Pro- und Hauptseminar

Pro- und Hauptseminar Sommersemester 2014 - Themenvorstellung

- Übersicht 1. Vignettenanalysen und ihre Anwendung in der empirischen Gerechtigkeitsforschung 2. Social Media Communication and Firm Performance 3. Why do People Donate Money to Charities - A Qualitative Analysis 4. Super Bowl-Werbung und Online-Buzz 5. Karteileichen im Fitnesssstudio: Eine Analyse psychologischer und sozialer Faktoren 6. Brand Strength and Creditworthiness 7. How Do Companies Choose Celebrity Endorser? A Research Design 8. Determinants of a company s crisis management success 9. The critical effects of appropriate crisis response strategies 10. Does the ethicality of e-commerce matter? 11. What Drives Soccer Club Reputation? 2

Thema 1: Vignettenanalysen und ihre Anwendung in der empirischen Gerechtigkeitsforschung (VR: 1 Student) Der sogenannte faktorielle Survey, auch als Vignettenanalyse bekannt, gilt als eine Methode, die die Vorteile der Experimentalforschung mit denen des klassischen Umfragedesigns verbindet. Hierbei werden den Teilnehmern verschiedene, aus einzelnen Bausteinen bestehenden Kurzgeschichten/Szenarien zur Beurteilung anhand einer je nach Fragestellung vorgegebenen Skala vorgelegt. Durch die gezielte Variation der einzelnen Bausteine (Faktoren, Merkmals-Ausprägungen) lässt sich ihr Einfluss auf die abgefragten Urteile bestimmen. Ein (stark vereinfachtes) Beispiel ist folgende Vignette: Ein 30-jähriger Mann ist von Beruf Lehrer und verdient 1.500 im Monat. Als wie gerecht stufen Sie sein Einkommen ein?, wobei das Alter, das Geschlecht, der Beruf und die Einkommenshöhe die zu variierenden Faktoren darstellen. Im Rahmen der Proseminararbeit soll die Methodik des Survey im Detail vorgestellt und kritisch beleuchtet werden. Dabei ist auf etwaige Besonderheiten wie beispielsweise unterschiedliche Methoden zur Vignettenselektion oder den Umgang mit eventuellen Lerneffekten einzugehen. Darauf basierend soll der Fokus der Hauptseminararbeit auf den Einsatz von faktoriellen Surveys im Bereich der empirischen Gerechtigkeitsforschung gelegt werden. Hierbei soll ein systematisierter Überblick über die Konstrukte, Forschungsteilgebiete und -fragen sowie die eingesetzten Vignetten gegeben werden. Einstiegsliteratur: Giacobbe-Miller, Jane K., Miller, Douglas J., Zhang, W., and Victorov, V. I. (2003), Country and Organizational-Level Adaptation to Foreign Workplace Ideologies : a Comparative Study of Distributive Justice Values in China, Russia and the United States, in Journal of International Business Studies 34 (4), 389 406. Hinz, Thomas, Auspurg, Katrin und Liebig, Stefan (2009), Komplexität von Vignetten, Lerneffekte und Plausibilität im Faktoriellen Survey, in MDA Methoden, Daten, Analysen 3(1), 59-96. 3

Thema 2: Social Media Communication and Firm Performance (MH: 2 Studenten) Forscher analysieren nutzergenerierte Inhalte in Blogs und Foren oder verfolgen die allgemeine Stimmung auf Twitter, um daraus zum Beispiel schließen zu können, wie beliebt eine Marke bei ihren Konsumenten ist. Inhalte aus den sozialen Medien können somit als ein Verhaltensindikator in Bezug auf die Kundenloyalität oder die Markenperformance fungieren. Letztere haben ebenfalls einen wichtigen Informationsgehalt für Investoren, dienen sie doch als ein möglicher Indikator für die zukünftige Unternehmensperformance. Ziel der Arbeit ist es, diese Zusammenhänge aus theoretischer Perspektive anhand von Studien aus Top-Tier Journals im Proseminar genauer zu betrachten. In der geplanten Studie im Hauptseminar soll empirisch gezeigt werden, inwiefern eine erfolgreiche Social Media Performance (in Form eines Social Media Markenrankings) als Indikator für die zukünftige Unternehmensperformance (Aktienkurs) herangezogen werden kann. Einstiegsliteratur: Antweiler, W. und M. Frank (2004). Is All That Talk Just Noise? The Information Content of Internet Stock Message Boards. The Journal of Finance, 59 (3), 1259-1294. Godes, D., Mayzlin, D., Chen, Y., Das, S., Dellarocas, C., Pfeiffer, B., Libai, B., Sen, S., Shi, M. and Verlegh, P. (2005). The Firm s Management of Social Interactions. Marketing Letters, 16 (3), 415-428. Luo, X., Zhang, J., Duan, W. (2013). Social Media and Firm Equity. Information Systems Research, 24 (1), 146-163. O Connor, A. (2012). The Power of Popularity: An Empirical Study of the Relationship Between Social Media Fan Counts and Brand Company Stock Prices. Social Science Computer Review, 31 (2), 229-235. Tirunillai, S. und G. J. Tellis (2012). Does Chatter Really Matter? Dynamics of User-Generated Content and Stock Market Performance. Marketing Science, 31 (2), 198 215. 4

Thema 3: Why do People Donate Money to Charities - A Qualitative Analysis (AN: 2 Students) Charitable organizations fulfill a variety of tasks for the society. The elderly, sick, poor and disabled are supported by a myriad of organizations, which all compete for one resource: Donations. However, due to the large amount of foundations vying for the donor s money, it is getting more and more difficult to reach potential donors and convince them to support a cause. It is therefore central for a successful charity to understand the motives of its potential donors. The following questions should be analyzed in this seminar thesis: 1. What are motives for donors to donate money to a specific organization? 2. Which role do justice considerations play for donors when they decide to support a certain cause? In the first part of the seminar these questions will be researched, based on papers from top-tier journals. In the second part of the seminar, qualitative interviews with donors will be conducted. Relevant Literature: Konow, J. (2010). Mixed feelings: Theories of and evidence on giving. Journal of Public Economics, 94(3), 279 297. Sargeant, A., & Woodliffe, L. (2007). Gift giving: an interdisciplinary review. International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, 12(4), 275 307. Winterich, K. P., Zhang, Y., & Mittal, V. (2012). How political identity and charity positioning increase donations: Insights from Moral Foundations Theory. International Journal of Research in Marketing,346-354 5

Thema 4: Super Bowl-Werbung und Online-Buzz (SR: 2 Studenten) Super Bowl Werbung erhält enorme Aufmerksamkeit von Medien und Konsumenten. Gleichzeitig bedeutet Super Bowl Werbung aber auch ein enormes Investment (4 Mio. USD /Spot in 2014), dessen Rentabilität u.a. vom sog. Pre- und Postgame-Buzz in Social Media abhängen kann. Während die Bedeutung des Online-Buzz für den Erfolg einleuchtet, ist das Wissen darüber warum ein Super Bowl Werbespot viel oder wenig Online-Buzz erzeugt eher begrenzt. Welche Variablen können den Online-Buzz beeinflussen? Diese Frage soll theoretisch und empirisch untersucht werden. Folgende Aufgaben sollen bearbeitet werden: 1. Literaturüberblick: Welche Variablen können den Erfolg von Super Bowl Werbespots beeinflussen? 2. Entwicklung eines Modelles, das relevante Faktoren und deren mögliche Effekte auf den Online-Buzz beschreibt 3. Empirische Analyse der Wirkungen dieser Faktoren auf den Pre- und Postgame-Buzz in Social Media (z.b. Anzahl Views, Anzahl Kommentare, Anzahl Likes, Anzahl Shares) für die Jahre 2008 bis 2014. Einstiegsliteratur: Nail, Jim (2007), Visibility Versus Surprise: Which Drives the Greatest Discussion of Super Bowl Advertisement, Journal of Advertising Research, 26 (December), 412-419. Siefert, Caleb J., Ravi Kothuri, B. Jacobs, Brian Levine, Joseph Plummer, and Carl D. Marci (2009), Winning the Super Buzz Bowk: How Biometrically-Based Emotional Engagement Correlates with Online Views and Comments for Super Bowl Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, (September), 293-303. Tomkovick, Chuck, Rama Yelkur, and Laurie Christians (2001), The USA's Biggest Marketing Event Keeps Getting Bigger: An In-depth Look at Super Bowl Advertising in the 1990s. Journal of Marketing Communications, 7 (2), 89-108. 6

Thema 5: Karteileichen im Fitnesssstudio: Eine Analyse psychologischer und sozialer Faktoren (NS&TS: 2 Studenten) Fitnessstudios und deren Mitgliederzahlen unterliegen in Deutschland einem stetigen Wachstum. Als Gründe werden in der Literatur gesteigerte Bedürfnisse bzgl. Fitness, Gesundheit, Spaß, Entspannung und Wohlbefinden angeführt. In der Realität scheint sich aber noch ein weiterer Grund abzuzeichnen: das schlechte Gewissen. Karteileichen, also Mitglieder, die einen Mitgliedsbeitrag bezahlen, das Fitnessstudio aber nur selten oder nie besuchen, sind für die Anbieter besonders lukrativ. Doch was bewegt Individuen dazu Geld für ein Fitnessstudio zu bezahlen, welches sie im Endeffekt nicht nutzen? Dementsprechend ist es das Ziel dieser Proseminararbeit, im Rahmen einer Literaturanalyse mögliche psychologische und soziale Faktoren zu identifizieren, die das Karteileichen-Phänomen in Fitnessstudios erklären können. Aufbauend auf diesen Ergebnissen soll ebenso ein Leitfaden entwickelt werden, der im Hauptseminar eine qualitative empirische Untersuchung ermöglicht. Einstiegsliteratur: DellaVigna, S. & Malmendier, U. (2005). Paying Not to Go to the Gym, The American Economic Review, 96(3), 694-719. Granzin, K. L. & Mason, M. J. (1999). Motivating Participation in Exercise: Using Personal Investment Theory, Advances in Consumer Research, 26(1), 101-106. Lambrecht, A. & Skiera, B. (2006). Paying Too Much and Being Happy About it: Existence, Causes and Consequences of Tariff-Choice Biases. Journal of Marketing Research, 43, 212-223. Mayring, Philipp (2002): Einführung in die qualitative Sozialforschung: Eine Anleitung zu qualitativem Denken. Robbert, T., Roth, S., & Skiera, B. (2013). Die Macht des Selbstzwangs Wie sich Konsumenten mit Tarifen selbst disziplinieren. In Theorie und Praxis des Dienstleistungsmarketing (pp. 145-166). Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. 7

Thema 6: Brand Strength and Creditworthiness (BP: 2 Students) In times of distressed financial markets, credit ratings are an important measure of firms creditworthiness and thus directly affect their efforts to raise capital in order to finance their operations and realize investments. While the validity of the evaluations of mighty providers such as Standard & Poor s or Moody s is disputed, their ratings are still a key source of information for investors. Next to hard financial data, these ratings are also based on market-based assets, such as brand strength or corporate reputation. The aim of this seminar is two-fold. In the first step, an overview on existing literature studying the relationship between nonfinancial metrics and credit ratings shall shed light on the status quo in academic research. Based on this theoretical background, the candidates are required to create a dataset by matching brand rating data (provided by the supervisor) with credit ratings from publicly available sources and conduct descriptive analyses in order to illuminate the relationships between the two measures. Relevant Literature: Anderson, Eugene W., and Sattar A. Mansi (2009), Does Customer Satisfaction Matter to Investors? Findings from the Bond Market, Journal of Marketing Research, 46(5), 703 14. Himme, Alexander, and Marc Fischer (2014), Drivers of the Cost of Capital: The Joint Role of Non-financial Metrics, International Journal of Research in Marketing, forthcoming. Luo, Xueming, Sascha Raithel, and Michael A. Wiles (2013), The Impact of Brand Rating Dispersion on Firm Value, Journal of Marketing Research, 50(3), 399 415. 8

Thema 7: How Do Companies Choose Celebrity Endorser? A Research Design (JB: 1 Student) Celebrity endorsement is a marketing and communication technique that has become an important tool for marketers over the past few decades. The beneficial and positive effects of endorsements for the endorsed brand have been subject to an extensive amount of research. However, marketing managers have difficulties to choose the right celebrity for their brands. Although, literature suggest a various amount of endorser characteristics that have to be considered when choosing endorsers, it still remains unclear which of these characteristics are really important for marketing managers. Do managers consider all influencing factors proposed by academic literature when choosing an endorser? Do they consider different influencers for different product categories? Is there a given procedure for choosing endorser in practice? Do companies in advance take care of probable celebrity misbehaviour in the endorsement contract and how? Thus the task for the Proseminar is to write an extensive literature review on celebrity endorsement and relevant celebrity characteristics, which should be considered by companies when choosing an endorser. The gathered insights will help to create a survey questionnaire in the Hauptseminar on the Unipark Platform. An additional task for the Hauptseminar is to create a dataset of all US based advertising agencies with relevant contact details that are eligible addressees of the prepared survey. Relevant Literature: Amos, C., G., Holmes and D., Strutton (2008) Exploring the Relationship between Celebrity Endorser Effects and Advertising Effectiveness, in: International Journal of Advertising, 27 (2), 209-34. Erdogan, B. Z. (1999) Celebrity Endorsement: A Literature Review, in: Journal of Marketing Management, 15 (4), 291-314. Erdogan, B.Z. and T., Drollinger (2008), Endorsement Practice: How Agencies Select Spokespeople. in: Journal of Advertising Research, 48 (4), 573-82. 9

Thema 8: Determinants of a company s crisis management success (SAM/JE: 2 Students) Crises are major unpredictable events that pose enormous threats to a company s reputation and financial situation. Crisis management therefore represents a set of factors designed to combat crises and to lessen the negative consequences. It encompasses four interrelated factors: crisis prevention, crisis preparation, crisis response and crisis revision. Understanding the crisis management process is a necessity for effective and informed decisions during crisis concerning ways to temper the negative effects on corporate performance. Although any crisis seems to be different and to impact the company only in an extremely negative way, researchers suggest that by adjusting the corporate strategy to external and internal conditions, the firm will succeed and survive also in highly adverse periods. The task for the Proseminar is to write a literature review on crisis management with the goal to investigate management aspects which influence a company s crisis managing success. The aim of the Hauptseminar is to examine how these management capabilities could be measured. Relevant Literature: Coombs W.T. (2012). Ongoing Crisis Communication: Planning, Managing, and Responding, 3rd ed., SAGE Publications, Thousands Oaks. Mitroff, I.; Anagnos, G. (2001), Managing Crises before they happen What Every Executive and Manager Needs to Know About Crisis Management, AMACOM, American Management Association, New York. Pearson, C.M.; Mitroff, I. (1993): From crisis prone to crisis prepared: a framework for crisis management, in: Academy of Management Executive, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 48-59. 10

Thema 9: The critical effects of appropriate crisis response strategies (SAM/JE: 2 Students) Crises are major unpredictable events that pose enormous threats to a company s reputation and financial situation. Crisis management therefore represents a set of factors designed to combat crises and to lessen the negative consequences. It encompasses four interrelated factors: crisis prevention, crisis preparation, crisis response and crisis revision. Understanding the crisis management process is a necessity for effective and informed decisions during crisis concerning ways to temper the negative effects on corporate performance. Although any crisis seems to be different and to impact the company only in an extremely negative way, researchers suggest that by adjusting the corporate strategy to external and internal conditions, the firm will succeed and survive also in highly adverse periods. The task for the Proseminar is to write a literature review on crisis classification concepts. Dimensions should be developed by means of which crises can be clustered. The aim of the Hauptseminar is to test the impact of a certain response strategy on the crisis perception of consumers. Relevant Literature: Coombs, W.T. (1995): Choosing the Right Words. The Development of Guidelines for the Selection of the Appropriate Crisis-Response Strategies. In: Management Communication Quarterly, Vol. 8(4), pp.447-476. Coombs, W.T. (2012). Ongoing Crisis Communication: Planning, Managing, and Responding, 3rd ed., SAGE Publications, Thousands Oaks. McDonald, L.M.; Sparks, B.; Glendon, A.I. (2010): Stakeholder Reactions to Company Crisis Communication and Causes. In: Public Relations Review, Vol. 36(3), pp. 263-271. 11

Thema 10: Does the ethicality of e-commerce matter? (DC: 2 Students) As e-commerce sales tremendously increased during the last decade, an important stream of research started to consider what motivates consumers decision to buy online instead of offline. Until now, research on online shopping motivations mainly highlighted two explanatory factors: consumers trust in e-commerce as well as its perceived convenience in terms of travel, variety offered or product information (eg. Shankar 2002, Rohm 2004). As scandals about e-retailers unethical practices hit the headlines (eg. Die Zeit, 2013), one may wonder whether consumer s perceived ethicality of e-commerce also impacts their decision to buy online. The aim of this seminar paper is first to theoretically investigate the motivations of online shopping and then, to empirically investigate the effect of Consumer Perceived Ethicality (CPE) of e-commerce on their intentions to buy online. Relevant Literature: Andorfer, V. a., & Liebe, U. (2011). Research on Fair Trade Consumption A Review. Journal of Business Ethics, 106(4), 415 435. Brunk, K. H. (2010). Exploring origins of ethical company/brand perceptions A consumer perspective of corporate ethics. Journal of Business Research, 63(3), 255 262. doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2009.03.011 Trudel, R., Cotte, J. (2009). Does it pay to be good, MIT Sloan Management Review,, 50, 61 68. Rohm, A.J., Swaminathan V. (2004). A typology of online shoppers based on shopping motivations. Journal of Business Research, 57, 748-757. Shankar, V., Urban, G.L., Sultan F. (2002). Online trust: a stakeholder perspective, concepts, implications, and future directions. Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 11, 325-344. 12

Thema 11: What Drives Soccer Club Reputation? (MK: 2 Students) Times when professional soccer clubs just consisted of eleven friends playing soccer are long gone. Nowadays, professional soccer clubs cannot be seen as loose associations anymore. They are professionally managed and organized companies. Treating soccer clubs as brands also attracted the interest of marketing research. Especially the enormous popularity of soccer clubs combined with a huge trend of commercialization, fuels research activities that shed light onto important intangible assets like soccer club reputation. Club managers strive to know which measures to apply to consciously manage public perception and their club s reputation. It is the task of this seminar thesis to summarize the state of the art regarding potential drivers of soccer club reputation from a fan perspective. Furthermore, a comprehensive driver model shall be developed based on insights from qualitative interviews and focus group discussions to describe the latent construct of soccer club reputation. A quantitative assessment of the driver model is not part of the seminar thesis. Relevant Literature: Fombrun, C.; Shanley, M. (1990): What s in a Name? Reputation Building and Corporate Strategy, in: Academy of Management Journal, 33(2), pp. 233 258. Sarstedt, M., Ringle, C., Raithel, S., Gudergan, S. (2012). In Pursuit of Understanding What Drives Fan Satisfaction. Management@TUHH Research Paper Series No. 7. : http://ssrn.com/abstract=2117000 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2117000 Schwaiger M. (2004). Components and parameters of corporate reputation An empirical study Schmalenbach Business Review, 56(1): pp. 46 71. 13

Organisatorisches Bewerbung bis zum 15. Februar 2014 über folgenden Anmeldelink (http://www.unipark.de/uc/imm_seminar_ss2014/) auf der IMM Homepage Bei Fragen wenden Sie sich gerne per E-Mail an Jovica Breberina (imm-seminar@bwl.lmu.de) 14