Cynthia M. Webster

Macquarie University · Department of Marketing and Management

The entrepreneurship literature demonstrates the positive impact of network bricolage on resource-seeking. We extend this work by examining why and how entrepreneurs reconfigure ties within the social architecture of their networks. Building on the network bricolage literature and an in-depth analysis of 55 dyadic relationships embedded in four net...

This study investigates the impact of incentive type and ad appeal on consumers' social media engagement in health‐related ads. The aim is to determine whether self‐oriented incentives versus other‐oriented social incentives encourage (crowd in) or discourage (crowd out) consumers to engage in health‐related ads on social media. Four experimental s...

Adopting and clearly communicating a higher purpose has become a key priority for many brands. More and more commercial organizations see purposeful branding as the next competitive advantage and are aligning themselves with a worthy cause or societal issue. Non-profit organizations (NPOs), which arguably are inherently purpose-driven, should also...

This paper examines consumer-brand engagement on social media, focusing on the dynamic interplay between brands and consumers as well as among consumers themselves. In addition to liking and sharing behaviors, we look at what influences consumers to provide feedback to brands by commenting on brand posts, connect with other consumers by replying to...

In seeking resources, entrepreneurs need networks but more than that they need the motivation and ability to enact different roles to capture network resources. We investigate the experiences of nine entrepreneurs by integrating qualitative in-depth, face-to-face interviews and quantitative social network analysis. We examine the network structures...

Applying the lens of network bricolage, our study examines how entrepreneur bricoleurs “make do with what’s on hand”, using their networks to circumvent resource constraints in their pursuit of growth strategies for their ventures. We tease out the network bricolage ties from mere resource-seeking ties. We provide evidence of network bricolage beha...

The purpose of this study is to examine how small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in different industry segments utilize government, industry, and professional networks and to test the influence of SME innovativeness, environmental competitiveness and network type for SME export likelihood. Previous studies on networks and exports tend to be qua...

Purpose With the soaring volumes of brand-related social media conversations, digital marketers have extensive opportunities to track and analyze consumers’ feelings and opinions about brands, products or services embedded within consumer generated content (CGC). These “Big Data” opportunities render manual approaches to sentiment analysis impract...

Many health providers sponsor online communities that enable health consumers to connect and share experiences. This qualitative study draws upon both social capital and consumer behavior theories to demonstrate that consumers participating in the creation of social capital co-create value for themselves and each other. This netnographic study cont...

This paper identifies the resource needs of international entrepreneurs and examines the role of government and industry networks as providers of resource opportunities deemed essential by international entrepreneurs for international growth. Unique resource challenges confront international entrepreneurs in their pursuit of international markets....

Today companies take advantage of social media to engage consumers and excite electronic word-of-mouth. Benefits of social media campaigns are not limited to commercial marketing, and social marketers are also investing in such campaigns to tackle sensitive issues and difficult lifestyle changes. Offering incentives and using different message appe...

This paper investigates the emotional dynamics in social media by examining brand-generated posts and responding consumer comments. The results of an empirical study of 166 Facebook brand pages suggest that emotional content in brand-generated posts increases emotional contagion to the consumers. Furthermore, positive emotional content and high aro...

Celebrity brand authenticity is introduced as a construct that represents consumer perceptions of celebrities being ‘true to oneself’ in their behaviors and interactions with consumers. A scale is developed through two purification stages and the scale’s predictive validity is assessed. First, the meaning of celebrity brand authenticity to consumer...

Social entrepreneurs create value for and with target communities in need. This paper responds to calls for research addressing social entrepreneurs’ drive to benefit others. We draw from psychology to augment the understanding of motives in entrepreneurship before conducting a phenomenon-driven, instrumental case study of social entrepreneurs’ mot...

Purpose This study explores consumer brand associations and values derived from a corporate brand and a celebrity brand endorser prior to their endorsement. Design/methodology/approach This study uses both Hierarchical Value Mapping and Brand Concept Mapping to identify brand attributes that translate to personal meaning for consumers and then to...

This study uses a combination of both qualitative and quantitative approaches to explore the associations that consumers tie to a specific human brand (Jerry Seinfeld) prior to his anticipated co-branding partnership with a regional Australian financial institution. Results of the study identified strong and unique attribute and attitude associatio...

Background Whole school, ethos-changing interventions reduce risk behaviours in middle adolescence, more than curriculum-based approaches. Effects on older ages are not known. We set out to replicate one of these interventions, Australia’s Gatehouse Project, in a rural Canadian high school. Methods A guided, whole school change process sought to m...

With the growth and ongoing popularity of internet-based social networking, consumers are finding new ways to connect and collaborate. This paper explores the value that consumers experience through social networks in a variety of contexts, both online and offline. Drawing upon two streams of marketing literature, one relating to perceived value as...

This paper applies Gestalt psychology and associative network theory to examine the effect of eclipsing in celebrity endorsement on consumer attitude towards the endorsed brand. Eclipsing occurs when the celebrity overshadows the endorsed brand by dominating in an advertisement and diminishing the associative link between the celebrity and endorsed...

Consumers increasingly turn to online health communities for health information and social support. Yet, the type of value consumers derive from online health communities is not well understood. This study examines social support as the mechanism through which consumers co-create and experience different types of value. Cutrona and Russell’s typolo...

This research furthers our understanding of brand authenticity by conceptualising and measuring relational authenticity as brands being true in their relationships with consumers. We develop a scale through two purification stages and then assess the scale’s predictive validity for various product and service brands. Sections of the Authenticity In...

Purpose – Relationship marketing (RM) studies have produced a range of conclusions that are attributed to the different exchange contexts, strategies and constructs used for analysis. This study aims to explore RM within the context of a membership association to gain insights into membership maintenance, customer advocacy and association performan...

This study examines the effect of irrelevant information presented in marketing communications by a celebrity co-branding partner on consumer judgments of a partner brand. Three experimental conditions manipulate the relevancy of information: relevant information, irrelevant information, and relevant plus irrelevant information. Findings from this...

Celebrity endorsement is not new. We only need to turn to our TV screens to see one in five ads featuring the hottest celebrity of the month (Solomon, 2009). In fact, the use of celebrities as endorsers appears to be on the rise with 14 percent of advertisements in America featuring a celebrity, 24 percent in India and 45 percent in Taiwan (New Yor...

This study examines the impact of trust on relational exchanges between buyers and sellers in an international context. Trust is considered as two separate dimensions: cognitive trust and affective trust. Data from Australian exporters are tested with regards to their overseas buyers. The empirical results show that cognitive trust and affective tr...

This study examines consumer–celebrity attachment within multiple endorsement situations. A 2×2 factorial design manipulates attachment strength to the celebrity and endorsement situation while controlling for celebrity attractiveness, familiarity and match-up. Results show strong attachment to a celebrity encourages positive attitude towards the a...

Purpose Some consumption activities are inherently interesting, pleasurable, gratifying and potentially important to consumers' lives. The primary aim of this paper is to further understanding of the role pleasurable consumption plays in consumers' lives. Design/methodology/approach To explore consumer value in pleasurable consumption experiences,...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper's novel, research-oriented approach is to embed research-based activities in a core second-year course of a university business degree program to support and develop student research capabilities. Design/methodology/approach – The design draws on Boud and Prosser's work to foster participation in a learner-centre...

This paper describes the impact of external environmental forces on cartel networks. Using a case research approach, this report examines two leading business networks within one industry, over time. The results suggest that (a) bargaining power of intermediaries increases with the advent of new and powerful actors, (b) process activities that cart...

Purpose To thrive in today's competitive marketplace, businesses constantly need to search for opportunities to develop and be tuned into consumers as innovators. With this in mind, the purpose of this paper is to further understandings of the ways in which consumers transform ordinary products to serve their everyday needs; and broaden appreciatio...

This paper describes the impact of external environmental forces on cartel networks. Using a case research approach, this report examines two leading business networks within one industry, over time. The results suggest that (a) bargaining power of intermediaries increases with the advent of new and powerful actors, (b) process activities that cart...

Self‐determination theory is used to explore the ways in which relatedness, autonomy and competence are important factors in seniors' hedonic and eudaimonic pleasurable activities within formal and informal community associations. Focus groups, unstructured interviews and observation were used to collect data from members of three senior citizens'...

Recent branding research identifies celebrities as human brands and suggests that consumerhuman brand attachment may be a critical factor in shaping consumer behaviour. In this study, we extend Thomson’s (2006) work by testing the extent to which human-brand attachment influences consumers’ attitudes and purchase intentions. The results suggest tha...

This study examines the impact that consumer-human brand attachment has on opinions of celebrities as endorsers of multiple brands. A 2 x 2 factorial design manipulated attachment strength to the celebrity and endorsement situation. Results found human brand attachment significantly affects consumers' opinions of celebrities, with no significant ef...

Social network analysis is the study of social structure. This glossary introduces basic concepts in social network analysis. It is designed to help researchers to be more discriminating in their thinking and choice of methods.

Understanding relationships is fundamental to marketing. Research has moved beyond simple dyadic relations to examine how networks of relations influence behaviour. While network theory is frequently drawn upon in marketing, few researchers apply the formal network analytical techniques developed. The aim here is to make network analysis more acces...

Here we introduce a computer-based visual display program, called MAGE. MAGE was designed to display molecules but we will explore its potential for application to the study of social networks. To do so, we will use MAGE to examine the structural properties of two data sets, friendship choices in an Australian college residence and peer choices amo...

The authors apply the cultural consensus model to the domain of personality and investigate (1) the level of consensus among informants' judgments on two traits, sociability and responsibility, and (2) the extent to which their judgments are veridical in that they measure differences among people that correspond to independent and external criteria...

The authors apply the cultural consensus model to the domain of personality and investigate (1) the level of consensus among informants’ judgments on two traits, sociability and responsibility, and (2) the extent to which their judgments are veridical in that they measure differences among people that correspond to independent and external criteria...

This paper examines the degree to which the constraints imposed by various social contexts influence social interaction. We draw on two data sets. In each, we compare the patterning of interaction of the same individuals across different contexts. If minimal constraints are imposed, then the interaction patterns among the individuals in the two con...

We assessed the forgetting of friends and its effects on measuring personal and social network characteristics and properties. All 217 residents of a university residence hall first recalled as many of their friends in the hall as they could. Then, on a complete list of hall residents, residents indicated other friends they forgot to recall. On ave...

Recent studies have emphasised differences in leadership styles between women and men. Women have an ldquointeractiverdquo leadership style while men are more ldquodirectiverdquo and ldquoauthoritative.rdquo Social network analysis is used to examine differences in eight mental health case management teams, half formally supervised by women and hal...

The authors investigated the impact of provider characteristics on the performance of clinical case managers. Case managers in a large California county were interviewed using a structured instrument that assessed service linkage, assertive outreach, and family management. Findings indicate that assertive outreach was done more often by more experi...

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We explore how humans solve some problems of living in a social world. In particular, we focus on the ability to see affiliation or alliance patterns in social communities. We draw on data from two naturalistic studies in which subjects were observed interacting and required to reveal their perceptions of the patterning of that interaction. In both...

This paper presents field-tested methods of measuring the costs of mental health services and their outcomes in a countywide public sector mental health service system for seriously mentally ill adults that features case management teams as the primary service delivery unit.

Consumer complaints often represent the last chance that an organisation has to redress any perceived dissatisfaction that its customers may experience and retain those customers as regular purchasers. It is essential to the organisation's survival to understand the process that these individuals go through in determining their relative satisfactio...

More and more, consumers are indulging in products and services purely for their hedonic benefits. To explore consumer value in hedonic consumption experiences, the Consumer Value Typology (Holbrook 1986, 1995), in conjunction with the Subjective Personal Introspection approach, is applied to pleasurable experiences captured in travel photographs....

This exploratory study considers issues surrounding the creation of Public Art from a new product development perspective. We examine how stakeholders with differing experiences in the creation of public art organise the field. Our aims are to determine the degree to which perceptions of public art differ as well as to establish a comprehensive exp...

We examine the effect of network structure on the diffusion of one technological innovation in a competitive industrial environment. Formal social network analytical techniques were employed to determine which of three network theories – "strength of weak ties", "structural equivalence", or "structural holes" -best explains the adoption of Thermocy...

In this paper we point out two major limitations, the lack of comprehensive network data and the unsophisticated analytical methods used, holding back the empirical research in relationship marketing. We take a classic business network data set, the Danprint case, and extend the network to be more inclusive. Social Network Analysis is applied to bo...

Thesis (Ph. D., Social Science)--University of California, Irvine, 1993.