Showing posts with label Trust. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trust. Show all posts

2016-09-14

Brand Strategy vs. Pricing Strategy

In the marketplace, perception is reality.

You can have in fact the best product in the market but that is useless if the customers’ don´t perceive that, or even worse, if the customers perceive another product as better than yours when in fact that is not true.

You must keep in mind that Pricing is not only a tool to generate revenues or margin. Pricing is also the key statement about the quality of your product.

Remember that no one believes that the cheapest product in the store is the best one, therefore Pricing is also a powerful brand positioning tool. 

To be successful, when you design the price of your product you need to consider the costs, the required margins, competition prices and also the current customer perception of your brand.

Why the current customer perception of your brand is so important when you design your Pricing Strategy?
The answer is… Trust. 

If there is lack of consistency between your prices and your brand image perception, customers will have trust issues with you, because your overall messages are conflicting.

Example: If you already positioned your brand in the market as a low cost service provider and you launch a new service in the market with a premium price, your new service and in the long term also your all business may be in jeopardy because you are losing consistency and customers don´t trust conflicting messages and customers tend to avoid brands that they don’t trust.

So, the key conclusions are:

Pricing is not only about margins… Pricing is also a powerful brand positioning tool.

  • Your Pricing Strategy must be aligned with your Brand Positioning Strategy
  • If not, you will trigger trust issues in your customers that in the long term may jeopardize all your business.

2014-07-23

Trust vs. E-commerce - The end of a myth?

There is still a big gap between the number of Internet users and online shoppers and although trust is considered by many as a key factor in e-commerce, the knowledge about it was little.

This was a quantitative research with a deductive approach in which statistical procedures were applied to validate the hypotheses of the theoretical frame of reference, and the research questions of this study were:


(i) What is the socio-demographic profile of university students’ online shoppers?
. Men have greater intention to buy online and recommend it to others than women.
. Working students have higher intention to purchase on the Internet than individuals who only study, but regarding their intent to recommend it to others the difference is not statistically significant.
. Older students have more intention to buy online and recommend it to others.
. Experienced online buyers have more intention to buy online and recommend it to others than individuals with less experience in online shopping.


(ii) What is the impact of trust and social influence in the intention to buy online?
. It was observed that the adjusted model regarding "Intention to Buy Online" in result of the weight of “Trust” and "Social Influence" explains only 1% of the variability of the "Intention to Buy Online", and although the "Social Influence" has more weight compared to “Trust", the relationships of these variables with the "Intention to Buy Online" are not statistically significant.


(iii) What is the impact of trust and social influence in the intention to buy online in individuals who never bought online before?
. It was observed that this model adjusted to the "Intention to Buy Online" regarding the weight of “Trust” and "Social Influence" explains only 4% of the variability of the "Intention to Buy Online" of those individuals, and despite that the "Social Influence" also has more weight than “Trust", the relationships of these variables with the "Intention to Buy Online "are also not statistically significant.


Conclusion:
This study confirmed the theoretical framework regarding the socio-demographic profile of online shoppers, namely that the profile is not homogeneous, even having differences between age groups as suggested by Reibstein (2002), with men having higher intention to buy online than women, as indicated by Greenfield Online in 1999 (quoted by Chih-Chung & Chang, 2005) and that the previous experience of Internet shopping of the individual is an important factor to consider, as stated by Perea y Monsuwe, Dellaert & de Ruyter (2004).

Regarding the central question of my research - "What is the Impact of Trust in the Intention to Buy Online?" - Turns out to be surprisingly that has been observed that Trust impact is in fact low, even in individuals who never bought online before.

However, some caution is required in interpreting these results, to avoid the mistake of generalization or abusive interpretation. Firstly, even considering that the sample was intentional, it is necessary to remember that the findings of this study apply only to the universe of students of ISEG (Technical University of Lisbon).

We also found that the impact of Social Influence in the "Intention to Buy Online" is very low too, although it was noted that this impact was greater than the Trust impact. So, it is important to remember that if consumers choose not to consult recommendations, consumers will rely on their knowledge or previous experience on the service to make their buying decision (Senecal, Kalczynski & Nantel, 2005).



Note: This is a summary of my Master Thesis. If you wish to read the complete study or the details of the mentioned bibliographic references, please follow the link below:

Antunes, A. (2011). Impacto da Confiança na Intenção de Compra Online. (Master Dissertation). Technical University of Lisbon Repository, Portugal.
https://www.repository.utl.pt/bitstream/10400.5/4459/1/DM-ANLGA-2011.pdf

2013-07-15

8.000 Downloads in 1 Year

I am happy to inform that my Master Thesis was downloaded/viewed more than 8.000 times, in the first year after being published.

If you wish, you also can download it here for free:
https://www.repository.utl.pt/bitstream/10400.5/4459/1/DM-ANLGA-2011.pdf

Title:
"Trust Impact in Online Shopping"

Abstract:
There is still a big gap between the number of Internet users and online shoppers in Portugal. Although trust is considered by many as a key factor in e-commerce, the knowledge about how trust influences online shopping intention in Portuguese consumers is still little.
This quantitative research has a deductive approach in which statistical procedures were applied to validate the hypotheses of the theoretical frame of reference. The purpose of this research is to describe the relationship between trust and online shopping intention.

Note: This Master Dissertation is written in Portuguese 

2012-12-16

Impact of Trust on Intention to Purchase Online


There is still a big gap between the number of Internet users and online shoppers in Portugal.

Although trust is considered by many as a key factor in e-commerce, the knowledge about how trust influences online shopping intention in Portuguese consumers is still little.

This quantitative research has a deductive approach in which statistical procedures were applied to
validate the hypotheses of the theoretical frame of reference.

The purpose of this research, which was my Master Thesis, was to describe the relationship between trust and online shopping intention.

This thesis is in Portuguese.

My Master Thesis Link