Companies are increasingly including innovative visual design elements such as animations and pictographs in digital communication. While both elements can be beneficial in exchanges with their customers, we propose that combining them can have negative effects on communication effectiveness. Animations and pictographs enhance digital communication, essentially through increased perceptions of enrichment

In many markets, consumers use attribute information to assess the value they expect from purchasing a product or service. This includes many low involvement experience goods including take-out food, many packaged good categories and restaurants. In these markets, quality differences exist but many differences are horizontal in nature: the consumer is interested in finding a product that meets her

Recently, firms have increasingly approached their own customers for assistance with corporate political activities—a strategy known as constituency building. While constituency building efforts targeting shareholders and employees have been well-studied, relatively little is known about the impact of approaching consumers. Hence, this paper examines why consumers participate in corporate political

We investigate how the status and functional benefits of cars’ brands lose value over time. Theoretically, we show that brands with a higher status, or that appeal to status-conscious consumers, exhibit steeper price decline over time. Empirically, we take advantage of the phenomenon of twin cars – pairs of car models that are nearly identical from a structural and mechanical standpoint, but that are

The role of advertising in consumer demand has received much attention in the marketing literature, where the marketing response model has emerged as a dominant analytical framework. In recent years, the model structure has evolved in three directions. Firstly, the inclusion of online paid, owned and earned media to accommodate the off-online path-to-purchase. Secondly, the introduction of consumer

Variance-based SEM, also known under the term partial least squares (PLS) analysis, is an approach that has gained increasing interest among marketing researchers in recent years. During the last 25 years, more than 30 articles have been published in leading marketing journals that have applied this approach instead of the more traditional alternative of covariance-based SEM (CBSEM). However, although

Though the mobile app market is substantial and growing fast, most app providers struggle to monetize apps profitably. Monetizing apps is done in two ways: a) selling advertising space within a free version of the app, and b) selling a paid version, termed freemium or in-app purchase strategy. In this paper, we present a framework for monetization of mobile apps, using two central empirical regularities

The current socio-economic climate is marked by an increased focus on corporate responsibility and the role of business in society. In this climate, megamarketing – efforts to develop and sustain an industry or market by gaining the cooperation and support of various stakeholders and publics – is an increasingly relevant approach. Current research in megamarketing focuses on understanding how various

The number of studies on the marketing–finance interface has escalated in response to increased interest in the value of marketing investments, such as sports sponsorship. This study integrates current research findings and establishes empirical generalizations on how sports sponsorship announcements impact firm value. The empirical literature finds contradicting results on the value shareholders place

Although collecting personal information about consumers is crucial for firms and marketers, understanding of when and why consumers accept or reject information collection remains limited. The authors conceptualize a privacy calculus that represents a consumer’s trade–off of the valence and uncertainty of the consequences of the collection, storage, and use of personal information. For example, usage-based

The growth in institutional holdings of public firms has led to increased interest in the concept of common ownership, in which the same investor owns stakes in multiple firms within the same industry. Economic theory suggests that common ownership could affect firm performance, but little empirical research has examined the nature of this effect or how a firm’s extant marketing potentially relates

Changes in firms’ warranty payments are informative signals that enable investors to form timely expectations about potential changes in product quality. The authors’ survey shows that warranty payments affect potential investors’ product quality assessments and stock investment likelihood. Their quantitative analysis reveals an asymmetric stock market reaction: unanticipated increases in warranty

Increasingly, marketing and consumer researchers rely on online data collection services. While actively-managed data collection services directly assist with the sampling process, minimally-managed data collection services, such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), leave researchers solely responsible for recruiting, screening, cleaning, and evaluating responses. The research reported here proposes

The present research explores how the proportion of sold-out options in the choice set affects consumer purchase choices. Across five experiments, we find an inverted U- shaped relationship between the proportion of sold-out options in a choice set and consumer purchase choices. Fueling this effect are two competing processes: presence of sold-out options signals the overall quality of products in

Although brand placements are commonplace in promotion strategies, the extant literature lacks a quantitative empirical synthesis of the effect of placements on cognitive, attitudinal, and conative outcomes. The authors report a meta-analysis addressing the extent to which brand placements affect consumers’ brand placement memory, brand salience, consumer attitude toward the placed brand, and purchase

Consumers frequently compare themselves with others and find themselves to be inferior or superior to the comparison targets. This article examines the effect of social comparisons on the relative focus of self-efficacy and relationship needs and the subsequent impact on consumers’ preference for competence- versus warmth-oriented products. Across six studies, we show that upward comparisons (i.e.

Service industries require rapid innovations in their service portfolios to gain and maintain competitive advantages. Service elimination is a potential tool for portfolio renewal, though it might threaten increased defection rates. To contribute to both service elimination and customer defection literature, this paper proposes a model of customer responses to service elimination, with practical implications

Technology licensing is an important form of exchange in business-to-business markets. Licensees consider licensing technologies as a key mechanism to expand their technological asset base and to innovate. Even though exchange is the central focus of marketing academia, technology licensing contracts as a form of exchange have been largely overlooked. We take some steps to fill this void by studying

In recent years, growing attention has been devoted to consumer engagement with brands through emerging technological (e.g., social media/artificial intelligence-based) platforms. However, despite important advances, much remains unknown regarding the effect of consumers’ technology-facilitated brand engagement (CTFBE) on their wellbeing, thus posing an important research gap. To explore this gap,

This research examines the effect of the consumption sequence of vices and virtues on consumers’ enjoyment. Five studies show that consuming a virtue after a vice increases consumers’ enjoyment of the overall experience relative to consuming the same items in the opposite sequence. Moreover, this sequence effect disappears when people have no strong goals that the vice violates, when the vice is perceived

Retailer loyalty programs (LPs) are pervasive in grocery retailing. However, participant spending and redemption typically wear off over time and traditional communication has not revealed very effective at maintaining program engagement. We study the impact of in-app mobile push notifications on consumer participation and reward collection in store-loyalty programs. Using a unique data set covering

We examine how channel members’ ability to recognize repeat and new customers affects service provision, profits, and welfare. In decentralized channels, when only retailers can recognize customers, customer recognition increases service levels. However, in centralized channels or decentralized channels when both manufacturers and retailers can recognize customers, customer recognition reduces (increases)

Model-based market segmentation analyses often involve an ordinal dependent variable as ordinal responses are frequently collected in marketing research. In the Bayesian segmentation literature, there are models for an interval- or ratio-scaled dependent variable but there is not any general model for an ordinal dependent variable. In this manuscript, the authors propose a new Bayesian procedure to

Online retailers provide social selling cues, such as “39 customers bought this product” or “156 customers viewed our product per hour”, to encourage sales. Revealing the numbers bought has been shown to increase purchase intentions, but what remains unexplored are the ramifications of posting the number of brand-related views or revealing both numbers bought and viewed so customers can determine the

In this paper, we examine whether the format of service lines affects customers’ satisfaction with their queuing experience. Using a goal-theoretic approach, and data from a series of experimental studies, we show that the duration of the wait moderates the psychological tradeoff between the initial queue length and its rate of movement, such that customers prefer a single line format for shorter waits

In this research, we examine the effect of joint versus separate visual presentation on consumers’ product evaluation. Counter to prior research on hedonic editing and unpacking, which suggests that separate presentation or unpacking produces greater utility, we propose and demonstrate in this paper that joint visual presentation can increase product evaluation. This pattern of effects occurs because

A basic aim of marketing research is to predict consumers’ preferences and the success of marketing campaigns at the population-level. However, traditional marketing tools have various limitations, calling for novel measures to improve predictive power. In this study, we use multiple types of measures extracted from electroencephalography (EEG) recordings and machine learning (ML) algorithms to improve

Consumers frequently make choices for family members they take care of or from whom they receive care (e.g., their children or partner), yet marketing research has given little attention to how these other-oriented choices might impact the chooser’s self-indulgence. In this research we consider familial caregiving relationships as a relevant and ubiquitous context of other-oriented choices and identify

We propose a new spatial modeling approach to calibrate the potential impact of spatial dependency and heterogeneity on the underlying drivers of customer service and/or satisfaction measurement. The newly proposed procedure identifies regionally varying coefficients, provides more flexible fitting, improves calibration fit and predictive validation, and can potentially result in augmented managerial

Retailers and brands such as IKEA, Home Depot, and Build-a-Bear encourage consumers to ‘make’ their products rather than be passive recipients. While a growing literature explores ‘why’ consumers purchase self-made products, it is less understood ‘how’ marketers can develop effective advertising and marketing communications to promote such products. Building on the functionalist framework of emotion