Effects of paid search advertising on product sales: a Chinese semantic perspective

ABSTRACT

Prior research on the impact of brand keywords on product sales has produced contradictory findings. Thus, one purpose of this study was to examine how brand keywords affect product sales when brand equity is considered. The other purpose was to explore how hedonic and utilitarian keywords interact with product type to impact product sales. The results of analyses of two secondary datasets and one lab experiment showed that brand keywords yielded more product sales than non-brand keywords. However, this effect disappeared when brand market share was small or consumer brand knowledge was high. A coding system was developed for Chinese keywords based on Chinese semantic features. Results showed a matching effect in which hedonic keywords generated higher product sales than utilitarian keywords for hedonic products, and utilitarian keywords generated higher product sales than hedonic keywords for utilitarian products.

KEYWORDS:

• Paid search advertising
• brand keyword; hedonic keyword; utilitarian keyword; Chinese semantics

Acknowledgments

The authors greatly appreciate the comments and suggestions provided by the editors, the associate editor, and three anonymous reviewers. The authors also thank two sellers for providing the data used in this study. Address correspondence to Yangjun Tu.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Both sellers wished to remain anonymous. We thank these two sellers for providing the data used in this study.

2. Due to their confidentiality agreements, neither sellers wanted to disclose their brand information. We obtained the sales rank of each brand through Shengyicanmou, a big data information platform provided by Alibaba. Sellers who purchase the service can inquire about market competition, popular products and the performance of their products in the market.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [71573079].

Notes on contributors

Zhi Yang

Zhi Yang is Professor of Marketing and Dean at the School of Business Administration, Hunan University. His research focuses on marketing strategy and marketing behavior. He has published in academic journals such as the Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Industrial Marketing Management, and International Business Review.

Yueyan Wu

Yueyan Wu is a Marketing Doctoral Candidate at School of Business Administration, Hunan University in China. She is a joint training doctoral student at Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. Her research interests include consumer behavior and sensory marketing. Her work has been published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and British Food Journal.

Chongyu Lu

Chongyu Lu is the Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Lubin School of Business, Pace University. She received her Ph.D. in Marketing from the C.T. Bauer College of Business, University of Houston. Chongyu’s research interests include digital marketing and marketing analytics. Her research has appeared in Journal of Advertising Research and Journal of Marketing Development and Competitiveness.

Yangjun Tu

Yangjun Tu is a marketing associate professor at School of Business Administration, Hunan University in China. Her research interests are in the field of consumer behaviour, sensory marketing, and robot marketing. Her research has been published in Journal of Sensory Studies, Food Quality and Preference, and British Food Journal.