Colin Campbell

University of San Diego | USD · Department of Marketing

In this article, we develop an understanding of native advertising, a growing new form of online advertising, which we define as desired marketing communications that appear in-stream. Current forms of native advertising can be considered in terms of their secrecy: how aware a consumer is of a native adver- tisement’s source and intent. Based on ex...

Pre-roll advertising is a novel form of online video advertising that provides consumers with an option to skip after viewing a brief forced segment. Pre-roll ads are unique from other forms of online advertising because pre-roll ads play in exactly the space in which consumers are expecting to view their intended content. Such interruption and obs...

Video advertising is increasingly prevalent, appearing in more and more places across the web and on social media. In many of these contexts ads are typically viewed without sound, possibly impacting their effectiveness and meaning. In this paper we draw on advertising and screen media research, analyze ads drawn from both articles and an agency da...

Native advertising is a relatively new form of online advertising that matches the format of surrounding non-advertising content. The fact that native advertising blends into its context risks deceiving consumers who may be unaware the content they are viewing is actually advertising. Article-style native advertising, a native ad form that mimics t...

Users of deal collectives coproduce “deals” that yield value beyond what a marketer intends when offering promotions. The authors develop an understanding of how this unintended value is coproduced through the combined actions of users in deal collectives. Users are drawn to deal collectives by a web of motivations that include subversive shopper f...

Rapid advances in AI technology have important implications for, and effects on, brands and advertisers. Increasingly, brands are creating digital models to showcase clothing and accessories in a similar way to human models, with AI used to customize various body types, ages, sizes, and skin tones. However, little is known about how the underrepres...

In this article we develop a comprehensive understanding of diverse representation in advertising. While numerous studies highlight increasing demand for diversity among some consumers, such enthusiasm is not universal. This is creating challenges for brands, some of which have faced backlash, either due to a perceived lack of authenticity in their...

Many luxury brands are investing heavily in creating dynamic video content to actively engage consumers. While it is straightforward to calculate the views or “likes” from a particular campaign to benchmark performance, analyzing consumers' comments on luxury brands' dynamic video content presents a challenge due to the unstructured nature of natur...

Today's marketers are increasingly faced with the need to collect and interpret data to aid firm strategic decision making. At the same time, there has been an explosion of text-based data and numerous advances in big data that enable marketers to mine the collection and aggregation of text. However, for many marketers there is a need to better und...

Purpose This paper aims to explore how business-to-business (B2B) salespeople use social media and emulate value creation strategies used by social media influencers. Design/methodology/approach Using 28 interviews with salespeople, this paper develops six propositions and a conceptual framework that outlines when and how B2B salespeople use socia...

In recent years, marketers have placed increased reliance upon artificial intelligence (AI) and, subsequently, the use of virtual agents in customer service contexts is on the rise. Despite such service digitalization, service can still fail. While there is an increasing literature on the effect of virtual agents in service settings, questions rema...

Research has shown that customer engagement contributes positively to competitive advantage. It is well-established that in the process of building and maintaining customer engagement, companies may make mistakes (service failures) that can jeopardise the success of customer-firm relationships. Studies on customer engagement have mostly focused on...

This article explores how firms, through characteristics of physical environments, can inspire consumers to engage in creating and posting environment-cued indirect advertising, or what is commonly known as “Instagramming.” The first study is used to qualitatively understand what makes an environment “Instagrammable” from the designer perspective....

Purpose This research explores anticipated long-term change in the retail and services marketplace, directly arising as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Design/methodology/approach A series of 20 in-depth interviews were conducted with retail and service stakeholders (executives, suppliers and thought-leaders) from across Asia-Pacific (New Zeala...

Purpose This paper aims to examine how consumers respond to social media influencers that are created through artificial intelligence (AI) and compares effects to traditional (human) influencers. Design/methodology/approach Across two empirical studies, the authors examine the efficacy of AI social media influencers. With Study 1, the authors esta...

Traditionally, advertising relies on creativity to increase its effectiveness. However, little is known about the use of creativity in negatively-valenced situations. For instance, in times of crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, how should retailers engage in advertising? Should they strive to deliver creative advertising, or not? We investigate...

Ephemeral social media is growing in popularity and brands are increasingly using this method to engage with and advertise to consumers. Yet, little research attention has been paid to how consumers perceive and retain social media content, particularly marketing communications, when they are aware it will disappear. Across five studies we find tha...

Marketers know that running experiments is a proven way to improve results and gain competitive advantage against rivals. Despite this knowledge - and the fact that experiments are now easier to conduct than ever before - data shows that marketers consistently under-experiment. This paper examines why this gap exists, and what can be done to close...

Live advertising is on the rise, with many influencers, brands, and retailers investing in the format online. Drawing on liveness theory, this article deconstructs advertising media and illustrates what it means to "go live." Allowing for the synchronous production and consumption of media, live ads often offer sociable atmospheres and, when online...

Traditionally, the production and distribution of advertising material has relied on human effort and analog tools. However, technological innovations have given the advertising industry the digital and automatic tools enabling advertisers to automate much of the advertising processes, and produce "synthetic ads," or ads comprising content based on...

Impulse purchases are encouraged by retailers and can comprise a significant portion of a retailer’s sales. However, both consumers and researchers generally see impulse purchases as something to be avoided because they tend to be incongruent with consumers’ long-term goals. Using a goal congruence framework, this research finds that taking a broad...

As government-mandated lockdowns and steep declines in trade set in as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, a common theme became apparent in the advertising of the time: it was all the same. Regardless of the product category or brand personality, many ads were remarkably similar, beginning with melancholy music, voiceovers reminding the audience th...

Many retailers seek growth by strategically enabling a category captain to manage a category on their behalf. Past research assesses the efficacy of category captaincy from a retailer perspective, with results showing effective categorycaptain arrangements depend on the respective abilities of actors to effectively operate in such a network structu...

Encouraging physical activity and fitness is a key goal of many organizations and governments today. At the same time, the last decade has witnessed an unprecedented growth in ability to track behavior. The fact that anything and everything can now be tracked also means that anything can be turned into a game. Gamification, or the application of ga...

Consumers are shifting purchasing behavior from physical stores to online vendors and increasingly relying on reviews from peers to make purchase decisions. Brands are keen to use these reviews in promotions and to facilitate product innovation. But there is an unforeseen outcome: this paper shows that when consumers rely on online reviews, they ar...

As customers, operations, and supply chains produce ever more volumes of data, firms must explore new ways of extracting valuable insights to improve efficiency and efficacy of decision-making processes at the same time as reducing noise and abnormalities in data streams (Sivarajah et al. 2017). Machine learning and artificial intelligence techniqu...

This article demonstrates the value of brands employing the use dark stories. Dark stories, also referred to as ‘grotesque’ stories, are created by using shocking, disgusting, or deviant imagery. This paper operationalizes dark storytelling and takes initial steps in scale creation, validating a preliminary three-item scale for the construct. In an...

Purpose This paper develops a generalizable, machine-learning-based method for measuring established marketing constructs using passive analysis of consumer-generated textual data from service reviews. The method is demonstrated using topic and sentiment analysis along dimensions of an existing scale: lodging quality index (LQI). Design/methodolog...

Sharing platforms are becoming increasingly common, transforming how organisations and customers interact across diverse categories. While there is clear demand for the sharing economy, less is known about heterogeneity of consumer preferences and the varying demand that exists for sharing experiences across different categories of consumption. In...

Purpose Brands are increasingly considering the use of chatbots to supplement, or even replace, humans in service interactions. Like humans, chatbots can follow certain service scripts in their encounters, which can subsequently determine the customer experience. Service scripts are verbal prescriptions that seek to standardize customer service int...

Service that falls below customer expectations is framed as a service failure. While many researchers have investigated service failures, they have tended to focus on large service failures. This is likely because large failures are more noticeable by firms and more likely to prompt customer complaints than small failures. However, we argue that sm...

Influencer marketing is the practice of compensating individuals for posting about a product or service on social media. Influencer marketing is on the rise, and many marketers now plan either to start using influencers or to increase their use of them in their media mixes. Despite such growth, relatively little strategic or academic insight exists...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is at the forefront of a revolution in business and society. AI affords companies a host of ways to better understand, predict, and engage customers. Within marketing, AI’s adoption is increasing year-on-year and in varied contexts, from providing service assistance during customer interactions to assisting in the ident...

Purpose This paper aims to develop a novel and generalizable machine-learning based method of measuring established marketing constructs through passive analysis of consumer-generated textual data. The authors term this method scale-directed text analysis. Design/methodology/approach The method first develops a dictionary of words related to speci...

Even using simple techniques like taking the stairs, many individuals struggle to maintain the motivation to be physically active. Health gamification systems can aid this goal by providing points earned through exercise that are redeemable for tangible extrinsic rewards. Using self-determination theory, we conduct research on one such system and i...

These are the correct figures of Strategies for creating value through individual and collective customer experiences

Social media affords brands and users a variety of benefits. However, a recent stream of research identifies a multidimensional dark side to social media. We contribute to this growing body of research in four key ways. First, we empirically investigate user perceptions of the dark side of social media in terms of the risks proposed by Baccarella e...

We spend our days looking at them, talking to them, and touching them. We sleep with them, work with them, and play with them. They increasingly consume our time, attention, and money: we are addicted to our digital devices—or, more precisely, the digital experiences they enable. This addiction is both akratic (we are aware of the negative conseque...

Native advertising is a new form of online advertising that appears in many settings, such as blogs, social media, and entertainment and news publications. Native ads typically blend with their surrounding context, stem from sources or placements that do not signal advertising, lack overtly persuasive or sales-focused messaging, and have less clear...

Despite tremendous interest in how online communities create value, existing research tends to focus on limited means through which such value is generated. In this article, we develop a conceptual model of customer value formation. This model rests on two dimensions, namely whether value is formed in the customer or provider domain and whether the...

While bricks-and-mortar stores and the Internet are dominant retailing channels, mobile and social media have rapidly emerged and challenge traditional retail models and consumer behavior. However, researchers have yet to account for how consumers integrate mobile and social channels throughout the various stages of the buying process. Using Latent...

We offer a theoretically grounded operational definition of the brand engagement construct, an area of demonstrated importance to practitioners and of growing interest amongst academics. We construct our definition following a grounded theory approach. Our investigation comprised a review of the relevant literature along with an associated multi-st...

Belgium, a relatively small country, with roughly 10 million people ranks fifth in terms of wine importations with roughly 300 million bottles per year. As a result of a complex history and profound and ongoing political crisis, the country is mainly composed of two communities: the French speaking and the Dutch (Flemish) speaking. Despite the cult...

Measuring response to consumer generated advertising is, for a variety of reasons, difficult to do using traditional advertising measures. In this paper we present an approach to better understanding response to consumer generated advertising. Using the comments posted about four consumer generated advertisements hosted on YouTube, we demonstrate h...

The democratization of the Internet and, subsequently, the growing popularity of amateur video production, have given rise to historic levels of voter empowerment. More specifically, the populace has turned to YouTube and other, similar websites to voice their opinions in a public manner through the posting of, and response to, amateur political vi...

Drawing on Clark and Marshall’s (1981) theory of mutual knowledge, this article presents a framework for understanding and managing brand meaning. Whilst traditional brand management theory has focused primarily on brand-related marketing communications, the role that the knowledge base of the recipient plays in interpreting these communications ha...

Web 2.0 and social media have changed the ways in which brands interact with consumers. As organizations attempt to join the conversations in the online world, brand managers need to measure their firm’s visibility in social media, just as they would with traditional media. This study proposes a tool for collecting and analyzing data on social medi...

The Internet and how consumers make use of it is constantly changing. The Internet has evolved from an information retrieval source to a place of interactivity, and a place for dialogue from one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many. Many term the Internet today “Web 2.0.” As one of many social platforms of Web 2.0, the use of video as a means of on...

Mission statements, although long accepted as an important part of the strategic planning and implementation process in the corporate world, have increasingly become requirements within institutions of higher education as well. Beyond mission statements’ ability to provide direction and to support strategic choice, mission statements are also seen...

The Internet has increasingly changed from a pure uni-directional information medium to a multi-directional exchange medium and thus nowadays holds a strong position in peoples’ daily life. Today, the worl-wide-web is used for information search and for vivid interchange of opinions and ideas amongst consumers. Especially the communication between...

Consumer perception of price increases and their reactions are a topic of great relevance for marketing research and practice. We investigate consumers' acceptance of price increases justified by higher costs due to company's corporate socially responsible activities by conducting two experimental studies. In the first study we examine perceived fa...

In the context of surveys, data quality is merely a function of the amount of error in the data. The more accurate the data ( i.e. the less erroneous the data), the higher the quality of the data (Biemer, Groves, and Lyberg 1991). Even though Weisberg (2005) elaborates on the importance of response behavior within the concept of total survey error,...

This article builds on the original Blattberg–Deighton (BD) model of customer equity to focus on short-term market share growth and long-term customer equity. We account for what we term the inertial segment – those consumers who will continue to purchase in the absence of retention spending – to explore ways to more optimally balance budget alloca...

Ask just about anyone over the age of 40 what advertising is and they’ll be able to give you a pretty crisp definition. It involves someone – usually an organization of some sort – paying for the right to display a message of their choosing at a particular space or during a particular time, usually in some form of mass media with the aim of persuas...

Purpose - To understand how consumers may be segmented with respect to their reactions to social network marketing. Design/methodology/approach - We segment consumers on the basis of attitudes toward social network marketing and explore the association among psychological, economic, and socio-demographic covariates using data from 883 consumers an...

For this Speaker's Box, we've asked three researchers and thought leaders for their views on the need for a more standardized typology for Internet advertising: Dr. Colin Campbell is a researcher who examines consumer-generated advertising, social media, and consumer engagement. In particular, he has a research and teaching interest in how the Inte...

Considerable research exists on stochastic models of switching behaviour that uses sequences of individual-level purchase data. While at the individual level, sample size and sequence length are limiting factors, at the aggregate level, heterogeneity with respect to purchase sequences may assist in interpreting results. The authors propose an appro...

It has become commonplace for consumers to judge companies against social responsibility criteria. Along with such judgments, many consumers are also taking up action, often using the Internet to virally spread their views. Such consumer-led campaigns can put at risk years of investments in branding. For firms understanding what drives consumers to...

While marketers have largely recognised website design and its value, interaction mechanisms are widely underexplored features of virtual communities. We argue that not only the presence of interpersonal interaction - but also its type - play key roles in how consumers experience virtual communities. In our study, we demonstrate a main effect of in...

Purpose This paper aims to examine the preferences of students towards different teaching methods and the perceived effectiveness of experiential teaching methods in different operations management (OM) modules. Design/methodology/approach Student perceptions of different teaching methods and various aspects of an experiential teaching method, in...

We report on the findings of an exploratory set of experiments designed to test the effect of negative firm actions online. Findings point to firms suffering a loss of consumer attitude toward the brand when legal action is threatened against the creator of a consumer generator advertisement. Similarly, consumers also lowered their attitude toward...