Donna Hoffman

George Washington University | GW · Department of Marketing

The rapid adoption of generative AI powered by large language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude promises to disrupt innovation for the consumer Internet of Things (IoT). To understand potential consumer behaviors and marketing strategies, we use an assemblage theory framework to analyze the coevolution of consumer and marketer rol...

We examine consumers’ interactions with smart objects using a novel mixed method approach, guided by assemblage theory, to discover the emergence of automation practices. We use a unique text data set from the web service IFTTT representing hundreds of thousands of applets that represent “if-then” connections between pairs of Internet services. Con...

Recent advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing are gradually transforming how humans search, shop, and express their preferences. Leveraging the new affordances and modalities of human-machine interaction through voice-controlled interfaces will require a nuanced understanding of the physics and psychology of speech form...

Consumer research often fails to have broad impact on members of the marketing discipline, on adjacent disciplines studying related phenomena, and on relevant stakeholders who stand to benefit from the knowledge created by rigorous research. The authors propose that impact is limited because consumer researchers have adhered to a set of implicit bo...

Consumers’ interactions with smart objects have a relational nature, and extensive research has supported the “relationship metaphor” as a fruitful way to understand consumer responses to consumption objects. But, smart objects pose unique challenges for considering the emergence of consumer–object relationships, because their degrees of agency, au...

Up to now, IoT device adoption is happening mainly in the niche segments of technologically sophisticated upscale consumers and technology-focused DIYers. To reach a broader range of users, marketers must do a better job of understanding and offering the inherent value of smart products. Current marketing approaches are fragmented and tend to focus...

IFTTT is a neutral platform that offers easy and free ways to get all your apps and devices talking to each other. Millions of users worldwide have enabled more than 75 million Applets for over 600 services that already cooperate with the platform. Linden Tibbets, co-founder and CEO of IFTTT, explains that everything in the future will be a digital...

The consumer Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to revolutionize consumer experience. Because consumers can actively interact with smart objects, the traditional, human-centric conceptualization of consumer experience as consumers' internal subjective responses to branded objects may not be sufficient to conceptualize consumer experience in...

Today's consumers are immersed in a vast and complex array of networks. Each network features an interconnected mesh of people and firms, and now, with the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), also objects. Technology (particularly mobile devices) enables such connections, and facilitates many kinds of interactions in these networks—from transacti...

Despite the fact that social media offers consumers opportunities to connect with each other, little work has focused on how what consumers do on social media interacts with why they do it to affect their feelings of connection. Further, the extent to which these social media interactions occur in brand contexts is likely to affect consumers’ respo...

Since the commercialization of the Internet began over twenty years ago, we have been fascinated with the opportunities that computer-mediated environments present for human interaction. As a result, we have spent the last few decades researching the marketing and consumer behavior impact of consumers’ interactions in digital environments. Now, as...

Consumers perform various behaviors online. In this entry, we apply the 4Cs (connect, create, consume, and control) model of higher order goals consumers may pursue online to examine several important research questions related to what motivates consumers' online behaviors and what insights marketers can gather to promote their business. Consumers...

Since the commercialization of the Internet began over twenty years ago, we have been fascinated with the opportunities that computer-mediated environments present for human interaction. As a result, we have spent the last few decades researching the marketing and consumer behavior impact of consumers’ interactions in digital environments.Now, as t...

We examine egocentric biases in mental accounting that occur when consumers face the prospect of disclosing personal information in exchange for online marketing incentives. We find that consumers keep balanced “mental accounts” of the costs and benefits of such exchanges when they are contingent or temporally integrated. However, when non-continge...

A key issue for marketers resulting from the dramatic rise of social media is how it can be leveraged to generate value for firms. Whereas the importance of social media for brand management and customer relationship management is widely recognized, it is unclear whether social media can also help companies market and sell products. Extant discussi...

A basic tenet of self-determination theory is that feeling close and connected to others can lead to optimal life experiences and recent research supports the idea that when people use social media to interact with others, they are likely to feel more related to others. Yet, little is known about whether using social media for more content-focused,...

Research supports the idea that when people use social media to interact with others, they are more likely to feel more related to others. But can using social media for more content-focused, less people-focused, pursuits lead to the same positive outcome of relatedness? We show that positive versus negative motivations (why people use social media...

We examine egocentric biases in mental accounting that occur when consumers face the prospect of disclosing information in exchange for online marketing incentives. We find that consumers keep balanced “mental accounts” of the costs and benefits of such exchanges when they are contingent or temporally integrated. However, when non-contingent exchan...

When do people consider their social media groups to be important to their identities? Despite the long history in social psychology of measuring importance of a particular group to one’s identity and the meteoric rise of social media usage, research has yet to address the relationship between social media usage and the value of group membership. U...

Why do people use social media? We examine how and why people use social media in the context of their basic needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness, intrinsic and external motivations, and well-being perceptions. Results show that motivations differentially drive social media goal pursuit, and users with different primary social media goals...

This paper argues that social media metrics should be captured as customer investments in marketers’ social media efforts and that applications considered in concert with performance objectives drive the choice of metrics. Motivating this approach are the “four c’s” that drive consumer use of social media. These include the connections consumers ma...

While much research has emphasized improving current new product concept techniques, little work has focused on trait-based approaches that specify which consumers are the "right" ones to use in the new product development process, particularly in the consumer goods industry. We propose that the right consumers to use for new product concept develo...

Decades of research provide strong evidence that consumers process information in two distinct and qualitatively different ways, rational and experiential. However, little research has addressed situational influences on thinking style, and there have been no attempts to simultaneously measure and validate two-dimensional situation-specific thinkin...

We develop and test an optimization model for maximizing response rates for online marketing research survey panels. The model consists of (1) a decision tree predictive model that classifies panelists into "states" and forecasts the response rate for panelists in each state and (2) a linear program that specifies how many panelists should be solic...

Although the flow construct has been widely studied over the past decade in marketing and related fields, it has proven to be an elusive construct to measure and model. In this paper, we examine two of the most important themes in flow research in the last decade: the conceptualization and measurement of flow in online environments and the marketin...

We examine egocentric biases in mental accounting that occur when consumers face the prospect of disclosing personal information in exchange for online marketing incentives. We find that consumers keep balanced “mental accounts” of the costs and benefits of such exchanges when they are contingent or temporally integrated. However, when non-continge...

Decades of theoretical and empirical research in social and cognitive psychology provide strong evidence that consumers process information in two distinct and qualitatively different ways: rational and experiential. However, there has been surprisingly little research attention devoted to explicitly measuring how situational influences directly im...

Scholars working at the intersection of African-American history and the history of technology are redefining the idea of technology to include the work of the skilled artisan and the ingenuity of the self-taught inventor. Although denied access through most of American history to many new technologies and to the privileged education of the enginee...

The Internet's distinctiveness holds important implications for digital commerce efforts. Some marketing activities are proving to be difficult to implement in their present forms and need to be restructured so they are more compatible with the unique features of the Web. Thus, online managers now find themselves having to think about how to develo...

The indispensability of the Internet to families and society at large is discussed. The number of adult Americans using the Internet increased 50% from 2000 to 2003. Compared to the General population, college students are the heaviest Internet users and it is used for managing all aspects of their academic and social life. In the year 2003, about...

The authors empirically examine how locus of control, an important consumer behavior construct, differentiates among consumers' Web use in a marketing policy context and argue that consumers' general expectancies as to whether they or others control events can predict their Web use and their beliefs regarding the regulation of content on the Intern...

Recently, it has been proposed that creating compelling experiences in the distinctive consumption environment defined by the Internet depends on facilitating a state of flow. Although it has been established that consumers do, in fact, experience flow while using the Web, consumer researchers do not as yet have a comprehensive understanding of the...

Metrics aresine qua non for solid research, and scientific metrics have now been advanced with new approaches in the arena of Net-enablement (NE), otherwise known as e-commerce. Questions that likely require additional attention include: (1) Where/what is the real value in substituting information for physical processes?, (2) which NE systems effec...

Clear and precise metrics are essential for evaluating phenomena such as e-commerce ("Net"-enablement) and the organizational use of networks and the Internet for commercial activities. Researchers require them for theory building and testing; practitioners require them for improving organizational processes. But for IS professionals to engage in t...

This book presents data supporting the existence of a gap–along racial, economic, ethnic, and education lines–between those who have access to the latest information technologies and those who do not. The Digital Divide refers to the perceived gap between those who have access to the latest information technologies and those who do not. If we are i...

[Editor's note: This study is based on data on a panel of households recruited as a random telephone sample of the U.S. population. In order to use the Internet for the purpose of efficient multi-channel data collection, each household in the sample--with ...

The rapid growth of electronic commerce, along with changes in information, computing, and communications, is having a profound effect on the United States economy. President Clinton recently directed the National Economic Council, in consultation with executive branch agencies, to analyze the economic implications of the Internet and electronic co...

Most retailers on the Web spend more to acquire customers than they will ever get back in revenue from them. Many think that sky-high spending on marketing is necessary to stake out their share of Internet space. But is it really? How do retailers know how much to pay? Consider CDnow, which has developed a multifaceted customer-acquisition strategy...

Enthusiasm for the anticipated social dividends of the Internet appears boundless. Indeed, the Internet is expected to do no less than virtually transform society. Yet even as the Internet races ambitiously toward critical mass, some social scientists are beginning to examine carefully the policy implications of current demographic patterns of Inte...

Intuition and previous research suggest that creating a compelling online environment for Web consumers will have numerous positive consequences for commercial Web providers. Online executives note that creating a compelling online experience for cyber customers is critical to creating competitive advantage on the Internet. Yet, very little is know...

There is a revolution happening—a startling and amazing revolution that is altering everything from our traditional views of how advertising and communication media work to how people can and should communicate with each other. That revolution is the Internet—the massive global network of interconnected packet-switched computer networks—and as the...

Currently, over 43 million hosts are connected to the Internet worldwide (Network Wizards 1999). In terms of individual users, somewhere between 40 and 80 million adults (eStats 1999) in the United States alone have access to around 800 million unique pages of content (Lawrence and Giles 1999), globally distributed on what is arguably one of the mo...

The reason more people have yet to shop online or even provide information to Web providers in exchange for access to information, is the fundamental lack of faith between most businesses and consumers on the Web today. In essence, consumers simply do not trust most Web providers enough to engage in "relationship exchanges" involving money and pers...

Advertising revenues have become a critical element in the business plans of most commercial Web sites. Despite extensive research on advertising in traditional media, managers and researchers face considerable uncertainty about its role in the online environment. The benefits offered by the medium notwithstanding, the lack of models to measure and...

Moving Web consumers along to the “purchase click ” is proving to be difficult. Current consumer online shopping revenues are meager, though the industry is optimistic, thanks to bullish forecasts of cyberconsumer activity for the new millennium. In 1996, Internet shopping revenues for United States users, excluding cars and real estate, were estim...

We investigated differences in Internet use between whites and African Americans in the United States. Although African Americans are online in impressive numbers, significant disparities in access indicate the presence of a racial divide on the Internet. Our findings have important implications for public policy seeking to ensure Internet access f...

The World Wide Web possesses unique characteristics which distinguish it in important ways from traditional commercial communications environments. Because the Web presents a fundamentally different environment for marketing activities than traditional media, conventional marketing activities are becoming transformed, as they are often difficult to...

Emerging (or "inchoate") industries differ significantly from mature industries. Inchoate industries are characterized by few producers, underdeveloped markets, unclear technologies, and uncertain regulatory forces. Traditional, linear-adaptive approaches to business strategy derived from the study of mature industries, such as Miles and Snow (1978...

this paper we examine how such concerns are affecting the growth and development of consumer-oriented commercial activity on the World Wide Web and investigate the implications of these concerns for one potential industry response: the commercial uses of online anonymity. The successful commercial development of the Web depends upon a variety of in...

essential to understanding consumer navigation behavior in online environments such as the World Wide Web. Previous researchers (e.g. Csikszentmihalyi 1990; Ghani, Supnick and Rooney 1991; Trevino and Webster 1992; Webster, Trevino and Ryan 1993) have noted that flow is a useful construct for describing more general human-computer interactions. Hof...

studying the commercialization of emerging media and are associate professors of management at the Owen

This paper addresses the role of marketing in hypermedia computer-mediated environments (CMEs). Our approach considers hypermedia CMEs to be large-scale (i.e. national or global) networked environments, of which the World Wide Web on the Internet is the first and current global implementation. We introduce marketers to this revolutionary new medium...

Abstract The flowconstruct has recently been proposed as essential to understandingconsumer,navigation behavior in online environments. We review definitions and models of flow, and describe an empirical study which measures flow in terms of respondents’ skills and challenges for using the World Wide Web. Skills and challenges are shown to correlat...

The World Wide Web possesses unique characteristics that distinguish it in important ways from traditional commercial communications environments. Because the Web presents a fundamentally different environment for marketing activities than traditional media, conventional marketing activities are becoming transformed, as they are often difficult to...

An abstract is not available.

The authors address the role of marketing in hypermedia computer-mediated environments (CMEs). Their approach considers hypermedia CMEs to be large-scale (i.e., national or global) networked environments, of which the World Wide Web on the Internet is the first and current global implementation. They introduce marketers to this revolutionary new me...

The potential of the World Wide Web on the Internet as a commercial medium and market has been widely documented in a variety of media. However, a critical examination of its commercial development has received little attention. Therefore, in this paper we propose a structural framework for examining the explosion in commercial activity on the Web....

This study explores the analysis of citations in the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) during its first 15 years of publication. We review previous work on citation analysis in marketing and consumer research, and we argue for the value of a more complex approach based on patterns of cocitation. Toward this end, we develop a data base that draws o...

The issue of the sensitivity of weighted linear composites to attribute-importance weights has attracted researchers from various disciplines, including marketing, psychology, and statistics. At issue is how sensitive a weighted scale is to a particular choice of weights. Scale sensitivity is defined by a negative correlation between two scales. By...

We formulate multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) as a nonlinear multivariate analysis method that integrates ideas from multidimensional scaling. MCA is introduced as a graphical technique that minimizes distances between connecting points in a graph plot. We use this geometrical approach to show how questions posed of categorical marketing rese...

The method of correspondence analysis, applied to a contingency table, provides a graphical representation of departures from the independence model. Generalized correspondence analysis has been proposed as a way of graphically representing departures from models other than independence. However, generalized correspondence analysis does not necessa...

The authors present a new multidimensional unfolding methodology that can analyze various types of individual choice data. The model represents choice data, defined by dichotomous variables that indicate whether a particular brand was chosen or not, in terms of a joint space of consumers and brands. Explicit treatment of marketing and subject backg...

The authors present a new multidimensional unfolding methodology that can analyze various types of individual choice data. The model represents choice data, defined by dichotomous variables that indicate whether a particular brand was chosen or not, in terms of a joint space of consumers and brands. Explicit treatment of marketing and subject backg...

This paper describes the development of an unfold ing methodology designed to analyze "pick any" or "pick any/n" binary choice data (e.g., decisions to buy or not to buy various products). Maximum likeli hood estimation procedures are used to obtain a joint space representation of both persons and objects. A review of the relevant literature concer...

Correspondence analysis is an exploratory data analysis technique for the graphical display of contingency tables and multivariate categorical data. Its history can be traced back at least 50 years under a variety of names, but it has received little attention in the marketing literature. Correspondence analysis scales the rows and columns of a rec...

Correspondence analysis is an exploratory data analysis technique for the graphical display of contingency tables and multivariate categorical data. Its history can be traced back at least 50 years under a variety of names, but it has received little attention in the marketing literature. Correspondence analysis scales the rows and columns of a rec...