Välitöntä brändikokemusta mittaamaan

Jokainen meistä muistaa suuren joukon brändejä ja meillä kullakin on omat mielikuvamme niistä. Myös kuluttajatutkimuksessa on jo pitkään keskitytty analysoimaan assosiaatioita, joita liitämme tunnettuihin brändeihin.

Kun brändi on vallannut paikkansa markkinoilta, ovat brändin kehittämispäätökset jo historiaa. Etenkin brändien ideointivaihe tarvitsee tuekseen tutkimusta.

Millaisten ideoiden varaan kannattaisi uuden brändiaihion kehitystyössä panostaa?

Olemme kehittäneet kauppa- ja ravitsemustieteiden yhteistyönä tutkimusmenetelmää, jolla voisimme analysoida kuluttajan välittömiä reaktioita, kun hän joutuu ensikosketukseen uuden brändiärsykkeen kanssa. Nämä reaktiot sisältävät paljon tietoa uuden brändi-idean mahdollisuuksista.

Sovelsimme brändikokemuksen mittaamiseen alkujaan salattujen asenteiden analysointiin tarkoitettua IAT-menetelmää. Alkujaan tässä tietokoneavusteisessa menetelmässä pyrittiin kohdeärsykkeen aiheuttamien reaktioaikojen perusteella tunnistamaan sellaisia asenteita, joita koehenkilöllä kyllä on, mutta joita hän ei halua tai pysty paljastamaan. Tällaisia ovat esim. rotuennakkoluulot ja poliittiset asenteet.

Nyhtökaura ja sikanauta vertailussa 

Ensimmäiseen kokeeseemme otimme vielä idullaan olevan ruokatrendin ”ruumiillistuman”, Gold&Greenin Nyhtökauran, joka tarjoaa proteiinilähteen lihan vaihtoehdoksi. Tutkimuksen aikaan tämä oli vasta markkinoille tullut uutuus.

Kuvituskuva: nyhtökaura
Nyhtökauran markkinoinnissa järki voittaa tunteet.

IAT-koeasetelmassa Nyhtökauralle tarvittiin vertailubrändi. Valitsimme tähän suomalaisen perusproteiinin lähteen, Snellmanin sikanauta-jauhelihan.

IAT-tehtävän lähtökohtana olivat kummankin brändin pakkauksista otetut kuvat. Kokeeseen osallistui 24 henkilöä. IAT-ohjelma mittasi kunkin henkilön reaktioaikoja stimuluksiin, jotka ponnahtavat brändikuvien mukana hänen eteensä tietokoneen ruudulla.

Tenho ei yllä ajatuksista tunteisiin

Nyhtökauran aiheuttamat, välittömät mielleyhtymät olivat jauhelihaan verrattuna vahvemmin sekä älyllisiä että aistinvaraisia. Nyhtökaura antoi ajattelemisen aihetta ja sen odotettiin olevan hyvänmakuista.

Yllättävää oli kuitenkin se, että Nyhtökaura ei pystynyt herättämään välittömiä positiivisia tunteita yhtään sen voimakkaammin kuin jauhelihakaan. Nyhtökauran ”tenho” ei näyttäisi yltävän tunteisiin asti. Nyhtökauran kehittämisessä kannattaa siis edetä mieluummin kognitiivisin perustein kuin tunteisiin vedoten.

Kuvassa Teuvo KantanenTeuvo Kantanen

Lehtori, KTT

Drivers of online sales: An integrated study of customer reviews and backward effects

In February 2018, the third movie in an American series Fifty Shades was released. The movie itself earned a significant amount of success in opening weekend revenue – $38,560,195 in USA (Source: imdb.com). At the same time, the book version of the series also enjoyed additional sales from such release. Interestingly enough, not only the book three, the one on which the movie was based, but the first book in the series also gained major benefits. In fact, even though this is not the first time the series released a movie, the Amazon salesrank of the first book Fifty Shades of Grey still dropped to the lowest point 494 within one week of release from the peak 11,715 it reached two months ago (Source: Keepa.com). The decreasing salesrank indicates an increase in book sales on the website.

According to brand extension theories, the phenomenon that an introduction of extension affects the consumption of original product is referred to as reciprocal spillover effect or backward effect. The above-mentioned case of Fifty Shades is an evident example; yet, the phenomenon can be observed in various occurrences such as when artists release new album, etc. Interested in the phenomenon, in my thesis I investigated the effect of releasing a new book on the first book sales using data collected from Amazon.com. With the use of linear mixed-effects models, I found that the first book sales indeed decreased during the release of a new book. Besides that, the success of a new book determined the volume of extra sales. One surprising finding was that for popular book, the earlier release of new book enjoys more radical backward effect than the subsequence. However, this might not be the case for less popular book, particularly for extremely unpopular ones

Factors affecting product sales have always been an intriguing topic of research and word-of-mouth communication has been considered as one of the most influential drivers of sales. Especially in today’s world, online word-of-mouth possesses even more profound effect owning to its incredible spread and breadth. Searching on Google Scholar using keywords ‘effect of online reviews on sales’, one can easily find more than 700,000 papers, which demonstrates the rigorous attention of academic community to the topic. As a result, I chose to examine the role of online reviews. The result suggested that book rating alone did not have any significant persuasive effect on sales. In contrast, the number of reviews and its interaction with ratings did the job once consumers are informed about the parent product upon exposing to extension information.

Hien Nguyen

Master’s Thesis title: The reciprocal spillover effect in online book sales. Integrated with the effect of online reviews

Supervisor: Dr. Ville-Veikko Piispanen

Value creation in sales management

Financial administration field is going through major changes. Rapid and constant change in the field such as the changing role of accountant, growing digitalization and trend of outsourcing. Especially, the ever-growing competition brings challenges for accounting firms.

As a result, accounting firms have changed their organizational structure to response more to customer needs. They have built own sales organization to keep up the competition which has not traditionally been part of the financial administration field.

Customers’ value creation and sales

The purpose of my master’s thesis was to find ways to develop case company’s sales management. More precisely, to study how customer’s value creation contributes to the development of sales management and what kind of values customer’s value creation produces for sales management at the beginning of customer relationship.

The case company comes from the financial administration field which is going through changes. The digitalisation has rapidly increased over the years and will definitely increase all the time and moreover, customer preferences have changed.

Sales organizations in financial administration

So why did I choose this topic? I have a professional experience from the financial administration field and during my master’s studies I studied sales management as my minor studies. It was easy and natural combine these two topics as a research.

I also saw the opportunity for interesting research because as mentioned previously separate sales organization has not traditionally been part of the financial administration field.

Furthermore, it can be seen that when a new customer is reached, there is many value creation points to be managed.

Ideas for developing sales management

The research results showed that value creation process happens if there is interaction between customer and service provider. Especially, the value creation process highlighted the roles of customer, service provider and interactions.

Customer’s value creation produced new values to sales management parts which are sales strategy, sales operations and sales analysis. These values can be used together with existed values which help the development of sales management.

Overall, the practical contribution of my master’s thesis was achieved which was to understand how sales management can be developed.

Photo of Jenna NuutinenJenna Nuutinen

Master’s Thesis Title: Value Creation in Sales Management: Case from Financial Administration Field

Supervisor: Eeva Aromaa

Plausibility and power in commercialization of knowledge

Commercialization of knowledge shakes the traditional practices in the universities throughout the world. Traditionally, universities have focused on teaching and research aiming to peer reviewed academic publications. However, the external pressure in terms of ever tightening research funding as well as universities’ internal interests have been transforming universities towards commercially oriented sources of public welfare since Bayh Dole Act in 1980.

In Finland, this change has been slow and driven often by engineering sciences or sporadic commercialization projects. In my Doctoral Thesis (link), I focused on a two-year commercialization project aimed at developing university-industry co-operation and generating a general commercialization model for the Science Faculty of a Finnish university. The main objective was to analyze how the sense of commercialization is produced over time and how it unfolds and changes through social interaction.

Social interaction in board meetings

According to Karl Weick’s sensemaking framework, people try to understand novel situations through their identity, according to extracted cues from the ongoing events, in a relation to their experiences, and with other people involved. In short, actors try to find a plausible explanation for the things happening around them.

In my data, the board meetings of the project served as a key site where the interaction between various actors took place and where the meanings of commercialization were negotiated, created, and maintained. The data for the study consisted of observations made in the board meetings, board member interviews, and project documents.

This socially constructed understanding of commercialization changed throughout the study, however, leaning little by little towards plausible explanation where challenges in commercialization were caused by a number of factors external to the project.

More plausible than others

The sensemaking framework focuses on socio-psychological properties of understanding, thus it sparsely provides tools to analyze, why a certain plausible meaning exceeds others. Albert Mills and Jean Helms Mills of Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, have introduced critical approach to sensemaking bringing formative context, organizational rules, power, and discursive practices into sensemaking process.

Through this extended heuristics, I found that the meeting and project rules, substance experts’ competence, and power relations between the board members guided a sense of commercialization, and it unfolded and took shape as a plausible commercialization story. The plausible story condensed into a local rule influencing the unfolding understanding of commercialization.

Scientific knowledge in front

In practice, those with academic background led the unfolding plausible story by bringing forth the academic principles and practices, and thus exercising discursive power to determine the commercialization process.

But, the power wasn’t only related to positions but socially constructed, negotiated and maintained in discourses. It was relational to issues considered, the phase of the project, the events, and the actors present in meetings.

Commercialization as a social process

My Thesis indicates that commercialization is a social interaction of which content and plausibility are constructed through making sense of events happening during the process. In academia, scientific knowledge is so dominant (see Montonen 2014) that it might even bypass or overshadow the economic aspects in commercialization process.

Therefore commercialization of academic knowledge might be easier to organize by such organizations of not directly involved to university (see e.g. Maia & Claro 2013; Isabelle 2013).

Photo of Outi-Maaria Palo-ojaOuti-Maaria Palo-oja, D.Sc. (Econ. & Bus. Adm.)

Uskottavaa kaupallistamistarinaa punomassa (written in Finnish)
Weaving plausibility into commercialization

Supervisors:
Professor Päivi Eriksson, University of Eastern
Lecturer Teuvo Kantanen, University of Eastern Finland
Postdoctoral Researcher Marke Kivijärvi, Jyväskylä University School of Business and Economics