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Open research questions in Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing

38 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 2,279 Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.

What the literature leaves open

  • For Businesses and Organizations • Treat SEO as a long-term investment consistent effort over time yields compounding returns in traffic, authority, and lead quality. • Prioritize content strategy above all other SEO activities. High-quality, user-focused content aligned with keyword intent should form the core of every SEO program. • Build a structured link acquisition strategy earning backlinks from credible, relevant websites is the most reliable path to building domain authority. • Ensure technical SEO fundamentals are in place, including fast page load speeds, mobile optimization, secure HTTPS connections, and properly structured metadata. • Invest in SEO analytics regular monitoring using tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SEMrush enables data-driven optimization. 9.2 For Digital Marketing Professionals • Conduct comprehensive keyword research before any content creation to understand what the target audience is actually searching for. • Measure lead quality, not just traffic volume conversion rate, cost per lead, and lead-to-customer ratios provide more meaningful indicators of SEO success. • Stay current with search engine algorithm updates and adapt strategies accordingly. • Integrate SEO with other digital marketing channels particularly content marketing, email marketing, and social media for a cohesive approach. 9.3 For SMEs and Startups • Small and medium enterprises should recognize SEO as one of the most cost-effective digital marketing channels unlike paid advertising, SEO generates ongoing organic traffic without per-click costs. • Begin with foundational on-page SEO before investing in more complex off-page or technical strategies. • Consider partnerships with experienced SEO agencies or consultants if in-house expertise is limited. 10. CONCLUSION This study set out to examine the impact of Search Engine Optimization on website traffic and lead generation, drawing on the experiences and perceptions of 200 digital marketing professionals in India. The evidence collected and analyzed offers a clear and compelling answer: SEO works, and it works powerfully. Across every dimension examined from the effectiveness of on-page and off-page techniques, to the role of content strategy, to the impact on lead generation and conversion respondents demonstrated strong, consistent agreement that SEO makes a meaningful, measurable difference to business outcomes. The statistical analyses confirm not just the existence of these relationships but their strength: an R² of 0.803 indicates that the factors studied account for more than four-fifths of the variance in overall SEO performance. © 2026 The Author(s). Published by IJCOPE Journal.

    A Study on the Impact of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)on Website Traffic and Lead Generation · 2026 · DOI

  • campaigns with detailed audience (Lookalike Audiences based on conversion behavior); use Facebook as a "reminder" channel, especially in interaction sequences where it is not the first touchpoint; test video formats and interactive posts to increase engagement depth before the appearance of House Ads. for channel optimization: targeting Email (13.36%) – a stable channel, yet requires systematic expansion of interactions. It does not function independently as a final trigger, but significantly amplifies the effect of combinations. The contribution in the Shapley model is higher than in Last Touch. Further integration of ЕКОНОМІКА. 1(228)/2026 ~ 199 ~ email marketing at the final stages of the user journey is needed. As a core CRM tool, Email should re-engage users who did not convert at earlier stages. Recommended actions: identify audience segments with a high likelihood of email response (e.g., based on Retention data); apply trigger-based campaigns such as abandoned cart, re- engagement, and onboarding; conduct A/B tests on subject lines, send times, and CTA formats (call-to-action). Instagram (11.58%) received higher scores in traditional models but lower scores in the Shapley model. The nature of this channel points to high visibility but a relatively weak marginal effect, indicating a limited impact on final decision- making and its appearance alongside more influential channels. It primarily builds emotional connection and enhances user engagement. Practical recommendations: use Instagram mainly at the early stages of the funnel (awareness), with creatives that build brand perception; integrate it with House Ads or Facebook to support multichannel communication; run campaigns linking to a landing page (LP) rather than just the brand profile to increase the likelihood of final conversion. Push notifications (5.51%) – a low-impact channel in need of relaunch. It shows the smallest contribution across all models. Its influence is insufficient and poorly structured. As the channel with the fewest impressions, it requires traffic growth for proper testing and assessment of its effectiveness. There's a rationale to revise the tactic or audience targeting. Recommendations for optimization: shift to more personalized push notifications (e.g., referencing prior user actions); limit frequency and apply A/B testing – whether to send push before or after email or other channels; measure open time and its influence on re-engagement. Therefore, by leveraging the flexibility and precision of the Shapley model, a company can effectively assess the marginal effect of each touchpoint. This approach will mitigate dependence on traditional models, which consistently overvalue the final stages of user interaction with channels. Concurrently, it will facilitate a more efficient allocation of the marketing budget, as channels with negligible impact will no longer receive disproportionate funding. Basing decisions on the actual impact of channels, rather than merely their frequency or reach, will enable more precise planning of multichannel campaigns. Ultimately, this will empower the company to formulate a truly coherent marketing strategy, wherein each channel functions as part of a synchronized system geared towards effective user engagement.

    DATA-DRIVEN ATTRIBUTION MODELING IN DIGITAL MARKETING · 2026 · DOI

  • The final stage consists of formulating conclusions and practical for optimizing marketing budgets, enhancing channel effectiveness, and designing multichannel campaigns based on attribution results. These insights empower companies to make informed and rational strategic decisions grounded in data. Experiment. To develop the Shapley value–based attribution model, a real dataset from a digital advertising campaign was utilized, comprising 10,037 records of user interactions with various marketing channels throughout January 2018. The campaign promoted a digital product offering online educational services. The key variables selected for modeling include user_id (a unique identifier distinguishing the dataset), individual users within marketing_channel (indicating the channel through which the marketing message was delivered: Email, Facebook, Instagram, Push, House Ads), date_served (the date the marketing message was shown, necessary for determining the order of touchpoints in the user journey), and converted (a binary variable: True if the user completed a conversion such as a purchase or subscription following the interaction, False otherwise. This is the primary target variable for attribution modeling as it defines interaction success. These variables contain a minimal amount of missing data (up to 0.2%) and allow tracking of individual user paths to focused on deriving conversion. Other subscription-related variables were excluded due to their irrelevance to the attribution analysis. Missing values in critical variables were handled by row deletion without compromising data quality. Exploratory data analysis insights, verifying data distributions, and preparing for modeling, with particular attention to the conversion rate, frequency of channel usage, and channel combinations leading to conversions. The analysis revealed a moderate class imbalance, with successful conversions (converted = True) constituting approximately 60% of observations and unsuccessful ones (converted = False) about 40%, which is favorable for model training without additional adjustment. Regarding channel usage, House Ads emerged as the most engaged channel with over 250 impressions, followed by Instagram and Facebook (~105 impressions each), indicating an uneven distribution of marketing efforts.

    DATA-DRIVEN ATTRIBUTION MODELING IN DIGITAL MARKETING · 2026 · DOI

  • and Policy, 39(2), 248–266. https://doi.org/10.1093/aepp/ppw015 Mostafa, M. M. (2013). More than words: Social networks' text mining for consumer brand sentiments. Expert Systems with Applications, 40(10), 4241–4251. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2013.01.019 Pang, B., & Lee, L. (2008). Opinion mining and sentiment analysis. Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval, 2(1–2), 1–135. https://doi.org/10.1561/1500000011 Suri, G. (2026). Near-me search intent as a pre-transactional retail demand indicator: Proximity Intent Pipeline (PIP) and Proximity Intent Score (PIS). Manuscript in preparation. Syntetos, A. A., Boylan, J. E., & Disney, S. M. (2009). Forecasting for inventory planning: A 50-year review.

    Social Media Sentiment as a Leading Indicator of In-Store Product Demand: An Empirical Analysis · 2026 · DOI

  • Based on the findings of this study, a set of recommendations can be made to grasp price ending strategies in e-commerce and provide a guide for future research. First and foremost, it is important that e-commerce platforms keep on applying charm pricing, such as.95 and.99 endings, for these revealed to efficiently urge a perception of savings and practicality among budget-conscious college students. In spite of that, it is crucial to ensure these promotional displays lead to tangible value and do not mislead consumers regarding actual price differences. Moreover, incentive programs and pricing displayed that clearly communicate true value can potentially produce progressive customer satisfaction and long-term brand loyalty. Furthermore, students should be advocated to improve their financial management and literacy by honing price rounding techniques, treating charm-priced items as the nearest whole number–to ensure they produce coherent choices and decisions based on their current budget rather than a psychological “emotion” of funds. Learning institutions and financial programs could influence in helping students recognize these subtle pricing signs to nurture exceptional financial awareness in digital marketplaces.

    The Effect of Price-Endings on Discerned Parsimony among College Students Using E-Commerce Applications · 2026 · DOI

  • Such pre-purchase (or search) data can be valuable to researchers in a variety of ways: as an additional source of information to estimate consumer preferences, to understand how firms can influence the search process through marketing mix variables, and to analyze how limited information about products affects equilibrium market outcomes.

    Consumer search: What can we learn from pre-purchase data? · 2024 · DOI

  • The goal of this study is to fill this gap in research, giving an average price level for PGMTs as well as introducing a PGMT index as a basis for a more differentiated price policy and benchmarking.

    Benchmarking the Performing Arts: a Price Level Index for Publicly Funded German Music Theatres · 2020 · DOI

  • Can cause marketing (CM) be effective? If so, do price discounts moderate CM effectiveness? Despite the prevalence of linking product sales with donations to charity, field evidence of CM effectiveness is lacking.

    Cause Marketing Effectiveness and the Moderating Role of Price Discounts · 2014 · DOI

  • Extant research reports conflicting results about price and promotional sensitivity for organic products and does not address the impact of organic assortment.

    What is Special about Marketing Organic Products? How Organic Assortment, Price, and Promotions Drive Retailer Performance · 2012 · DOI

  • If it could be demonstrated that increased attention to the consumer, in the development stages of advertising leads to more effective advertising than when consumer input is limited to the evaluation of advertising, after the fact, this would be of significant interest to advertisers as well as advertising agencies.

    The Use of Research in Developing Advertising Strategies · 1997 · DOI

  • The findings suggest that live commerce conversion is more closely related to active audience presence and product relevance than to passive reach, while causal claims remain limited by the observational platform-data design.

    Live Commerce Performance and Actual Sales Volume: Evidence from Skincare Brands on TikTok Shop Indonesia · 2026 · DOI

  • Despite being discussed in scholarly research and managerial practice for over forty years and mixed findings about its impact, a comprehensive understanding of the construct of adaptive selling remains missing.

    The past, present, and future of adaptive selling: Toward an integrative framework · 2025 · DOI

  • For example, for many brands in the Laundry Detergent and Instant Noodles categories, the number of customers purchasing the products in each store fluctuated significantly, whereas the number of purchased items per customer varied widely in the Japanese Tea category.

    Fluctuation in Grocery Sales by Brand: An Analysis Using Taylor’s Law · 2022 · DOI

  • Relatively little is known about the specific impact of these variables and their relationship to each other, and few existing measures of consistency and uniqueness extend beyond subjective rating scales.

    Measuring the Role of Uniqueness and Consistency to Develop Effective Advertising · 2021 · DOI

  • An understudied mechanism is analyzed by which this variability can reduce firm revenues when customers do not know true service quality but rather learn about that quality over time based on their experiences.

    How Service Quality Variability Hurts Revenue When Customers Learn: Implications for Dynamic Personalized Pricing · 2021 · DOI

  • An important aspect of multimedia advertising effectiveness that remains unexplored is a customer-level analysis of the relative importance of each medium for multiple retailer-brands within a product category.

    Advertising Effectiveness for Multiple Retailer-Brands in a Multimedia and Multichannel Environment · 2020 · DOI

  • Limited research has even posited that some drug-related vendors on cryptomarkets sell to other dealers, adding another dimension to existing literature that highlights the retail nature (dealer-to-customer transactions) of these Tor-based drug markets.

    Characteristics of Drug Vendors on the Tor Network: A Cryptomarket Comparison · 2016 · DOI

  • In food retailing a high degree of price dispersion between and within stores and brands is documented, but variations in the dynamics of prices and its causes have not been analysed in great detail.

    Cost pass-through in differentiated product markets: a disaggregated study for milk and butter · 2014 · DOI

  • <h3>ABSTRACT</h3> Amid the plethora of research on advertising effectiveness, the authors of the current study believe consumers9 online search behavior, subsequent to exposure to traditional advertising messages, has been understudied.

    Effects of Multi-Channel Marketing on Consumers’ Online Search Behavior · 2013 · DOI

  • While the empirical investigation is limited to the relationship between communication characteristics and asking price, the price negotiation process and property-based characteristics that lead to the final price are also discussed.

    Exploring the Relationship Between Sponsorship Characteristics and Sponsorship Asking Price · 2012 · DOI

  • The model facilitates estimation of daily keyword conversion and click-through rates in a sparse data environment while accounting for the endogenous position of the text advertisement served in response to a search.

    A Latent Instrumental Variables Approach to Modeling Keyword Conversion in Paid Search Advertising · 2012 · DOI

  • Few studies have considered the relative role of the integrated marketing mix (advertising, price promotion, product, and place) on the long-term performance of mature brands, instead emphasizing advertising and price promotion.

    The Long-Term Effect of Marketing Strategy on Brand Sales · 2010 · DOI

  • The manufacturer's private incentives to stage a buyback are insufficient, the buyback price offered is too low, and the continued product usage by consumers is excessive.

    Product Safety, Buybacks, and the Post-Sale Duty to Warn · 2009 · DOI

  • Given the extensive use of reference pricing and scarcity appeals, their association with each other, and their further association with other commonly recognized advertising tactics, additional research on the use of multiple influence strategies appears warranted.

    Reference price and scarcity appeals and the use of multiple influence strategies in retail newspaper advertising · 2007 · DOI

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38 open questions have been extracted from the limitations and future-work passages of 2,279 Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing papers in our library. Each one below links back to the study that raised it, so you can read the original claim in context.

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