
Charles AreniUniversity of Wollongong | UOW · Sydney Business School
Charles Areni
Doctor of Philosophy
About
55
Publications
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2,119
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
June 2016 - February 2017
Publications
Publications (55)
Motivated reasoning explains how climate change deniers can maintain their beliefs in the face of disconfirming evidence, suggesting that, compared to believers, the online comments of climate change deniers are more likely to (a) reference independent and social media websites advocating ideologically congruent positions, (b) politicize the issue,...
Automated text analysis of YouTube comments on videos featuring content indexed by year for each year between 1965 – 1981 (Study 1), each year between 1980 – 2005 (Study 2), and 56 of the 70 years between 1950 – 2019 (Study 3), identified key words associated with users’ disclosing their age in the year of the video (e.g., “I was _11 years old_ in...
Research on motives for using social media suggests competing hypotheses regarding how far back in time people vicariously travel to experience nostalgia online. Automated text analyses of user comments on 56 YouTube videos featuring Billboard Magazine's top 30 songs of the year from the 1950–2019 period identified clusters of co‐occurring words su...
Motivated reasoning suggests that climate change deniers are more likely to access and comment on unreliable online sources of information that support their existing views and political ideologies, whereas climate change believers are more likely to access more objective sources of information not necessarily related to their political viewpoints....
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to show how non-random groupings of YouTube videos can be combined with automated text analysis (ATA) of user comments to conduct quasi-experiments on consumer sentiment towards different types of brands in a naturalistic setting.
Design/methodology/approach
NCapture extracted thousands of comments on multiple...
Leximancer identified word frequencies and co-occurrences in thousands of comments on YouTube videos of TV commercials from the 60s and 70s (Study 1) and the 50s–80s (Study 2). Multiple clusters of co-occurring words suggested ontological insecurity (e.g., “old,” “remember,” “love,” “miss”) and nostalgia (e.g., “childhood,” “memories,” “happy,” “be...
Contemporary concerns that social media – and its hardware accomplice the smart phone – dumb down, socially isolate and cause addiction among users have historical precedents in earlier reactions to the Internet, television, radio, and even the printed word. Automated and interpretive analyses of thousands of comments on YouTube videos of products...
Reactions to nostalgia-evoking content on social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube suggest an unconscious motive of ontological security, defined as a ‘sense of presence in the world as a real, alive, whole, and in a temporal sense, a continuous person’. In addition to the unprecedented access to the past provided by social media, additiona...
Two laboratory studies examine how consumers adjust their eating to the size of the portion they expect to receive. Participants who knew in advance that they would receive six pieces of chocolate waited less time before eating each piece and ate more pieces than participants who expected to receive only two pieces when they started, even though bo...
Researchers suggest quantification of qualitative data as an innovative approach to knowledge creation. Brand associations, a form of qualitative data, are common in measuring customer-based brand equity. The branding literature suggests that not all brand associations are equal. The strength, uniqueness and valence of brand associations need to be...
Music congruity effects on consumer behavior are conceptualized in terms of cognitive priming of semantic networks in memory, and operationalized as congruent with a product's country of origin (Experiment 1), or congruent with the utilitarian (Experiment 2) or social identity (Experiments 2 and 3) connotations of a product. Hearing a specific genr...
This research examines the savoring or eating behaviors by which consumers are able to adjust their level of satiation to accommodate different portion sizes. Over three experiments, it shows that consumers who receive a smaller number of chocolates than initially expected compensate by eating more slowly (an effect mediated by number of chews) pay...
American wine consumers reported purchase likelihoods for several fictitious wines based on brief verbal descriptions in an information display table. The information in the table was organized according to either region of origin or wine variety categories. Results indicated that the French Chardonnay had a higher purchase likelihood when the tabl...
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to examine whether home advantage (HA), wherein a team is more likely to win, and by a larger margin, when they are playing at home vs away, exists in representative rugby competitions involving teams comprised of “all-star” players from several clubs. It also assesses whether referees are biased in favour of...
This research presents a framework for branding new products that distinguishes between combining a parent brand with a generic sub-brand that is little more than product category identifier, combining a parent brand with a genuine sub-brand that creates associations unique to the new product, and developing a completely new brand with no reference...
The results of a laboratory experiment revealed that women were generally more accepting of advertising claims than men. However, men and women had decidedly different reactions to the use of hedges (e.g., "may," "probably," "possibly") and pledges (e.g., "definitely," "undoubtedly," "absolutely") in advertising claims. Women responded negatively t...
A field experiment involving 95 variety discount chain stores was conducted in which in-store radio ads were run in different formats and schedules, across different blocks of stores, over a 4-week period. The test products were advertised on in-store radio either (a) at their regular price, (b) at a discounted price or (c) at a discounted price th...
A meta-analysis of 34 samples identified a small but reliable "Monday blues" effect (-.08 < or = d < or = -.06) in samples reporting current or real-time moods for each day of the week. However, the size of the effect in samples reporting recalled summaries of moods experienced over the course of a day varied depending on whether the sample involve...
Some researchers argue that the "company is the brand" for services, emphasising the pre-eminence of corporate brand image, while others advocate developing strong sub-brands for specific service offerings. This paper presents the arguments for the "company as the brand" notion for services, and addresses these arguments in favour of suggesting tha...
In an internet survey, 349 respondents predicted that their moods for the work week ahead would be lowest in the early morning, rising steadily to a peak in the evening, but there was no obvious trend in the momentary moods they actually experienced on each day. These results suggest that, several days in the future, paid work is viewed more negati...
Some researchers argue that the `company is the brand' for services, emphasising the pre-eminence of corporate brand image, whereas others advocate developing strong sub-brands for specific service offerings. This research explores the debate using the open-ended associations elicited by brands in two service categories. The results indicate that w...
This research refers to dissatisfied consumers posting negative complaints on blogs as "flogging". It qualitatively content analyses the complaints flogged on a non-commercial website, and highlights all complaint channel breakdowns as experienced by both offline and online shoppers. The "open and axial coding" technique with no a priori categories...
In an internet survey, 702 Australians reported momentary and typical moods for each day of the week (DOW). Both mood measures indicated a gender x marital status x DOW interaction, wherein wives were relatively immune to Monday blues compared to husbands and single adults. Due to traditional gender stereotypes and roles within the household, wives...
Researchers often focus on perceived (i.e. estimated) duration or deviations from expected duration when examining the effects of atmospheric music on waiting and customer satisfaction. Comparatively little attention has been given to whether an interval feels as though it has "dragged" on versus "flown" by compared to the normal pace of time passa...
An Internet survey revealed that day-of-the-week (DOW) stereotypes (i.e., “Monday blues”, “Wednesday hump day”, “TGIF”, etc.) were pronounced when subjects predicted their moods for each day of the upcoming week, less obvious when they remembered their moods from each day of the preceding week, and least apparent in the momentary moods they actuall...
In a survey of 202 participants, Monday was cited most frequently as the worst morning (65%) and evening (35%); whereas Friday (43%) and Saturday (45%) were the best evening and morning, respectively. Test–retest reliability was higher for worst morning (.89) and evening (.83) judgments, compared to best morning (.44) and evening (.61) judgments. I...
Arguments in advertising are intended to maximize the acceptance of the product claims being made. The structure of the argument can influence claim acceptance apart from the quality of the substantiating evidence presented. Specifically, arguments having irrelevant but representative conditionals, hierarchically-related claims, multiple data propo...
This research explores how message style influences persuasion in conjunction with message substance. Using the elaboration likelihood model, the study operationalizes message style as language power and message substance as argument quality, then considers the multiple roles language power can assume in persuasion. The authors investigate whether...
In the first of two experiments, the estimated duration of a given interval was shorter when familiar as opposed to unfamiliar music was played, but only for respondents waiting idly; music had little or no effect on respondents engaged in a memory task during the interval. In the second experiment, respondents waiting idly again reported shorter e...
The segmentation-change model of time perception proposes that individuals engaged in cognitive tasks during a given interval of time retrospectively estimate duration by recalling events that occurred during the interval and inferring each event's duration. Previous research suggests that individuals can recall the number of songs heard during an...
Powerless language involves the use of various linguistic markers (i.e., hedges, intensifiers, deictic phrases, overly polite language, tag questions, and verbal and nonverbal hesitations), which signify relatively low social status in a given communication context. Powerful language suggests higher social status and is characterized largely by the...
The results of a laboratory experiment revealed that the participants had generally negative reactions to the use of hedges (e.g. ‘may', ‘probably', etc.) and pledges (e.g. ‘definitely,' ‘undoubtedly', etc.) in advertising claims. The use of either type of probability marker reduced claim acceptance and produced more negative cognitive responses re...
Conditional indicatives are words or short phrases that facilitate comprehension and signal relationships among the clauses and sentences comprising an argument. Causal indicatives (e.g. because, since and thanks to) imply a positive relationship between two clauses such that the acceptance of one makes the other more likely to be true, whereas con...
Scales were developed to measure hospitality managers’ beliefs about the effects of atmospheric music on perception, behaviour, and financial performance. Some of the scales corresponded to established theories in the marketing literature, whereas others captured emergent theories based on an earlier exploratory study of industry conventions regard...
In research examining the elaboration likelihood model (ELM), argument quality has generally been treated as an expedient methodological tool rather than a conceptually meaningful construct. Differences between strong and weak arguments have typically been cast in terms of pretest results and/or the ad hoc interpretations of researchers. Given the...
A total of 90 hotel, restaurant, and pub managers completed unstructured telephone interviews exploring their implicit theories of how atmospheric music affects consumer behavior. Many of the implicit theories emerging in the interviews were grounded in previous research, but others had no obvious counterparts in the literature. The more novel theo...
Drawing on aspects of logic, classical rhetoric, psycholinguistics, social psychology, and probability theory, this article develops the proposition-probability model (PPM) of argument structure and message acceptance in which verbal arguments are decomposed into arrays of three types of propositions: (a) product claims, (b) data supporting those c...
To explore the issue of style over substance during initial contact between salesperson and prospect, the authors introduce the construct, sales presentation quality, to capture the skill with which sales presentations are actually delivered. Drawing upon the communications literature, the authors conceptualize sales presentation quality in terms o...
Men are typically thought to dislike being involved in gift giving. The results of this study, however, show that men's involvement in gift exchange is sometimes incongruent with society's gender role expectations. Using written narratives of memorable gift exchange experiences, we find that men are far more likely than women to recall gift giving...
A laboratory experiment examined the extent to which the reported opinions of others influence persuasion in individuals low vs. high in need for cognition (NFC). Reported opinions influenced the attitudes of high- and low-NFC respondents in the direction of the majority position. However, for high-NFC respondents, the effect was entirely mediated...
This manuscript examines the potential of bias in qualitative research due to coder gender. It reports a study of gender differences in coding by males and females based on a coding assignment involving written narratives completed by 18 males and 17 females. The study found gender differences in their coding the presence/absence of 10 themes relat...
The purpose of this study is to investigate how origin information for wine products influences retail sales. The growing variety of products and the generally singular origin of wine products makes this market particularly sensitive to origin information. The origin of wine is often perceived as an indicator of quality and is used as the basis of...
This research compares and contrasts three gender identity instruments, the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI), the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ), and the Sexual Identity Scale (SIS), that have been used in previous investigations of various aspects of consumer behavior. Specifically, it examines the dimensionality and internal reliability of...
Can point-of-purchase (POP) displays cause a decrease in sales of the featured brand? In an actual test-market promotion,
the use of special POP displays led to a decrease in sales of featured wines from a specific U.S. region. Moreover, sales
of regularly shelved wines from competitive regions actually increased. The results of a laboratory experi...
A laboratory experiment examined the effect of reporting poll results on opinions regarding a legislative proposal affecting higher education. The results indicated that exposure to poll results was more likely to change opinions when the proposal had few personal consequences, and when the majority position in the polls was counter to the opinions...
Using the Heuristic‐Systematic Model as a theoretical basis, this study replicates, extends, and integrates previous research on communication modality (i.e., print vs. audio vs. audiovisual) and power of language style (POS). Specifically, it focuses on the extent to which communication modality moderates the effects of powerful versus powerless l...
Research on gift-exchange behavior has generally found that women are more concerned and involved with giving gifts than are men. Moreover, the consumer behavior literature has focused almost exclusively on gift-giving behavior, offering few insights regarding gift-receiving roles. As an initial step toward understanding gift receiving, 89 men and...
This paper presents an integrative model of service sub-branding that distinguishes between generic sub-brands that are nothing more than service category identifiers, versus genuine attempts to establish equity at the sub-brand level. Within this generic versus genuine continuum, sub-branding strategies depend on (a) whether the newly branded serv...
Drawing on aspects of logic, classical rhetoric, psycholinguistics, social psychology, and probability theory, this article develops the proposition-probability model (PPM) of argument structure and message acceptance in which verbal arguments are decomposed into arrays of three types of propositions: (a) product claims, (b) data supporting those c...
Brand architecture is a set of interlinked building blocks reflecting the levels of branding, from higher level corporate brands to lower level product sub-brands, and the linkages amongst them (Uncles et al., 1995). For example, not only is the powerful linkage between Nestle and its sub-brand KitKat synergistic but also the association of each be...
Colour research in marketing, particularly as it relates to branding, is limited by reliance on verbal labels to identify and categorise colours. For example, discussing associations with the colour "green" for branding food products makes little or no sense because numerous relevant associations would depend on the specific shade of green used (i....