Communication Research Methods (Alternative Thinking) Report Analysis

This report analyzes three articles focusing on communication research methods related to customer decision-making and brand purchase behavior. The first article examines the impact of social media on brand purchases, exploring the effects of earned and owned social media activities using a two-stage decision-making model. It reviews limitations and proposes alternative methods like data mining and direct links to brand websites. The second article investigates consumer role performance and brand identification through surveys and field experiments, aiming to understand how organizations foster brand identification. The report critiques the research methodology and suggests using a heuristic-systematic model for further analysis. The third article explores the impact of the brand's digital marketing, the report analyzes the research methods, findings, and limitations of each article, proposing alternative research methods to enhance the understanding of customer behavior and brand engagement. The report concludes with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of each research approach and suggests improvements.

Running head: COMMNUNICATION RESEARCH METHODS (ALTERNATIVE THINKING)
Communication Research Method
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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COMMUNICATION RESEARCH METHODS (ALTERNATIVE THINKING)
Table of Contents
Introduction....................................................................................................................2
Article 1..........................................................................................................................2
Reference:..................................................................................................................2
Article review:............................................................................................................2
Alternative Methods Proposal....................................................................................4
Article 2..........................................................................................................................6
Reference:..................................................................................................................6
Article review:............................................................................................................6
Alternative Methods Proposal....................................................................................8
Article 3..........................................................................................................................9
Reference:..................................................................................................................9
Article review:............................................................................................................9
Alternative Methods Proposal..................................................................................11
References:...................................................................................................................13

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Introduction
The aim of this report is to identify the decision-makings of a customer while buying
products or goods of a brand based on the research of three articles. Three articles of different
writers have been chosen for this report as they all have researched on the reviews given by
the consumers on the internet. Various research methods have been explained along with the
alternate methods that might have resulted in positive manner for the proposed agenda. All
the research papers have certain limitations; these articles are chosen in pattern that the next
paper cover the limitation of the first article. This resulted in better transparency for the topic
and the limitations of the project.
Article 1
Social media and brand purchase: Quantifying the effects of exposures to earned and
owned social media activities in a two-stage decision making model
Reference:
Xie, K. and Lee, Y.J., 2015. Social media and brand purchase: Quantifying the effects
of exposures to earned and owned social media activities in a two-stage decision making
model. Journal of Management Information Systems, 32(2), pp.204-238.
Article review:
This article presents research on the effects of the exposures to the owned and the
earned activities in social media and their interaction on brand purchasing process in two-
stage decision model including the amount of the products purchased offline and their
likelihood to purchase (Lamberton& Stephen 2015). The writers of this article seek to find
out the effectiveness of social media exposures forthe brands with efforts made for the
promotion (Xie& Lee 2015). Another seeking leads them towards the application ofboth the

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likelihood towards the stage of purchasing and the amount of purchased goods or products in
the offline stage. The authors seek to find out the answer of the question ‘how channelsshould
be optimally utilized’, as only in an extreme condition the negative moderatingeffect because
of any type of social media activities might become substantial. In this situation, the
household is being exposed to large volume of any type of social media activities. It is also
represented as a nontrivial question or agenda of this article (Xie& Lee 2015).
This could help in providing an integrated setting, in order to illustrate the relative
multi-metric marketing’s effectiveness efforts considering the social media exposuresand
promotional programs in-store based on those findings.The framework presented by the
authors was based on the long-standing Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) (Botetzagias,
Dima& Male 2015).TPB holds that people in respond to the informationsignals, proceed
through a series of stages that are being started with knowledge-building related to the
cognition or learning, and awareness to action means conation or do, and conviction.Moving
forward the authors have put emphasis on the uniformed customers and resulted that in
respond to informationsignals like social media advertising the uniformed customers had to
proceed through the stages of likelihood on the purchasing of products or goods and
represented it as stage 1 ‘Being informed’. After that second stage had been proposed namely
‘Purchasing’ in which the amount of products that has been purchased offline. The
information had been collected through tracking the levels of exposures to the owned social
media activities and earned social media activities through the learning and awareness
towards the product (Xie& Lee 2015). Owned social media activities has been referred for
the manager response and the brand page newsfeeds, whereas earned social media activity
has been referred to the activities like “share”, “like”, status updates and comments on the
brand pages.Interaction between the earned and the owned activities have also been proposed
in this article. The behavioral or cognitive components or behaviors have beentraced through

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the amount of purchased products offline through presenting a figure of theoretical
framework, which can be helpful in exploring this topic.
The proposed article was based on the data analytics and imperative in FMCG (Fast-
Moving Consumer Goods) industry involving the ‘guesswork’ that is being involved in the
strategizing and corporate planning.This study can provide managers about the knowledge
that the social media can be characterized by promoting potential trade-off with in-store and
advertising the channel interplay. This article can promote the managerswho are concerned
with the market shares and relative performance measures in utilizingthe proposed study and
can take proper cautions while employing the competitor-benefiting socialmedia exposures
(Lianos 2015).
This study was limited to the social media advertising, which cannot predict the
offline purchased goods or products. Social media has very little impact on the brand product
purchasing because of the sheered amount of owned advertising events. This failed in
introducing the possibilities of the customers those could be averse to overload of the social
media marketing. Facebook is not a place where every individual is trying to know the
products as; it is not the reason behind connecting to then Facebook.
Alternative Methods Proposal
Collecting data about the customers from the branded stores could be helpful in
estimating the exact reaction of the customers on buying the products. This will be covering
the customers who are interested in brands excluding the unnecessary individuals who will
buy the products from the general stores or super markets. Data mining is the latest
technology for predicting the behavior and action of the customers, which could have also
improved the results that are being stated in the above article (Wu et al. 2014 ). This could
have not only covered social media, but have also have included all the online buyers who are

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buying branded products online. Majority of the population nowadays are moving towards
online purchase. The focus should be the majority not the traditional ways. For effective and
efficient results an individual cannot depend on the ‘guesswork’, it should be well calculated
and based on evidence and data mining is the way of knowing the customers without waiting
for the feedbacks. The authors have predicted some results based on the comments that have
been made on the Facebook pages. Most of the newspapers have reported that there are
almost 40% Facebook identities are either fake, hacked or missing ids, which cannot be
helpful in getting accurate data and feedbacks (lee 2014).The authors have proposed
Facebook as the primary media as it is the most popular social networking website; regardless
of that, the authors should have collected information from the branded stores. Because ‘the
reason most members are joining a brand on Facebook is most likely not to learn about
products’ will be a complete myth. The users are connecting to the Facebook for their
personal use like entertainment, chatting etc. Social media could be a medium for the great
hub of interested buyers but there are also different methods that could be more helpful. An
alternative approach can be proposed like there should be a direct link to the original website
of the brand on every advertisement social media (Wilson & Post 2013). It should only be
used in manner to calculate the strength of the customers not about their choices and
preference.
Data mining is the latest technology but ethical issues surround no-doubt
implementation of data mining, which might be opposed by the customers
(Tene&Polonetsky, 2012). This will collect personal information and the places on the web
the user is moving by following ‘cookies’ of the internet users.

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Article 2
Consumers' Role Performance and Brand Identification: Evidence from a Survey and
a Longitudinal Field Experiment
Reference:
He, Y., Chen, Q., Lee, R.P., Wang, Y. and Pohlmann, A., 2017. Consumers' Role
Performance and Brand Identification: Evidence from a Survey and a Longitudinal Field
Experiment. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 38, pp.1-11.
Article review:
The aim of the authors in this article is on identifying the processes and antecedents
that could lead to much strong brandidentification.The authors aimed at betterassessing the
casual relationships hypothesized in the proposed research.The authors seek to find out how
an organization fosters the intrinsic motivations of the consumers to act their interest of the
brand (He et al. 2017). Another question which answer was being searched in this report was
that how the motivations influence the role behaviors of the customers within the community
of the brand and afterwards their identification with those brands. In the second study, the
authors were seeking to find out what kinds of marketing techniques or tactics could be
employed in order to motivate the community behaviors that effectively and efficiently foster
the brand identification. In order to answer this question the authors aimed at identifying the
processes and antecedents that could lead to stronger brand identification (He et al. 2017).
To get answers of these questions, the authors used experimental stimuli in order to
manipulate self-competency, self-belongingness, and self-autonomy. The actual and very
behavioral measures had been proposed to enhance the managerial relevance and theoretical
contribution because of the manipulated factors (Yukl, 2012).

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Data were being collected using the survey, which was based on web-based
questionnaire(www.sojump.com) for a limited period. In this survey the number of
customers, logging into the brand websites had been noted in order to determine which time
of the day or the day most users are logging into those website.The authors sent an invitation
mail, in which the questionnaire web link was attached (He et al. 2017).
Based on the methods author findings were resulted that most of the users logon to the
brand websites in theperiod between 8:00 PM and 11:00 PM on Saturdays andSundays (mith
et al. 2017). This article eliminated the limitation of the article proposed above as the
questions were being asked to the paid customers only, which eliminated the group of people
who are not involving with the brands. The findings led the authors to give a statement “for
consumers with highlevels of brand identification when the brand is mature andwell known”.
The findings onactual behavior and behavioral intentions of the users resulted in
compellingthe empirical evidence that supports the causal relationships hypothesizedin the
theoretical model proposed in the paper.The findings also helped in demonstrating that the
members of the brand community perceived self-competency and self-belongingnessin brand
community. Participation in both extra-role and in-role andextra-role behaviors resulted,
fosters consumer brand identification (Lii& Lee 2012).
Above paragraph states about the strengths of the article but there were certain
limitations of the article which can be stated as the research was not capable of answering all
the questions that the authors was seeking to find out. Two studies were made in the research
but both were failed to support the proposed hypothesis ‘more involved extra-role
behaviorsexert a stronger impact on brand identification than relatively lessinvolved in-role
behaviors’.

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Alternative Methods Proposal
Heuristic-system model could have resulted in finding of the answers the authors were
seeking to find. Because the researchers were not able to find the answers can be explained as
the types of community behavior represents the more engaged brand experiences, regardless
of the fact that whether that is extra-role or in-role (Brocat, Voorhees & Baker 2012). There
is the possibility of different role activities on the brand identification has been moderated by
the individual stage of the consumers of brand identification.The heuristic–systematic model
could have pointed out the heuristic cues that were associated with the applicability,
accessibility, and availability, ofthe knowledge of the individual. It would have helped
authors toexamine the three elements of the heuristic cues in the researchcontext, because
many cues that have no content could have related cues of the number of online reviews that
were existed on the online review sites. This could have also helped todiscern whether the
selected heuristic factor is valid in this preferred situation.Secondly, and the most important
aspect is that the heuristic–systematic model could havehighlighted the co-occurrence of
heuristic and systematic informationprocessing. It could have cover the population who are
involved completely with the brand as someone will only give time for the reviews if the
individual is connected to that particular brand, a human nature. Almost each individual
nowadays connected to the internet, this led the more involvement of the individual on the
webpages and if the individual see the known brand, it will automatically attract the
consumers or the customers to give their perceptive on the nature or demand-meetings of the
product. It can be expected that this could have covered each individual that is in role with
the brand and could have resulted in more efficient and effective findings. The reviews with
ratings could have make the system to separate them in different categories, and this could
have let the authors to discriminate between the good reviews and bad reviews, as one could

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not look all the reviews which could lead to loss of some hidden reviews and could affect the
findings (Kauffman et al. 2016).
Providing reviews on certain brand is the personal thought of the individual, it is their
responses and using it as evidence to derive results could have let to the expose user’s
activities that where they are going and what they are buying which can lead to certain ethical
issues (Zikmund et al. 2013). This could be uncomfortable for the individuals who are getting
involved in the review system of the brands.
Article 3
Examining the influence of online reviews on consumers' decision-making: A
heuristic–systematic model
Reference:
Zhang, K.Z., Zhao, S.J., Cheung, C.M. and Lee, M.K., 2014. Examining the influence
of online reviews on consumers' decision-making: A heuristic–systematic model.Decision
Support Systems, 67, pp.78-89.
Article review:
This article aims at delving into heuristic– systematic model in order to enrich the
understanding on how onlinereviews might affect the behavioural intention of the consumers.
In order to achieve the above objective authors have reviewed prior literature on dual-process
theories andhow these theories can be applied in the sector of online reviews and other wider
problems in Information Systems (IS) (Zhang et al. 2014). Through heuristic-systematic
model the authors are seeking to find firstly, what are the heuristic factors and key systematic
for understandingthe influence of the online reviews provided by the consumers (Moore
2015, p.35). Secondly, whether there is existence of bias effect or not betweenthe two types

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of factors. The bias effect could help in explaining how systematic and heuristic factors might
interact with each other, which is a priortheoretical extension in the proposed heuristic–
systematic model. Examiningthe bias effect can be helpful in order to provide notable
implicationsfor further examining the influence of the online reviews on decisionmaking of
the customers (Yin, Bond & Zhang 2013).
There have been three research methods used in this article which can be listed as:
firstly, online review site that includes dianping.com, which is basically about reviews on the
restaurants. Review messages have been listed with the basic information of the restaurants,
by providing unique web pages for every restaurant (Zhang et al. 2014). Besides providing a
large amount of content related to the reviews,Dianping.com was offering numerical
information in order to show the numberof reviews submitted to every restaurant and used the
numbers of “contribution value” and “medals”to demonstrate proper ranking level to
differentreview contributors or consumers. Dianping.com appears tobe proper research
website that helps in enabling the subjects to develop perceptionsconsidering the content of
argument quality and variousheuristic cueswhich can be stated as perceived quantity
ofreviews and source credibility. Secondly, Questionnaire development and pilot study,
which included survey questionnaire as it was done in previous article. Thirdly, Data
Collection, which included distribution of final questionnaire to the potential users of review
sites that was affiliated with Dianping.com.
Findings of this article can be stated as; this article provides a strong empirical
support for the influence of customer’s decision makingfrom perceived quantity of reviews
and source credibility to the argumentquality in the environment of online websites. The
proposed bias effect helped in uncovering the relationshipbetween heuristic and systematic
factors (Zhang et al. 2014). In order words, perceptions of the consumersin relation with the
online reviews’ content can be strengthenedby the perceptions of the customers related to

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non-content online reviews’ cues. Ifconsumers finds out that the receive reviews from
credible sources and quantityof reviews to be large, then the consumers will perceive and
further expect thatarguments represented in online reviews are more persuasive and
informative (Cheung, Xiao & Liu 2012).Based on the findings it can be suggested that the
both cue-related and content related thinking have the potential to influence the judgment
making of an individual as, the findings were seems to be consistent with the additional effect
of the heuristic-systematic model.
Emphasizing on the strengths of the article it can be stated that the managers of firms
or any organization can be beneficial through this research.The managers might involve in
the phenomenon of onlinereviews system through the discussed four stages which are
moderator, observer, participant, and mediator (Park & Allen 2013).Through the lens of this
report managers of the organization or the firms would be able to understand and predict the
impacts of the online reviews.
There were certain limitations to this research paper because of the research
methodology that has been proposed in it. Firstly,only a single online review site that is
Diaping.com has been adopted for the research context (Bellur&Sundar 2014).Secondly, the
authors have not considered the impacts of negative online reviewson the decision making of
the consumers. Another limitation was that the authors’ research has been restricted the
analysisof source credibility and the argument quality towards positive reviewsonly in order
to achieve a simple design and highlight the focus of the research.
Alternative Methods Proposal
The findings could be made more efficient and effective in the way of searching the
answers of the proposed questions, if authors have consider more than one online review
website and considered all the negative reviews in the research (Van Noort&Willenmsen2012