Prof Melanie Wiese of the Department of Marketing Management was honoured at the University of Pretoria’s Virtual Academic Achiever Awards, held on 25 November 2020, for her National Research Foundation (NRF) rating. The purpose of this event was to congratulate academics on exceptional academic achievement in 2019. Prof Wiese’s C3-rating confirms that she is an established researcher with a sustained record of productivity in the marketing field, who is recognised by her peers as having produced a body of quality work.

 

Her research focuses on consumer choice behaviour. Prof Wiese’s research contributes to the current debate on how consumers make decisions in both the online and offline environment, as well as what influences their decisions and why consumers act or behave in certain ways because of their decisions.

 

Specifically, her s-commerce research found that members of a brand's social network site (SNS) can be segmented to identify various consumer segments that will be most responsive to marketing communications to encourage s-commerce, while the main drivers of s-commerce engagement are message credibility, trust in the brands’ Facebook page, involvement, peer communication and online social interaction propensity. Furthermore, the theory of reasoned action was found to be more appropriate to predict engagement with Facebook advertising in an African context, while the social support theory showed promise for examining perceptions and attitudes towards social network advertising (SNA) across countries. Additionally, it is evident that consumers’ culture influences the role of privacy and trust in SNA perceptions.

 

Below is a screen shot of Prof Wiese taken during the virtual event: