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information and how such interpretation influences consumers’ purchase decisions
differently from the quality inference. Future research may follow this up and continue
exploring online social comparison with popularity information.
5.4 Managerial Implications
The empirical results of this research provide practical implications for e-businesses
as to how they could incorporate relevant strategies using popularity information to
promote products with differing breadth of appeals. First, when breadth of appeal and
sales volume are congruent, e-businesses do not need to do much if intending to promote a
broad-appeal product because consumers already have a higher tendency to purchase a
broad-appeal over a narrow-appeal product. Releasing popularity information in this
condition does not seem to exert a strong influence.
Second, when breadth of appeal and sales volume are incongruent, the effect of
popularity information becomes apparent and e-businesses’ strategies should be aligned
with the effect. If intending to promote a broad-appeal product, e-business should provide
cues to stimulate consumers’ social inference. Many methods may be used to induce the
social inference. For example, celebrity endorsements have long been used as an effective
tactic to induce consumers’ social comparison because celebrities serve as an effective
attention-getter and reference group identifier (Lockwood and Kunda, 1997; Wei and Lu,
2013). Besides, e-businesses could strategically supply social-related information, such as
number one sales on the Internet or most wanted product by celebrities and etc., on the
website or actively deliver this kind of information to potential consumers through emails.
Moreover, e-businesses can emphasize the large breadth of appeal of the broad-appeal
product with the intention to stimulate consumers’ interests to treat the large breadth of
appeal as their reference group and follow that group’s purchase decisions. By doing so,
consumers hopefully would pay less attention to the higher sales volume of the narrow-
appeal product but focus more on the large breadth of appeal of the broad-appeal product.
On the other hand, if intending to promote a narrow-appeal product, e-businesses
may prepare consumers either with the quality or social inference. Our empirical results
show that both inferences may significantly boost the sales for the narrow-appeal product
in comparison to the condition of congruence, yet the quality inference may exert a
stronger impact than the social comparison. Thus, e-businesses may consider prioritizing
the quality inference to receive a better effect from promoting a narrow-appeal product. In
order to induce the quality inference as a primary inference, e-businesses could invite