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This study investigates the psychological effects of social identity on both posters and lurkers in online brand communities (OBCs). The results reveal the intermediate mechanisms mediating and moderating members’ social identity effects on members’ brand commitment, leading to positive word-of-mouth and their resistance to negative information about the brand. This article treats social identity as a multi-dimensional construct. Differences amongst posters and lurkers on the relationships between the cognitive, affective and evaluative components of social identity are investigated along with their positive effect on brand commitment and behavioral consequences. Using a sample of 752 OBC members, both posters and lurkers emerge as valuable members and equally likely to derive social identity from their membership of an OBC. However, there are counter intuitive results for relationships within the research model between active and passive members of OBCs. These results offer implications for theory and can help managers to be better interactive marketers.

Recruitment is a mission-critical process for human resources management. Due to the high turnover rate and lack of specific skill requirements, the retail sector has an acute need to hire new employees to fill vacancies. Therefore, recruiting a relatively large number of new employees in a limited period of time is crucial for companies in the retail industry. Existing studies have suggested that by designing recruitment activities and utilising appropriate recruitment sources to promote and announce a job, employers are able to attract jobseekers to apply for jobs and join the organisation. The social communication theory highlights four major elements involved in any information communication: the information communicator (source), the information receiver (audience/jobseeker), the response (the receiver’s attitude towards the information received and the decision taken to apply or not) and the stimulus (the message/information content that is transmitted by the communicator). An individual’s ‘attitude’ towards the recruitment information can significantly affect their ‘intention’ of making a job application decision, and this intention can significantly influence their actual decision-making ‘behaviour’, such as accepting a job offer. Consequently, most of these studies focus on the effectiveness of the stimulus (e.g., how the design of the recruitment information content can attract more jobseekers).However, there are divergent results in the literature. For instance, numerous researchers have attempted to investigate how different recruitment information sources can impact jobseekers’ application and recruitment decisions. Some researchers claim that the formal, company-controlled, recruitment information sources, such as advertising and corporate websites, are less effective than informal. By contrast, other researchers indicate that formal sources are used and accepted more often by jobseekers because this information is regarded as considered to be more objective and reliable than the experience-based route (e.g., word-of-mouth). Some researchers suggest that employers should provide objective, hard information (confirmable information such as salary and location) and provide the message in the employer’s tone’ using company-controlled sources; thereby not to convey too much soft, experience-based information from employees. Only very limited research has considered the influences of receiver’s differences (individual differences) on the stimulus (content) and communications (source) as a moderator. The receivers’ differences could be the essential information that can be used to interpret the divergent findings in the literature. Psychologists have demonstrated that individual differences will influence personal values and will be translated into personal preferences. Decision-making research suggests that every decision-making process involves individuals’ decision habits and preferences. People tend to keep their decision habits and preferences throughout different decisions. Therefore, individual traits should be considered when seeking to understand how jobseekers evaluate information to make decisions. A well-known classification of individual differences that has been shown to affect decision-making preference is an individual’s decision-making style: maximisers (those who always try to find the best possible result and carefully evaluate all types of information from different sources) and satisficers (who aim for good-enough results and tend to save time resources). The present study aims to address the gap in the existing literature by exploring the possible reactions of different decision-making styles (maximiser vs. satisficer) in response to recruitment messages with different lengths, valences, forms and provider backgrounds that are provided from various sources.Study 1 and Study 2 are employed as groundwork studies to provide a deeper understanding of maximiser-style and satisficer-style retail-trade jobseekers’ traits. The results illustrate retail trade jobseekers’ job-information-seeking preferences and the relationship between an individual’s maximising tendency and other cognitive-based individual characteristics. The results suggest that employers should not exclude either maximiser-style or satisficer-style jobseekers because the current maximiser-style and satisficer-style employees demonstrated the same levels of job satisfaction with no particular group showed a higher or lower turnover intention. Based on the findings of Study 1 and Study 2, Chapter 5 starts with a scenario-based experiment (Study 3). This experiment assesses whether, when presented with a realistic job-information-searching scenario of receiving basic job information from a typical formal short job advertisement, maximisers and satisficers differ in their need for further information. It also explores whether further evaluation is required from informal information sources in relation to valence and tie strength. Study 3 leads to the reflection that staff ‘word-of-mouth’ (SWOM) messages were influential but could not be controlled by organisations. Study 4 expands the findings of Study 3 and tests whether employers can satisfy more maximiser-style and satisficer-style jobseekers’ information needs to encourage their perceived organisational attractiveness (OA) by providing more detailed formal job advertisement messages. The findings highlight that more details of hard information could effectively satisfy jobseekers’ information needs, even though a group of jobseekers still wanted to search for more experience-based information. However, the findings also show that more detailed messages only slightly increase maximisers’ perceived OA and do not increase satisficers’ perceived OA.By extending the findings of Study 3 and Study 4, three scenario-based experiments (Study 5.1, Study 5.2 and Study 5.3) are designed to test how employers can attract more maximiser-style and satisficer-style jobseekers by tailoring their recruitment messages. The results demonstrate that the SWOM-formed realistic job preview (RJP) messages with some negative information could best increase jobseekers’ perception of source credibility and OA. Furthermore, when maximisers and satisficers looked for different job positions they would perceive the source credibility differently if the background information of the information provider as different.A qualitative-based supplementary study (Study 6) is further conducted to delineate three issues that are not directly measured or not sufficiently clarified in the above-mentioned five studies. This complements Studies 3, 4 and 5 and theoretically enhances the understanding of how jobseekers refer to job recruitment messages and how they evaluate the job information.The results contribute to decision-making theory and social communication theory by demonstrating that the notion of maximisers and satisficers represents a significant and central individual trait in job-application information searching and decision-making in the retail trade. Furthermore, the findings suggest that an individual’s decision-making style is an influential moderator for the effectiveness of communication elements. This research also provides a fundamental basis for further studies to apply individual-differences in human resource management field.

This study focuses on investigating some of the factors that influence the choice of stock to purchase (invest) by retail individual investors within the same industry. Specifically, understanding how brand affinity and stock choice of investors correlate and the effect on the price of the stock. Brand affinity, in this context, refers to the level of affect of favour that an individual has towards a certain corporate brand. The research also aims at developing a model for predicting the relationship between financial performance metrics of a company, brand affinity, and investor stock choice, which can be used in developing a simulator for predicting pricing and stock choice behaviours by simulating market choices. This research makes a relevant contribution to the fields of behavioural economics/finance, business strategy and investment management. Collection of primary data is done using a controlled experiment that involves an online simulation of a quantitative study using the choice-based conjoint analysis approach, which is a conjoint analysis variant. The data is collected and analysed using Sawtooth Software, an application for conjoint analysis, because of the complex mathematical operations involved. Investor stock choice is taken as the dependent variable while independent variables comprise of brand affinity and five financial performance metrics, which are dividend yield, price-to-earnings ratio, price-to-book ratio, return on equity and earnings per share. This study finds that brand affinity has a major impact, and is the most important factor affecting investor decision making in purchasing stocks. It is established that brand affinity and investor stock have a direct positive relationship, which is also the same for higher brand affinity levels and stock price. It is also established that when selecting stocks, investors do not exclusively rely on the rationality and expected utility in the same industry with same risk profiles. A market simulator is also successfully developed to examine the cross-elasticity effects between different stock attributes and levels of those attributes, albeit with a few limitations, which are to be improved through further research. A market simulator in Microsoft Excel format was generated that converted the raw conjoint (part-worth utility) data from the study into a model that allows simulated market choices.

This research systematically investigates the sleeper effect, a counterintuitive phenomenon in which attitudes toward a persuasive message increase in favourableness over time despite the presence of discounting information. The sleeper effect has rarely been researched since criticisms in the 1970s and 1980s concerning relevance and difficulty in demonstrating the effect. Shifts in the consumer environment, however, merit a re-examination of the effect.The paucity of research leaves major gaps in establishing the conditions for existence of the sleeper effect, understanding the underlying mechanisms of the effect, the context in which the sleeper effect may flourish, and other factors with the potential to influence the effect. Recent research suggests self-associations at encoding impacts information processing and attitude change. The research reported in this thesis builds on the latter to develop hypotheses to test the relationships between self-associations and attitudes toward positive and negative information over time.The study adopts a quantitative approach to test the hypotheses using a series of three experiments, each building on one another. The first experiment seeks to find the absolute sleeper effect, and accomplishes this aim. The second experiment investigates the role of implicit self-anchoring on attitudes toward positive and negative information over time, showing that self-anchoring influences self/product identity overlap rather than the transfer of meaning through elaborative associations. The third experiment compares implicit self-anchoring and explicit self-referencing on attitudes toward positive and negative information, and shows that explicit self-referencing produces the associations and dissociations necessary to find the sleeper effect.This study significantly contributes to understanding the sleeper effect, not only by providing evidence for its existence, but by clarifying the mechanisms at work in the sleeper effect process. It distinguishes implicit self-anchoring and explicit self-referencing, and defines two processes in which the self and object interact in memory to influence attitudes. From a practical perspective, it situates the research in the contemporary consumer context, in which positive and negative information regarding products and services is accessible to consumers online. This study demonstrates that negative information can be leveraged to produce positive attitudes.

The term ‘epidemic’ is often used to describe the obesity phenomenon and indicate that overweight or obesity is a worldwide phenomenon. While the prevalence of overweight and obesity has been increasing, reviews on overweight and obesity studies indicate a clear need for further effectiveness studies of innovative and cost-effective strategies to improve the long-term outcomes of weight loss and weight maintenance programmes in large populations.Current weight loss interventions, while successful in the short term, are often not cost effective enough to deliver on a large scale because they are labour and time intensive. Most importantly, they do not cover large populations. Despite some individual successful weight loss in these interventions programmes, individuals still need to self- manage their weight following intervention. It is unrealistic to expect health professionals and clinicians to provide timely and long-term ongoing support for 2.1 billions overweight and obesity populations around the world (OECD Health Statics, 2014).Therefore, the solutions for weight control may be more effective if grounded within the online community, that is, design long-term solutions that build and draw on social capital to support weight maintenance and are scaled to cope with large populations. Understanding the individual weight loss experiences through informal online social support and utilising the advantages of computer-mediated communication (CMC) can be a timely and cost-effective way to help people self-manage their weight.A three-month online longitudinal phenomenological interview of 17 informants recruited from an online community forum was applied to explore the weight loss experiences with assistance of informal online social support. Four weight loss threads selected by the informants during their weight loss process were also interpreted to map out the key roles of informal online social support and the interaction process that takes place in an online community forum.This research describes the lived experiences of individuals’ self-help weight loss process and maps out the critical moments and differential experiences involved in the Stages of Change (SoC) to explain the individual differences during different weight loss stages. This research also identifies the interrelationships of Processes of Change (PoC) for facilitating behaviour change. The findings of this research contribute to demonstrate the interaction process between community members and the process of providing and receiving social support at different individual members’ weight loss stages, which helped them to continue to lose weight or maintain their weight. The informal online social support could meet different self-help weight loss individual’s needs during different weight loss stages, which is difficult to be provided by the healthcare providers. The findings also contribute to social marketing as a way of offering a cost-effective and efficient way to assist the self-help individual to self- manage their weight in the long term. It may also be a viable way of addressing the issues of costs and labour intensity found in the current weight loss interventions that want to serve large populations.