with good data often results in high impact papers that are eligible for awards, citations, and references in the business press. Accordingly, my recommendation to strategy researchers is to help build a research center at their university or become affiliated with one of the many existing research centers to connect with today’s firms and the issues they confront. Footnote 6

It has been my privilege and honor to serve as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science for the past three years. I tried to be a good steward and continue the journal’s positive trajectory by leveraging its strong foundation and implementing a few new initiatives to help advance its position as a leading publication outlet for top quality, high impact, managerially focused marketing research. I am excited to pass the editorial reins to John Hulland, who brings a broad knowledge base to the position, as well as many new ideas to advance the journal. In closing, I believe JAMS has significant impact, providing an outlet for research with meaningful insights that connect academia to marketing practice. Marketing can benefit society and people’s lives around the world; I am grateful to play a small part in helping JAMS achieve these worthwhile and relevant objectives.

Some of these special issues are still in the review process and will be published in coming years.

See https://goo.gl/HCJbPX

Clarivate Analytics, Journal Citation Reports , https://jcr.incites.thomsonreuters.com /.

https://charteredabs.org/academic-journal-guide-2018/

I take this opportunity to note explicitly that JAMS is open to any substantive research that offers relevant insights to business, government, policy makers, or society at large.

To read more about sales- and marketing strategy–focused research centers, see Kumar ( 2017 ), Lilien ( 2017 ), and Palmatier ( 2017 ).

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Palmatier, R.W. Advancing marketing strategy research. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 46 , 983–986 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-018-0595-4

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How to Leverage Sales Angles to Boost Your Sales Strategy

Kyle Coleman

Kyle’s foray into B2B tech sales started in 2013 when he joined Looker as the 6th employee. Over the next 6 years, he grew the SDR team from 1 to 60+ as the company scaled from $100k in ARR to $100m+, and was acquired by Google for $2.6b. He then moved on to Clari and for the next 5 years, led growth marketing, SDR, and enablement as the CMO. Kyle is now the CMO @ Copy.ai, an AI workflow automation platform. He’s an avid runner, a proud corgi owner, and is always looking to talk shop.

Crafting compelling sales angles is crucial for driving sales success and standing out from the crowd. But what exactly are sales angles, and how can they supercharge your sales strategy?

Welcome to your ultimate guide on the power of sales angles. Here, you'll learn how to leverage them to boost conversions, engage customers, and skyrocket your revenue. Let's dive deep into the benefits of using sales angles, such as:

Understanding the importance of sales angles is just the beginning. We'll walk you through the process of implementing them effectively, providing you with actionable tips, best practices, and real-world examples to help you master this essential skill.

By the end of this article, you'll have a solid grasp on how to develop and deploy sales angles that resonate with your target market, giving you the tools you need to elevate your sales strategy.

So, let's start by answering the fundamental question: what exactly is a sales angle?

What is a Sales Angle?

A sales angle is your secret weapon to present a product, service, or idea in a way that makes your target audience sit up and take notice. It’s all about spotlighting the unique benefits, features, or solutions that hit the sweet spot of your potential customers' needs, desires, or pain points. Crafting compelling sales angles allows businesses to stand out from the competition, grab the attention of their ideal buyers, and ultimately drive more conversions.

In a market where everyone’s shouting for attention, having a killer sales angle is crucial. Consumers are bombarded with marketing messages every day, making it tough for businesses to cut through the noise and effectively communicate their value. Enter the well-honed sales angle. It helps you connect with your audience on a deeper level and shows them exactly how your offering can solve their problems or make their lives better.

Sales angles are game-changers, especially in industries where products or services are similar. They help create a unique selling point (USP) that sets you apart from the pack. Take the crowded smartphone market, for example. Companies need to find innovative ways to position their devices as the top choice for specific user segments. One angle might highlight the phone's exceptional camera for photography buffs, while another could emphasize its long battery life for busy professionals always on the move.

When done right, sales angles can dramatically boost sales outcomes. They build trust, credibility, and rapport with potential customers by showing a deep understanding of their needs and offering tailored solutions. By delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time, businesses can turn leads into loyal customers. Plus, strong sales angles can speed up the sales cycle, quickly communicating the key benefits and value of a product or service, making it easier for prospects to decide.

The perks of well-crafted sales angles are numerous and far-reaching. Let’s dive deeper into how they can supercharge your business and drive long-term success.

Key Components of Sales Angles

To create sales angles that truly resonate and drive conversions, you need to nail down the key components that make them irresistible. These elements work in harmony to grab your prospects' attention, address their needs, and persuade them to take action.

1. Understanding Customer Pain Points

Identifying and addressing customer pain points is crucial for crafting effective sales angles. Understand the challenges, frustrations, and obstacles your target audience faces, and you can create sales messages that truly resonate.

Start by conducting thorough market research to uncover customer pain points. Analyze your target audience's demographics, psychographics, and behavior patterns. Engage in active listening during sales conversations and note common issues and complaints. Typical customer pain points often include:

Once you identify the key pain points, develop strategies to address them effectively. Show how your product or service can alleviate their challenges and provide tangible benefits. For instance, if your audience struggles with limited time and resources, highlight how your solution streamlines processes and saves valuable time. If cost is a significant concern, emphasize the long-term cost savings and ROI your product offers.

To further enhance your understanding of customer pain points, leverage AI-powered tools like Copy.ai's AI for Sales . These tools analyze vast amounts of customer data, identify patterns, and provide insights into the most pressing issues your target audience faces. Harnessing the power of AI gives you a deeper understanding of your customers' needs, allowing you to tailor your sales angles accordingly.

Addressing customer pain points head-on creates a strong foundation for your sales angles. However, to truly differentiate yourself from competitors and capture your audience's attention, craft a unique selling proposition (USP).

2. Crafting a Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

A unique selling proposition (USP) is the secret sauce of effective sales angles. It sets your product or service apart from the competition and communicates the distinct value you offer to customers. A strong USP should be clear, concise, and compelling, spotlighting the key benefits that make your offering the best choice for your target audience.

Crafting a powerful USP starts with identifying your target market's pain points and the unique features of your product or service that address those needs. Your USP should emphasize the specific benefits customers will experience when choosing your solution over others. It should be memorable, easy to understand, and resonate with your ideal customer.

Take Domino's Pizza's USP, "You get fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less, or it's free." It clearly communicates their commitment to fast delivery and customer satisfaction. Or consider M&M's "The milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand," which highlights a unique product feature that sets them apart from other chocolate brands.

Here are some tips for creating a killer USP:

For more insights on crafting persuasive messaging that effectively communicates your unique value proposition, check out our B2B Content Marketing guide.

Once you have a strong USP, weave it into your sales angles to create a more persuasive and effective pitch. Consistently communicating your USP throughout the sales process reinforces the unique value you offer and sets you apart from competitors.

And remember, leveraging emotional triggers can further boost the impact of your sales angles.

3. Leveraging Emotional Triggers

Emotional triggers are like the secret sauce in a customer’s decision-making recipe. Sales pros who master these triggers can whip up irresistible sales angles that hit home and drive conversions.

Here are some emotional triggers that pack a punch:

Ready to harness these emotional triggers? Here’s how:

Using emotional triggers can make your sales pitches more persuasive and engaging. Just remember to keep it ethical and authentic—trust and credibility are key.

And here's a pro tip: Advanced AI tools like Copy.ai’s GTM AI Platform can predict which emotional triggers will hit the mark for specific customers or segments. This means you can fine-tune your sales angles and boost your conversion rates.

So, go ahead and sprinkle some emotional triggers into your sales strategy. Your customers—and your bottom line—will thank you.

4. Use Social Proof

Social proof is your secret weapon for building trust and credibility in your sales angles. Leveraging the positive experiences and testimonials of existing customers demonstrates the value and reliability of your product or service to potential buyers.

Customer testimonials are a cornerstone of social proof. Genuine, detailed reviews from satisfied clients establish trust and show that your offering delivers real results. These testimonials should highlight specific benefits and outcomes, making your value proposition more tangible and relatable for prospects.

Case studies are another powerhouse of social proof. Presenting in-depth examples of how your product or service has solved problems and driven success for other businesses provides compelling evidence of its effectiveness. Case studies should tell a clear story, outlining the challenges faced by the customer, the solution provided, and the measurable results achieved.

Social proof also includes user statistics, industry awards, or partnerships with well-known brands. Highlighting the number of satisfied customers, showcasing recognition from respected organizations, or demonstrating associations with trusted companies all contribute to building credibility and trust in your sales angles.

To incorporate social proof effectively into your sales angles, consider these strategies:

Strategically leveraging social proof enhances the persuasive power of your sales angles, builds trust with potential customers, and ultimately drives more conversions. Now, let's dive into how to effectively implement sales angles into your overall sales strategy.

How to Implement Sales Angles: A Step-by-Step Guide

Phase 1: research and identify target audience.

To nail those sales angles, you first need to dive deep into your target audience. Here's how to get those golden insights:

To streamline your audience research, consider these tools and techniques:

Check out these audience research success stories:

With a thorough understanding of your target audience, you'll be ready to craft sales angles that hit the bullseye on their needs and preferences.

Phase 2: Develop and Test Sales Angles

Developing and testing sales angles is key to nailing the most effective approach for your target audience. Here’s how to create and refine your sales angles:

To test your sales angles effectively, consider these tools and techniques:

For example, a SaaS company tested two different sales angles for their product: one focused on cost savings and the other on productivity gains. By using A/B testing on their landing pages and tracking conversion rates, they discovered that the productivity angle resulted in a 20% higher conversion rate. This insight allowed them to refine their sales strategy and prioritize the productivity angle in their sales materials.

Continuously testing and refining your sales angles will help you optimize your sales strategy and boost your overall sales performance.

Best Practices and Tips

Ready to supercharge your sales angles? Here’s how:

Want to optimize your sales angles? Try these tips:

Sales angles work wonders across industries. For instance:

With Copy.ai's AI Sales Manager , you can streamline the creation, management, and optimization of your sales angles. This lets you focus on delivering the most effective messaging to your target audience.

Even with the best practices and tips, there are common pitfalls to avoid when implementing sales angles.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Implementing sales angles can supercharge your sales strategy, but beware of common pitfalls that could trip you up. Let's dive into these mistakes and how to dodge them:

To steer clear of these pitfalls, try these tips:

Consider this: A software company launched a product with a sales angle that flaunted its cutting-edge features. But they missed the mark on communicating how these features benefited their audience. The launch flopped. They learned, revised their angle to focus on tangible benefits, and saw a significant sales boost.

By recognizing these common pitfalls and implementing strategies to avoid them, you can effectively leverage sales angles to drive success. To further enhance your strategy, explore AI-powered tools for sales prospecting that help you sidestep common mistakes and optimize your approach.

Tools and Resources

Sales automation tools.

Sales automation tools streamline and optimize various aspects of the sales process, including the implementation of sales angles. These tools save time, increase efficiency, and drive more conversions. Let's dive into some popular sales automation tools and how they can sharpen your sales angles.

First up, Copy.ai's GTM AI Platform . This powerhouse uses artificial intelligence to automate and optimize sales processes. It helps you craft compelling sales angles, personalize outreach, and engage prospects more effectively. With AI-powered insights and recommendations, you can refine your sales angles and supercharge your sales strategy.

Next, we have Outreach, a sales engagement platform that automates and personalizes outreach at scale. Outreach lets you create targeted sequences that deliver the right sales angles to the right prospects at the right time. Plus, it offers analytics and insights to help you fine-tune your sales angles and boost conversion rates.

Then there's SalesLoft, another sales engagement platform that automates and optimizes your sales angles. With features like email templates, call scripts, and social media integrations, SalesLoft ensures consistent and compelling sales angles across multiple channels. It also provides robust reporting and analytics to track the effectiveness of your sales angles and make data-driven improvements.

When choosing sales automation tools, consider these tips:

1. Identify your specific needs and goals. 2. Look for tools that integrate with your existing tech stack. 3. Prioritize ease of use and adoption. 4. Consider the level of customer support and training provided. 5. Evaluate the tool's reporting and analytics capabilities.

Select the right sales automation tools and use them effectively to optimize your sales angles, save time, and drive more revenue for your business.

CRM Software

CRM software is essential for implementing effective sales strategies by centralizing customer data, tracking interactions, and providing valuable insights. These tools help sales teams understand their customers, personalize their approach, and optimize sales tactics for maximum impact.

Some popular CRM software options include:

Successful CRM implementations have significantly boosted sales performance. For instance, a global IT services company increased its sales productivity by 30% and reduced its sales cycle by 25% after implementing Salesforce. Another financial services company saw a 50% increase in cross-selling opportunities after adopting a CRM system.

When choosing a CRM software, consider these tips:

As technology advances, AI-powered sales tools are revolutionizing CRM. These intelligent solutions leverage machine learning and natural language processing to provide sophisticated insights and recommendations. Copy.ai's GTM AI Platform is a prime example, offering an AI-driven CRM that helps sales teams optimize strategies and achieve better results.

AI-Powered Sales Tools

AI-powered sales tools are shaking up the sales game, especially when it comes to nailing those perfect sales angles. These tech marvels use machine learning and natural language processing to dish out valuable insights, take over repetitive tasks, and supercharge your sales processes. Incorporate AI into your sales toolkit, and you'll not only sharpen your sales angles but also boost your overall sales outcomes.

Here are some AI-powered sales tools you should have on your radar:

Successful AI in sales? You bet. Take a leading software company that used an AI-powered sales tool to analyze customer data and dish out personalized sales angle recommendations. The result? A whopping 25% increase in conversion rates and a 15% revenue boost.

When picking AI tools for your sales squad, keep these tips in mind:

Curious about how AI can revamp your sales strategy? Dive into our article on GTM AI to explore various AI tools and their sales applications.

Got questions about implementing AI-powered sales tools? Stick around for the next section where we tackle some frequently asked questions to help you get the most out of these game-changing technologies.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are sales angles.

Sales angles are those clever twists and turns you use to showcase your product or service to potential customers. Think of them as the unique selling points that make your offering stand out in a crowded marketplace. They spotlight specific benefits, features, or solutions that click with your target audience and set you apart from the competition.

How do sales angles differ from marketing angles?

Sales angles and marketing angles might seem like twins, but they play different roles in the persuasion game. Marketing angles are the broad strokes used in campaigns to attract and engage potential customers. Sales angles, on the other hand, are the precision tools used in one-on-one interactions between salespeople and prospects to seal the deal.

Can sales angles be used for any product or service?

Absolutely! Sales angles are like the Swiss Army knives of selling—they work for any product or service, no matter the industry. The trick is to pinpoint your unique selling points and tailor your angle to the specific needs and pain points of your target audience.

How often should I change my sales angles?

Changing sales angles isn't about sticking to a rigid schedule; it's about staying agile. Factors like market trends, customer feedback, and the effectiveness of your current angles all play a part. Regularly evaluate and tweak your sales angles to keep them relevant and impactful. If a particular angle isn't hitting the mark, it's time to brainstorm a fresh approach.

What are some examples of effective sales angles?

Here are a few sales angles that hit the bullseye:

1. Cost savings : Show how your product or service can save customers money in the long run. 2. Time efficiency : Highlight how your offering can streamline processes and save the customer precious time. 3. Competitive advantage : Demonstrate how your product or service gives customers a leg up on their competitors. 4. Social proof : Use testimonials, case studies, or endorsements to build trust and credibility.

Understanding these sales angles can arm sales professionals with the insights needed to implement and optimize them effectively in their strategies.

Final Thoughts

Mastering sales angles is a game-changer for any sales professional aiming to supercharge their strategy and drive revenue growth. Understand the essentials of effective sales angles—addressing customer pain points, crafting a unique selling proposition, leveraging emotional triggers, and utilizing social proof—and you'll create pitches that truly resonate.

Research your target audience, test various sales angles, and stick to best practices while dodging common pitfalls. Sales automation tools, CRM software, and AI-powered sales tools can further enhance your implementation and streamline your process.

Incorporate these insights into your strategy, and you'll boost conversions, improve customer engagement, and hit your sales targets. Curious about how AI can revolutionize your approach? Check out Copy.ai's GTM AI Platform to elevate your sales game.

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