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In News

Deceptive Marketing Can Backfire For Companies Caught In The Act

December 1, 2017 No Comments

The truth always comes out and it will make you look stupid.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

In the era of fake news, less scrupulous businesses are using deceptive tactics to smear their rivals. But companies that spread fake news against their competitors ultimately experience the brunt of negative publicity and reputational damage.

That’s a key finding of new research co-authored by the UBC Sauder School of Business. The researchers examined a real-life case from 2012 in South Korea, when a customer reportedly found a dead rat in a loaf of bread made by one of the country’s most popular bakery brands. The company’s business plummeted, until a reporter discovered that a rival bakery had whipped up the fake story. Suddenly, the offending franchise found itself in the hot seat, in the media and online.

“People doubted the credibility of this firm and its management practices,” said study co-author Gene Moo Lee, assistant professor of information systems at UBC Sauder. “What’s more, the offender was a franchisee, which ultimately tarnished the reputation of the larger company. This study showed that deceptive marketing just doesn’t pay.”

The researchers examined three years’ worth of blog posts, news articles and social media exchanges, and counted how many positive and negative words were used in reference to each company.

They found that, while the fake story damaged the victim company at first, it caused far more significant and lasting damage to the firm that originally concocted the story. In fact, damage to the victim company lasted one year, while the effects for the offender lingered for more than two years.

For businesses that practice these smear tactics, the researchers caution that fake news detection technology is becoming increasingly more precise.

“Social media services like Facebook, Google and Twitter are building very sophisticated fake news detection algorithms now, which means it’s increasingly easy to be caught,” said study co-author Sungha Jang, assistant professor of marketing at Kansas State University. “Practically speaking and also ethically speaking, you don’t want to do that. Ultimately the truth prevails.”

According to study co-author Ho Kim, assistant professor of digital and social media marketing at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, the findings serve as a warning to companies to avoid using smear tactics.

“It’s a lesson we all learned in kindergarten: don’t tell a lie,” said Kim. “It’s not surprising, but a lot of people spread fake news. When it’s uncovered as fake news, it brings lasting reputational damage for the offender.”

In News

When Brands Tempt us to Lie, Cheat and Steal

November 30, 2017 No Comments

Get your company reputation in order, or you might find that even your satisfied customers will betray you.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

While many people consider themselves generally moral and honest, even the most upstanding citizens will likely become willing to lie, cheat and steal under certain circumstances, according to evidence from a new study in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

If consumers believe that a company is harmful in some way – to the environment or to people – then they feel justified participating in illegal activities, such as shoplifting, piracy or hacking, according to findings in the study.

“People are much more willing to do something that risks their own integrity if they believe a company is unethical,” says Jeffrey Rotman, a professor in the business school at Deakin University in Australia. “And this desire to punish a harmful brand occurs even when the consumer has not personally had a bad experience with the company.”

Rotman’s team discovered this effect in one study in which participants were introduced to a fictitious pharmaceutical company that produced drugs to treat Parkinson’s disease and a bacterial infection called Brucellosis. Some of the participants learned that the company planned to increase the price of the drug by 300 percent to generate considerably more profit, even if it meant that certain customers could no longer afford the medication. Other participants learned that the company would not raise prices despite the profit benefits.

The researchers discovered that the participants who were told that the company was raising prices were significantly more willing to punish the company via unethical means, such as lying, cheating or stealing.

So why do consumers violate their personal code of ethics in these situations? The researchers conducted another experiment in which participants read a report stating that on average, internet speeds are consistently below advertised speeds. The federal report explained that this occurs because many ISPs intentionally cap speeds at 20 percent lower than advertised speeds. One group of participants was told that their internet speeds had in fact underperformed, and they were asked to sign a letter to the ISP asking for a 10 percent discount on monthly fees. The other group was told that their internet speeds were as advertised, but they should still sign the letter based on the findings in the federal report. Even though their internet speeds were good, they were encouraged to lie to justify the discount and capture the company’s attention.

Typically, people feel emotional consequences when they engage in unethical behaviour, but the researchers found that negative feelings, such as guilt, were absent because people felt that the company was cheating customers. “People felt morally justified lying to the ISP because the report claimed that the company was not delivering promised speeds,” Rotman says.

The researchers discovered that this desire to punish companies perceived as harmful is also reflected in the real world. Participants rated how harmful they perceived a variety of different industries, such as pharmacies, supermarkets and home improvement stores. On average, the more harmful the ratings, the greater the rates of theft were in these industries.

“There is growing distrust among the public of certain aspects of business and government, and these findings suggest that if people perceive these entities as harmful, they might feel justified in being unethical,” Rotman says. “My hope is that organisations will make it a priority to build a reputation that allows consumers and businesses to be on the same side.”

In News

Study: Social Media Is Simply “People Watching”

November 29, 2017 No Comments

If you worry that people today are using social media as a crutch for a real social life, a University of Kansas study will set you at ease.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Jeffrey Hall, associate professor of communication studies, found that people are actually quite adept at discerning the difference between using social media and having an honest-to-goodness social interaction. The results of his studies appear in the journal New Media & Society.

“There is a tendency to equate what we do on social media as if it is social interaction, but that does not reflect people’s actual experience using it,” Hall said. “All of this worry that we’re seeking out more and more social interaction on Facebook is not true. Most interactions are face to face, and most of what we consider social interaction is face to face.”

According to Hall, social media is more like old-fashioned people-watching. “Liking” something is similar to a head nod. It’s not social interaction, but it’s acknowledging you are sharing space with someone else.

“Keeping tabs on other people sharing our social spaces is normal and part of what it means to be human,” Hall said.

Hall is no stranger to research on social media. New Media & Society published an earlier study of his that found people can accurately detect the personality traits of strangers through Facebook activity.

In his current paper in the journal, Hall details three studies. The first demonstrates that when using social media, most of us are engaged in passive behaviours that we don’t consider social interaction, like browsing others’ profiles and reading news articles.

The second diary study demonstrates that most of what we consider social interaction with people in our close circle of friends happens face to face. When interaction with these close others is through social media, it’s not something passive like browsing or “liking” but rather using chat or instant message functions.

Here’s where it gets interesting, Hall said. The first study found that chatting and commenting – things that we would even consider social interaction – are but 3.5 percent of our time on social media.

The third study had participants contacted at random times throughout the day. This study drives home how adept we are at separating social media use with social interaction. People reported 98 percent of their social interactions took some other way than through social media.

“Although people often socially interact and use social media in the same time period, people understand they are different things,” Hall said. “People feel a sense of relatedness when they’re interacting face to face, but using social media does not make them feel connected.”

All three studies, Hall said, circle around the idea that we still value face-to-face time with close others for the purpose of talking.

“If we want to have a conversation, we’re not using social media to do it,” he said.

The findings speak to a broader anxiety that many still have regarding social media.

“There’s a worry that people are seeking out more and more social interactions on Facebook and that social media is taking over our face-to-face time,” Hall said. “I’m saying, ‘Not so fast.’ People use social media to people-watch and still seem to enjoy a good face-to-face conversation.”

In News

How do I Know if my Online Ads Work When 90% of my Sales are Offline?

November 27, 2017 No Comments

A recent study in the journal Marketing Science has shown that online display ads can increase both online and offline retail sales. This provides valuable insight for future marketing decisions.

The study (titled When Less is More: Data and Power in Advertising Experiments) was a collaboration between Garrett Johnson of the University of Rochester, Randall Lewis of Netflix, and David Reiley of Pandora, plus Yahoo.com.

The Yahoo! researchers worked with an unnamed national apparel retailer to evaluate the effects of the retailer’s advertising. They collaborated on a large-scale field experiment involving over 3 million Yahoo! users. For two weeks, Yahoo! users in the experiment’s treatment group saw branded apparel ads from the retailer whereas users in the control group saw ads for Yahoo! Search. Relative to the baseline established by the control group, the experiment showed that the retailer’s campaign increased sales by 3.6 percent or roughly three times the retailer’s spending on ads.

Reiley said, “This apparel retailer approached us with an interesting problem: ‘How do I know if my online ads work when 90 percent of my sales are offline?'”

The authors attacked this problem by matching customer records between the retailer and Yahoo!. Importantly, the authors combined customer-level online and offline sales data with a controlled experiment that allowed them to assess how much the consumers would have purchased in the absence of the ad campaign. They determined that 84 percent of the sales increase from the ads came from offline sales. Reiley added, “Without the experiment, the retailer could have erroneously concluded that the ads only increased online sales and not offline sales. Ironically, this could have led to underinvestment in online advertising.”

The study notes that their novel experimental design can be valuable for companies seeking to measure advertising effectiveness. Lewis noted, “We’d run experiments with this retailer before, but this was the largest experiment where we used ‘control ads’ to determine which control-group members would have seen the ads. This allowed us to ignore statistical noise from the purchases of consumers who never saw the ads. We also discovered that we only needed to look at sales after the first ad because an ad can only affect you after you have seen it. These two tricks allowed us to improve the statistical precision of the estimated benefits from online advertising.”

The improvement in precision from using control ads is critically important for managers making advertising decisions. Johnson explained, “Ad effectiveness estimates tend to be small, but also imprecise. Even with a study of 3 million users, standard methods to improve precision by controlling for customer’s past behaviour and demographics were less effective than most expected. However, by making full use of the control ads, we further improved by six times the statistical precision of our ad effects estimates. For managers, this improvement could be the deciding factor in learning whether online advertising has a clear and statistically significant positive impact. We hope the ideas in our design can help firms invest confidently in ad campaigns when they are likely to be profitable.”

In News

How to Build a Predictable and Profitable Website

November 24, 2017 No Comments

Know the basics before even setting foot on the internet.

We are well aware of the need to have a website developed for our business. Website design, aesthetics, usability, and user and search engine friendliness have been discussed time and time again by various experts. These things are important in discussions about website design. Today, we will delve into the heaviest part of website design, the elements that have to do with usability for web visitors and giving them a reason to stay on your website.

The first thing that we think of when we start building our website is what will be the chosen design? When we configure our designs, we think of things that could attract web visitors, and entice them to stay on for a longer period of time. Images, graphics, colour, white spaces, navigation settings, calls to action, buttons, and content placement are included in the list of website design elements that impact why visitors may stay on the site, subscribe to an offer, leave a trail or possibly become your next customer.

We want our web visitors to concentrate on our web pages. If your web space is crowded and people experience a difficult time navigating it, or encounter difficulty in finding information, they will walk away quickly. Therefore, in selecting our design preferences, the following should be considered:

Simple Design

Keep your design simple and to the point. Choose the right set of colours, but make use of white spaces efficiently and remove unnecessary elements that are not serving any real purpose except that of occupying usable spaced on the web page.

See The World Through Customer Eyes

Take a look at your web page like a web visitor would. What are elements that your website visitor would like to learn about? What are the elements that could confuse them? Which content is most enticing? If you put yourself in the shoes of the web visitors, you could possibly make effective web pages that could help you sell your products and disseminate information.

Use of Images in Website Design

Choose images wisely. High resolution, purposeful images. If you are trying to sell sweets, but display pictures of puppies, this won’t help you sell your product. You likely won’t be able to retain web visitors for more than 2 seconds. Pick images that relate to your business, products and services. Do not create false alerts. Such efforts simply go to waste.

Use of Fonts in Website Design

Typography is another highly important element to focus on when you design your web page. The font type, font size, and font colours must be chosen with care. Readable text makes a difference. Faded text or small fonts can make reading difficult for some audiences.

Larger fonts and bold text work well with H1 (heading or headlines). The text that you want to emphasise must be written in these types of fonts. Overcrowding the content area with bold text in other areas could force visitors to lose focus and wander off to other places on the net.

Call to Actions

The web page that you create must carry a clear call to action. Don’t hide behind words; tell your web visitors what they need to do, whether they are eager to learn more, or wanting to take you up on a discount offer. Put your call to action in catchy words to make users want to quickly grab the offer that you are presenting to them in exchange for the information they leave for you to catch up with them later.

The development of web pages isn’t as simple as it appears. However, a customer-focused approach and attractive design can help you garner the interest your products deserve.

Author: Qamar Zaman – KISS PR – Dallas Web Site Design & SEO Company

In News

Mobile Scroll Ads More Effective Than Pop-Up And Static Banner Ads

November 23, 2017 No Comments

A new experiment suggests that pop-up ads can have an adverse effect on consumers’ perceptions of the content.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Scrolls ads, a newer style of advertisement designed for mobile screens, show signs of being more effective than older forms of digital advertising. This is according to a new experimental study conducted by The Media Insight Project, a collaboration between the American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. This new research has significant implications for a news industry that is constantly searching for new revenue models to finance journalism.

(For the unitiated, a scroll ad is an interactive ad format which is adapted to the reading behavior of your visitors. The ad opens at the bottom right only when the visitor scrolls down. This ad format will close automatically or can closed directly from the visitor.)

An example is here:

“Banner and pop-up ads have been the standard way to advertise online for decades, though they have met consumer resistance, especially in mobile,” said Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute. “Our research into online advertisements finds that formats designed more recently, and with mobile in mind, strike users as less intrusive and more pleasing. To our surprise, compared with ad formats designed for other web environments, scroll ads can also improve recall of the product being advertised and enhance trust in the article where the ad appears.”

These are some of the results of the online survey experiment conducted with 1,489 participants between November 9 and December 6, 2016, using AmeriSpeak, NORC’s nationally representative survey panel. The online panel interface allows respondents to see and respond to content presented to them digitally, something that is not possible with traditional phone surveys.

Key findings:

The experiment finds that people are more likely to recall the product accurately if it appears in a scroll ad than if it appears in either a pop-up or static ad. Indeed, 34 percent of users accurately recalled the product from the scroll ad versus 26 percent in static ads and 25 percent in pop-up ads. The differences were even more pronounced if you take just those people who say they noticed the ad at all. The majority of all respondents, 57 percent, fell into this group.
People are no more likely to notice pop-up ads than they are scroll ads (61 percent vs. 62 percent for scroll) and are less likely to recall the product in pop-up ads, just 41 percent versus 55 percent in scroll ads and 53 percent in static ads. Pop-up ads also have several negative effects. For instance, 61 percent of people say pop-up ads make the article more difficult to read (vs. 37 percent for scroll ads and 19 percent for static ads).
When readers are interested in the topic of the ad, they are more likely to express some positive evaluations of the article and engage with that article. Overall, people who are interested in the topic of the ad provide more positive evaluations of the article, including that it provides diverse points of view (28 percent vs. 19 percent) and that it is entertaining (32 percent vs. 25 percent). However, those interested in the subject of the ad are no more likely to say the article got the facts right, had a professional appearance, that it was easy to find important information, or that the information was trustworthy.

“Scroll ads should play an even bigger role in online advertising because they appear to be more effective on a range of metrics than pop-up ads and static banners,” said Trevor Tompson, director of The AP-NORC Center. “These ads optimised for mobile produce benefits to the advertiser and the news outlet compared to older styles of digital advertising.”

In News

What Public Relations Can Learn From The iPhone X Launch

November 23, 2017 No Comments

By Ed Zitron.

It may surprise you, but Apple’s PR immediate strategy isn’t as educational as you’d think – the magic lies in the world and the media’s reaction.

Apple’s immensely expensive, hard-to-find and dream holiday gift the iPhone X isn’t just doing the usual job of sending the media into a froth. It’s sent them into a rage, as Apple changed their normal strategy of iPhone review unit deliveries. Instead of providing the creme-de-la-creme of the tech press with the iPhone X, they started by sending them first to seemingly random (but not if you leave the tech media) YouTube people. Nobody was more furious than avid Apple blogger Jon Gruber, who posted a play-by-play of blogs that weren’t his that got it first (such as HIGHSNOBIETY), even furious enough to swear about a man’s “emoji expert” nephew having a view of the new iPhone before he did.

Notably, CNET, The Verge and others were behind outlets and bloggers that many PR people ignored. This was called “short-circuiting” the media by Cult of Mac, which ironically may have fallen into a trap that I believe Apple purposefully laid.

You see, to me this wasn’t something PR people can learn from in the classical sense. There are many YouTubers to go after, and yet very little in the way of actual data as to which one drives what where. Subscriber numbers are a great metric, but there’re just so many to go after, and it requires way more time to evaluate each one (IE, you have to watch a video versus read an article), something that most PR people can’t do when it comes to the simple written word and beat of the average reporter. However, none of these outlets were “unknown” – they just weren’t known by a majority of the tech media (and I’d add tech public relations people), as former Samsung mobile PR product man Philip Berne put. In essence, his salient point is that to many in the tech media or popularist tech, some of these may be “unknowns” – but they’re as present and attentive at events and in their coverage as the big names. At least, in some cases. In others? Well…

Beyond those directly covering technology, I mean, sure, you can absolutely say “hey, I now know some new outlets that might take some of my products,” which would be really dumb if you didn’t read their website/watch their videos (HIGHSNOBIETY isn’t a great shot for your tech product, and neither is Fashion magazine). You could say “it’s unconventional.” But I want to really break down what this was, and what it means for you, the public relations person.

It’s Apple. Apple Does Not Play In Your Sandbox.

I want to make something abundantly clear: if you went to these outlets with a phone from HTC, or even Google’s new Pixel 2, you’d get a much less excited reaction. If you went to them with another consumer electronics product, you’d likely get no reaction at all, because who the hell are you? The answer is you aren’t Apple. Your product is not the new iPhone X (this would have absolutely worked with the iPhone 8, by the way). Apple is a gigantic, consumer-loved product that hundreds of millions of people want to hear about. Apple could give the iPhone X to 100 random people and say “post your thoughts, whatever they are, at exactly 12PM in your time zone on this date,” and it would go absolutely viral. Tim Cook could walk out and just hand fifteen random people the iPhone X and it would go viral.

Apple will get press no matter what they do. You are not Apple, and you will likely never be Apple. Only Amazon has the sheer force of brand cache that Apple has.

The Business and Tech Press Were Always Going To Review The New iPhone

It’s absolutely no dig at CNET, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times or any other major outlet covering technology to say that they’d cover this phone even if Apple didn’t provide a review unit at all.

Perhaps Apple has finally realized that effectively anything they do gets press, and their new phone is guaranteed to get coverage. Perhaps they have realized that the tech press has a duty to their readers to review this phone, and as a company with billions of dollars just sitting in the bank there is no need to give them the first look. They can do basically anything they want. Which includes, but isn’t limited to, seeding the first review units of the iPhone X to seemingly “random” YouTubers. An audience they haven’t hit before, one that they can effectively experiment a press strategy with with the absolute knowledge that the only thing that will happen is the tech press will be surprised. Most people won’t care. Heck, they’ll find it endearing – Apple being “real” – even if it’s as manufactured and mechanical as the phone’s production run.

Those who have worked with Apple for access may, indeed, be finding out that it was a one-sided deal. To paraphrase Darth Vader, Apple is altering the deal, pray they do not alter it any further.

Apple Got More Press By Doing This From The Tech Press

By doing an “unconventional” strategy, Apple has literally got coverage of them getting coverage. They are getting people writing about people writing about the iPhone X. It is a masterwork of trickery – a sleight of hand that only they could pull off – pontifications about a strategy that Apple will never reveal any details on, one that will send people noodling endlessly, desperate to find the deeper truth. They created not just a press storm around their new, fascinating phone but an absolute tizzy around the way they did it.

Which was…that they gave the phone to some other people early. The why confounds people as the answer is so much clearer – that they are looking for more ways to get press, and they found one – and have absolutely seen that they can get press for anything. Even if it’s getting press for getting press.

Apple Aren’t Public Relations Magicians

Much is written of Apple’s dominance of public relations, of their masterful strategy, and they certainly do have a large public relations department. They also have the single most successful smartphone and literally the world’s strongest brand.

This is not magic.

This is not telepathy.

This is not “genius.”

It’s having a 100% certainty that you have a product that anyone will want to be first, or even tenth, to look at.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Ed Zitron

Ed Zitron is the founder of EZ-PR, a PR and media- relations company based in New York City and Raleigh, North Carolina. He is also the author of This Is How You Pitch: How to Kick Ass in Your… Full bio

Sourced from Inc.

In News

The Most Exciting Social Media Platforms Among Teens

November 22, 2017 No Comments

Musical.ly is currently the place for your influencer marketing money.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A new survey of teenagers age 13-17 finds that teens have shifted their favoured social media platforms to Instagram and Snapchat. But the most exciting breakthrough is that of Musical.ly.

A survey taken by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research in the USA found that:

76 percent of teens age 13-17 use Instagram.
75 percent of teens use Snapchat.
66 percent of teens use Facebook, down from 71 percent of teens using the site in 2015.
47 percent of teens use Twitter.
Fewer than 30 percent of teens use Tumblr, Twitch, or LinkedIn.

Strangely, however, there is one contender that fails to be mentioned: Musical.ly, which is roaring into popularity, especially in Europe. And there are great opportunities for marketers to reach that ever-elusive teen and tween market.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjf8tvnaIQs

Musical.ly was founded by friends Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang. They decided to target the US teenage market, as this market is characterised for being an early adopter of new trends. The main idea was to create a platform that incorporates music and video in a social network. The first version of musical.ly was officially launched in August 2014.

In 2015, the app began to attract millions of users and in July 2015, musical.ly climbed up to the number 1 position in the iOS App Store, becoming the most-downloaded free app in over 30 countries, including the US, Canada, UK, Germany, Brazil, Philippines, and Japan. In July 2016, musical.ly reached 90 million downloads, with over 12 million new videos posted every day.

So how does it work? To put it simply, “musers” lip-sync to their favourite tunes, by themselves or with a friend, and share it. That’s actually the main thrust of it. But the opportunities for marketers are strong. In June 2016, Coca-Cola launched its #ShareACoke campaign on musical.ly, which introduced musical.ly’s “User-Generated Ads” model.

Kids were making some seriously cool little ads for Coke.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LgMzMl9OFA

The hashtags that are popular on this social network usually make reference to bits of pop culture and trends among the internet world.

So, marketers, if you want to reach tweens and teens, it is definitely worth your while to check out Musical.ly. It has fast become a Go-To destination for influencer marketing. The app is still finding a way to monetise its platform.This means that they are a little more loose with restrictions or requirements in place for branded content, advertising, and influencer marketing campaigns. You never know, it might just be the perfect spot to place your influencer-marketing budget.

In News

Paying Online Community Members to Write Product Reviews Backfires Badly

November 21, 2017 No Comments

Just let people do their thing, you’ll have more success.

Online user reviews have become an essential tool for consumers who increasingly rely on them to evaluate products and services before purchase. The business models of online review platforms such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, and e-commerce sites such as Amazon and Expedia critically depend on them. Should such sites pay users to encourage them to write reviews?

According to a forthcoming study in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science, a leading academic marketing journal, that is a bad idea. Paying users suppresses the number of reviews on social platforms, especially among those users who are socially well-connected and likely to be more influential.

The study is authored by Yacheng Sun of University of Colorado, and Xiaojing Dong and Shelby McIntyre of Santa Clara University. The authors examine user response from a sample of customers following the introduction of a monetary payment program for user reviews by a social shopping platform in China.

The payment was roughly the equivalent of 25 cents per review in credit for purchases from sellers affiliated with the platform. To the company’s surprise, the number of user reviews declined by over 30 percent in the month after the payment program was introduced, relative to the month before. “The familiar “Law of Supply,” that implies supply increases in response to higher prices, does not seem to hold true when it comes to paying for reviews on a social platform,” said Sun.

The paper explores why reviews drop in response to the monetary payments. The authors conjecture that the drop in reviews could be the result of community members’ concerns that their honest reviews – motivated by an intrinsic motive to either help others with relevant information or to present themselves as knowledgeable about the product or service – may now be interpreted by the community as simply driven by the less honourable extrinsic motivation of making money. If this were true, the drop in user reviews would be greater among users who had more friends on the social network, who could potentially misinterpret the user’s motivation for writing reviews.

The authors empirically test their conjecture by comparing the change in reviewing behaviour among “socialites” (more than five friends on network) against “loners” (no friends on network) after the introduction of the payment scheme. Indeed, the reviews from socialites drop 85 percent, from just over 0.4 reviews a month to just under 0.06 reviews a month. In contrast, the loners who had little to lose in terms of social capital increase their reviews from close to zero to about 0.03 per month. The increase in reviews from the loners however does little to offset the massive drop among the socialites, who are the heavy contributors overall. Hence the aggregate drop of 30 percent.

“Nobody wants to be seen as a paid shill for brands, so the users with more friends and followers, who were likely more influential and wrote more originally, are the ones who stop writing. A real double-whammy,” said Dong.

“Our results support the approach of industry leaders like Yelp or Amazon, who do not compensate for reviews. In fact, they tap into the intrinsic motive for social recognition through status badges for frequent contributors,” said McIntyre. “There may be still ‘under the radar’ ways to pay only the less socially active users for their reviews, but such targeting can be risky as the heavy reviewers may perceive it to be unfair and therefore stop writing reviews, if and when they learn about it.”

The complete paper is available here.

In News

Millennial Chinese Become The Biggest Group of Online Shoppers for Luxury Brands

November 16, 2017 No Comments

By Nicole Buckler

Singles Day, held in China, is a day where Chinese shoppers go mental, buying themselves all sorts of nice stuff. This is all in aid of cheering themselves up while living the single life. The day is now the biggest day for e-commerce sales in the world.

The celebration for Singles Day held on 11/11 used to celebrate people who were proud to be single. So about those 1s in the date – obviously, single means “1.” But also, the four 1s evoke “bare branches,” the Chinese expression for the unattached. So the day became an anti-Valentine’s day of sorts. It was a self-love day. It was nice. Ahh.

But since the day started out, a lot has happened. There are now lots of single dudes in China. And, they are slowly getting richer. They have Yuan to burn and no one to spend it on but themselves. But let’s not forget the Chinese women too. They are now richer, taking their time to marry, and certainly love a good spend-up. And, if these women can afford it, it is the day where luxury brands get a solid burst of credit card love.

Even up until the Noughties, Singles Day used to be a small celebration. Then Billionaire Jack Ma of Alibaba came along (Alibaba is the Amazon.com of China.) Ma decided that he would do huge promotions around the day and plug it as an online shopping fiesta. And it worked. It is now the biggest online sales event in the world.

People who have gone on to marry have kept buying themselves stuff on Singles Day, jealous of singles and their self-spoiling. Singles Day is now a 24-hour-period where just about every demographic goes utterly mental with their credit cards. And if we don’t adopt it in Europe I was be very distressed. It sounds awesome.

While Alibaba was the first to link Singles’ Day to a shopping craze, plenty of rivals have joined in. Xiu.com is a Chinese luxury e-commerce platform. It just released its sales report for this year’s Singles Day.

Here are the sales stats generated via Xiu.com:

Online shoppers born after 1990 have become the leading consumer group in China

Online shoppers aged between 25 and 30 (born between 1987 and 1992) took up the biggest share of Xiu.com’s total sales on this year’s November 11. Purchasing behaviours vary significantly across age groups. Citing a few examples: the favourite fashion brand among women shoppers born in the 2000s was The Kooples, an emerging French street fashion brand featuring a Brit-pop style that, to date, had not yet proven popular in China.

Shoppers born in the 1990s preferred Dolce & Gabbana. Burberry was the top-selling fashion brand among women born in the 1970s and 1980s.

Giuseppe Zanotti was the best-selling shoe brand among male shoppers born in the 1990s and 2000s, while men born in the 1980s preferred Gucci. Men born in the 1960s and 1970s opted overwhelmingly for Prada. Surprisingly, Chanel was the favoured brand among male shoppers born in the 1950s.

Burberry remains the country’s favourite brand

The top selling brands overall were Burberry, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana and Chanel.

However, obvious differences existed between different cities. In Beijing, Moncler was the bestselling brand, while in Shanghai, Hermes, which was barely mentioned in other cities, proved to be the best seller. Philipp Plein was favored by Shenzhen buyers, while Emporio Armani sold best in Chongqing.

Male buyers spend more in fashion field

This year saw a huge increase in the average sale among men for fashion items, outspending the women. Male shoppers preferred the casual style of Armani Jeans and the avant-garde fashion style of Philipp Plein, while women remained with traditional luxury brands represented by Valentino, Dior and Chanel.

Beijing is where most of the shoppers are

Beijing ranked first on Xiu.com’s list of the top 20 Chinese cities in terms of sales during the one-day event, followed by Shanghai, Shenzhen and Chengdu.

The overall results showed that while there were more luxury-item shoppers in the bigger cities, people from smaller towns spent more per person, although there were fewer of them. So this seems to show that there is more money in bigger cities, which seems to be true of every country in the world.

If we can learn anything from this, it is that European luxury brands are killing it in China. And, that we must institute Singles Day here at once, people. Let’s get on it!