Behavior & Technology Lab

This Special Issue in the journal Sustainability argues for the importance of consumer behavior analysis, particularly the effects of different settings and contingencies in modifying consumer behavior. It is essential to ensure the development of objective behavioral marketing that focuses on real-time activities for better understanding of consumer behavior. This Special Issue thus aims to expand our understanding of consumer behavior analysis by presenting an array of empirical work currently underway which illustrates novel methodologies for the investigation of consumer behavior analysis and its applications in marketing. Deadline for manuscript submissions: 1 December 2021.

Valdimar Sigurdsson (Reykjavik University) and Asle Fagerstrøm (Kristiania University College) are guest editors for a special section on “Health, Technology, & Behavior Science” in Perspectives on Behavior Science. The aim of this section is to provide reviews and empirical research that integrates the latest technological innovations and behavior science. The contributors in this special section demonstrate that behavior science can aid an understanding of why people do or do not engage in a healthy lifestyle and help identify what is needed to design a successful health behavior intervention through the use of technology

Healthy food labels are a widely used form of intervention that nudges consumers towards healthier choices. This study is published in Procedia Computer Science and investigates the relative importance of healthy food labels on the consumers’ online choice of grocery. A conjoint study (n=111) shows that price, brand, and country of origin had a relatively higher impact on choice than health food labels. However, it is important to note that consumers are not completely indifferent to the presence of a healthy food label and it increases chances of a product being chosen online. The results also demonstrate gender differences, as healthy food labels had a stronger impact on female consumers.

This study investigates the impact of Internet of Things (IoT) services from a smartphone app in a retail grocery shopping situation. A scenario was arranged whereby 226 participants were to purchase, among other products, fresh salmon in a grocery store using the store’s smartphone app. Findings from a conjoint study show that the following IoT services; “updated expiry date”, “aggregated national customer experience index”, and “personalized offer based on product in the basket” evoked the approach and abated avoidance tendencies to explore the smartphone app, while simultaneously increasing the likelihood of buying based on information from the app. The IoT service “Real-time price” had a varied impact on participant approach-avoidance tendencies to interact with the app. Scenario simulation analysis shows that some IoT services can be a deal-breaker in a competitive grocery market. The study is published in Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, presented at Forskning.no and Kristiania.no.

This study analyzes online customer reviews in order to investigate customers’ preferences regarding cosmetic products. Based on the marketing firm theory, this research explores the possibility of enhancing the bilateral contingent relationships between the customer and the marketing firm within the cosmetics domain. Hence, this study applies market‐search concepts by extracting customer reviews and employing text analytics to identify reinforcers and factors in cosmetic products, which customers are expecting, and their sentiments towards them. Our results suggest that some reinforcers are shared among all customers, but some vary among the different customer segments based on their age and skin tone. The study is published in Managerial and Decision Economics and presented in Kunnskapsmagasinet Kristiania.

Internet of Things Applications in Healthcare: A Focus on Improving Patient Safety: A special issue of Journal of Healthcare Engineering

Call for papers

This special issue seeks to attract original research articles that discuss emerging IoT technologies with regard to their impact on patient safety in healthcare. This special issue especially welcomes analytical, computational, experimental, and clinical research, state-of-the-art reviews, and conceptual and theoretical developments and designs.

Using the theory of the marketing firm, two articles that discuss how marketers in an organization can respond to behaviors resulting from co‐creational customer–customer exchanges. These two papers examine marketer and customer co‐creation processes within the context of bilateral contingencies. The studies are published in Managerial and Decision Economics; 1 and 2.

This paper responds to a call for research on the context-specific effects of human images in different online contexts. This study investigates how inherent facial expressions in a consultant’s profile image influence the likelihood to contact tendency of small business-to-business website visitors. The results from a conjoint study (n = 67) demonstrate that a consultant’s profile image with a smiling facial expression induced a higher likelihood to contact tendency. While the absence of a profile image reduced this tendency, relatively more than an image with a neutral facial expression. In light of these results, implications for small businesses as well as suggestions for future research are discussed. The study is published in Interacting with Computers and presented at Forskning.no.

This study aims to expand understanding of social business processes for co-creation in the service industry. Findings from a case study showed that the banking and finance company in Norway manage to co-create value together with their users. Several new online products and services have been launched since the co-creation lab was launched. The banking and finance companies’ co-creation lab has a small, but stabile group of users. There are, however, findings that indicate that there could been achieved even more value in co-creation process through more and better interaction from the company’s side, as well as introducing an incentive arrangement for the users of the co-creation lab. This study is published at the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM).

This study aims to investigate the influence of a male and female sellers ́ profile image and its expressions on the choices made by the peer user within the context of peer-to-peer accommodation rental. We arranged a scenario in which participants evaluated their likelihood to rent an apartment on Airbnb. Results of the conjoint study (r = 0.967, p = 0.000) show that, relative to price and customer reviews, a seller ́s profile image and its facial expression has a strong impact on the likelihood to rent the apartment on Airbnb. Second, the male seller profile image and its facial expression had the strongest impact in both positive and negative directions. Finally, the absence of a seller’s profile image (head silhouette) had a relatively strong negative impact on the likelihood to rent. Sellers looking to sublet property on Airbnb should be aware that their profile image could potentially influence prospective tenants. The study is published in Procedia Computer Science.