Wibke Heidig

Upselling is a widely utilized sales tool especially in service industries like car rentals, hotels, and travel businesses. The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual clarification of the customer's decision process underlying an upsell choice as well as to give an an answer to the question of when and why consumers decide in favor or against an upsell offer. Drawing on the effort-accuracy framework and framing literature, we show that upsell arguments highlighting loss aspects moderate the relationship between effortful initial decisions and the probability of choosing the upsell.

Many companies do it: they let their employees play - with small plastic bricks, tokens, memory cards or board games. Practice and anecdotal evidence suggests that brand games work, because they are fun and motivate customer-contact employees to live the brand. The purpose of this paper is to investigate if a brand and its underlying values can be communicated effectively through the use of brand games. Drawing on flow theory and research on social interaction the reported field experiment demonstrates that brand games can lead to more favorable evaluations of the brand and higher levels of positive affect toward the brand compared to an expository representation.