••• pricing research
Free apps garner reviews as thanks
Consumers who get a web-based product or mobile app for free are more likely to give it a word-of-mouth boost than a product they buy, suggesting they feel “one good turn deserves another.”
That’s according to new research from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin by Wen Wen, an assistant professor of information, risk and operations management. She collaborated with the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Samuel Bond and West Virginia University’s Stephen He on the study, which was published in the Journal of Marketing Research.
The researchers analyzed more than 5,000 mobile apps, in addition to surveying consumers and conducting experiments using a hypothetical product and a real one. They concluded that consumers are motivated to thank the producers of the free products by sharing positive reviews (both online and face-to-face).
Consumers of paid products who share reviews of their purchases have different motivations for doing so, the study said. For them, informing others, especially when little has been said about the product and the reviews are mixed, is the primary reason to weigh in about their experiences with the product.
With that in mind, marketers of free products might want to consider embedding “reciprocity cues,” such as alerts that tell customers to “spread the word” or “tell your friends,” Wen said. Marketers can encourage word-of-mouth for paid products by hinting that it could help other shoppers looking to buy the product. Those marketers, Wen said, could use phrases such as “save them time,” “help them choose” and “save them money.”
••• employee research
Beware the bystander effect
In every workplace, multiple people may witness incompetence, laziness, fraud or any manner of bad behavior from the same colleague week after week but nobody speaks up. According to research from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, you can blame the bystander effect.
For example if a car breaks down on the side of a busy road, nobody may stop to help because everyone assumes somebody else will do it. If the same car breaks down in a low-traffic area, the odds of rescue increase despite fewer motorists because each passerby feels a greater sense of responsibility.
“Our research shows that when multiple individuals know about an issue, each of them experiences a diffusion of responsibility or the sense that they need not personally take on any costs or burden associated with speaking up,” Maryland Smith Ph.D. student Insiya Hussain and professor Subra Tangirala wrote in Harvard Business Review. “They feel that others are equally knowledgeable and, hence, capable of raising the issue with top management. As issues become more common knowledge among frontline employees, the willingness of any individual employee to bring those issues to the attention of the top management decreased.”