CDO Update : first week in Paris

This week is a special one of “retrouvailles” in Paris.
After one month and a half, the CDO students are back to school, a moment felt as holidays !
We welcomed Professor Luc Boyer on Monday with a rich presentation of prospective and its application to the field of communication and advertising, the latest news were shared and debated.
This week’s program goes on with Julie Boulage, from Publicis, dealing with the market of communication agencies. The end of the week is dedicated to image history and functions with the team of André Gunthert from the National Institute of Arts History. We have to thank André for welcoming us in these wonderful settings and for organising the image-related sessions.
A one-day seminar with Odile Martin, Phd candidate and Consultant, deals with brand management and communication.
Cultural as well as practical aspects are at the heart of this first parisian week and I hope that (featuring in alphabetical order ) Emilie, Gwendal, Marie-Camille, Nathalie, Pauline and Perrine will appreciated it.

Statistical Textual Analysis: How nice!

Textual statistics methods were developped more than two decades ago combining differents disciplines : linguitics, discourse analysis, statistics, information technology, and survey processing.
They have been applied to a wide variety of topics (in history, marketing, sociology, etc.) and different objects: open questions, interview analysis, written transcripts, documents, novels…
Two main approaches can be identified:
* French approach : following the seminal work of Benzécri,
* CAQDAS : computer aided qualitative data analysis systems.
The book entitled “Analyse statistiques des données textuelles en Sciences de Gestion” I coordinated with D. Peyrat-Guillard welcomes explanotory as well as illustrative contributions by: M. Reinert, P. Marchand, S. Labbé & P. Marchand, D. Peyrat-Guillard, A. Helme-Guizon & M.L. Gavard-Perret, C. Gauzente & C. Gonzalez. It is prefaced by L. Lebart and postfaced by J. Rojot.
We hope this method to spread within the management research community.
Link to the book
See also:
http://pascal-marchand.fr/
S. Point
lexicometrica

Marketing & ethics

A quick and short note to refer to the chapter written with Professor Hervé Fenneteau about marketing’s ability to be “responsible”. We present Kotler’s seminal work and his proposal of a “social marketing” and the subsequent critics of this view. We also suggest a four cells matrix in order to clarify the debate of “whether marketing should be responsible or not”.
link to the book : Responsabilité sociale de l’entreprise (2006), coord. JJ Rosé, Ed. De Boeck.

Master CDO: Here we go !

The master ” communication & organization” of Sciences Po Rennes has opened this Monday 7th september. Six students are participating to the program. All of them will receive both a theoretical and practical training. This will take place in parallel with their training period (from mid-september to end of june).
The organizations that welcome them during this year are either private companies (Lagardère Digital, Bouygues Telecom, PSA, I&E, Atmospheric) or associations (‘Lire la politique’).
Several stimulating ideas have already been generated and shared during this first week and we hope to implement most of them…

Information search and paid results

Relatively little academic knowledge has been developed to understand users’ perceptions and behaviors toward sponsored links. In particular it is of foremost importance to delineate factors that influence click intention and behavior. This paper proposes a hierarchy-of-effects model in order to understand surfers’ click on sponsored links. An empirical study is conducted over 349 participants confronted to three different Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) representing three search situations. Results indicate a significant relationship between attitude toward sponsored links and behavioral intention. In addition, past satisfaction is found to significantly predict click behavior. The contribution of this study for both researchers and practitioners is discussed.
See article in Electronic Markets

Author’s version available here: author version

A consumer stance at search engine marketing

Special issue International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising, vol. 5, 1/2, 2009
Guest editors : C. Gauzente & C. Gonzalez

In February 2008, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) announced that “Internet advertising revenues for 2007 are estimated to grow to $21.1 billion, a 25 percent increase over the previous revenue record of nearly $16.9 billion for full year 2006”. Part of this dramatically increasing internet advertising investments are sponsored links. Parallel to this, 61 billions of queries have been made on search engines (including Google, Yahoo, Baidu) by 754.5 millions of internet users –Comscore, August 2007.
Taken together those two facts explain the irresistible rise of search engine marketing.

While the practice of search engine marketing (i.e. advertising techniques used on search engines, such as sponsored links or paid placements, search engine optimisation) and, more generally, search marketing (i.e. advertising techniques used during the search process of internet users, which clearly goes beyond search engines) is developing and taking a growing importance in advertising strategies, academic research has, to this date, dedicated very few efforts to the understanding of search engine marketing. A certain number of IS studies have investigated rank allocation mechanisms; however the marketing field and consumer behaviour are virtually unexplored.

This special issue is aimed at delivering academic research about consumer’s perception, understanding and reactions in face of search engine marketing techniques. It is also aimed at disseminating conceptual and theoretical considerations about advertisements that are produced in response to consumer’s or user’s search action, which is a notable difference compared to traditional unidirectional advertising.
See the table of content.

Privacy

The privacy issue has been my entry door to online marketing and, more generally, wireless marketing topics.

Online environment is now part of everyday life. However, trust is still an important issue for online merchants. This explains why there is an increasing interest in “trust busters” by the general consumer. Trust busters entail, among other, a thorough online privacy policy (OPP) that encompasses detailed privacy and security statements.
The paper looks at both the views of the consumer and the views of the web merchants in attempting to unravel the problems of privacy on the Net. A sample of 89 French web merchants and a sample of 154 consumers were examined using bivariate analysis.
The results showed that, even in a government-regulated country such as France, there is still room for improvement in web merchants’ privacy policies. Concerning consumers, an important result is that the perception of reassuring privacy and security statements varies according to browsing intention.

For further reading :
Gauzente C. (2008), Politiques et pratiques des sites marchands en matière de respect de la vie privée : analyse du dosage entre chartes et labels et de leur évolution, Revue Management & Avenir, vol. 17, 44-65.
Gauzente C. (2004), Web Merchants’ Privacy and Security Statements: How Reassuring are They for Consumers? A Two-sided Approach, Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, 5 (3), [online: http://www.jecr.org]
Gurau C., Ranchhod A. et Gauzente C. (2003), To legislate or not to legislate – A comparative exploratory study of privacy/personalisation factors affecting French, UK and US web sites, Journal of Consumer Marketing, 20 (7), 652-664.
Gauzente C. (2003), Vie privée et Internet : les pratiques des sites français, Décisions Marketing, 30, 7-17.

Q-method

This book offers a panorama of research methods – qualitative and quantitative – used in management sciences and social sciences. It is edited by P. Roussel and F. Wacheux. The chapter I wrote is dedicated to q-method, a method designed to “study human subjectivity”, as stated by Williamsom.
Visit also the qmethod website.

Time & market orientation

Since the formalization of the market orientation concept in the 90’s (Kohli and Jaworski 1990; Narver and Slater 1990), empirical investigations were mainly devoted at the exploration of its impact on business performance (Slater and Narver 1994; Jaworski and Kohli 1993; Greenley 1995). As the associations were not always clear, researchers suggested that delayed effects could explain non-significant associations with the measures of performance (Greenley 1995; Hunt and Morgan 1995). Researchers also looked for potential mediating variables (Han et al 1998) while others emphasized the cultural dimension of market orientation. For Day (1994) the cultural basis of market orientation is essential in defining the ontological status of the concept. Several recent studies integrate such a view (Jaworski and Kohli 1996; Harris and Ogbonna 1999; Olavarrieta and Friedmann 2000). Acknowledging the cultural nature of market orientation leads to the examination of temporal phenomena involved in market oriented processes. As recently demonstrated by Heiens (2000), there is a need for a better understanding of market oriented firms. In line with this, assessing the role of time in market orientation will certainly add to our knowledge. The key aspects of time that are considered are length, age and historical period. The significance of these three aspects for market orientation are now considered.
see : amsreview.org

Market orientation & Marketing for the 21st century

This handbook is directed by Pr. A. Ranchhod (Solent University) and I contributed to it. It attempts at developping a vision of the hot topics of marketing practice in coming years.