An idea is more than a simple collection of words or ingredients that make up the idea. What makes an idea original or appealing is how these elements are combined in the context in which they appear. This research leverages representation learning methods, specifically word embeddings, to measure internal coherence among the components of a creative idea and capture the relationship between its coherence and idea evaluation or success. Using a large-scale online recipe dataset with over 57,000 recipes, as well as an ideation dataset of 1,057 ideas, the authors investigate how the fit among idea components relates to downstream measures such as popularity and evaluation. The results consistently show that internal coherence of an idea promotes its popularity, trial, and posttrial evaluation. Counter to prior research on creativity, which suggests that creativity is mostly associated with positive outcomes, the study finds that ideas with unique ingredients have lower popularity or trial, but higher ratings given trial in the context of food recipes. Based on these findings, the authors develop a generative recipe tool that suggests recipe improvements by adding, removing, or substituting ingredients ( http://recipecreativity.com/ ).
An ongoing, inconclusive debate in strategic marketing research centers on the relative importance of brand management versus customer management—two key dimensions of marketing strategy. However, empirical evidence on how firms prioritize these two dimensions, how their strategic emphasis shifts over time, and how these dimensions shape financial performance remains limited. Using longitudinal data collected from automated text analysis of +95,000 earnings conference call transcripts involving +1,800 firms over 22 years, complemented by manual coding and secondary data, the authors show that brand and customer management foci are uncorrelated, indicating neither a systematic trade-off nor a systematic complementarity between the two strategic foci. Consistent patterns emerge across industries and business types. Importantly, the two strategic foci have distinct effects on revenue- and cost-related performance outcomes. Strikingly, a dual emphasis on both brands and customers is less attractive than focusing on either one. Moderating environmental factors influence the effectiveness of each strategic focus.
The rapid growth of digital shopping channels has led many traditional retailers to invest in e-commerce websites and mobile apps. While prior research shows that multichannel customers are more valuable, it overlooks how the motive for adopting a new channel shapes post-adoption behavior. Using transaction-level data from a major Brazilian pet supplies retailer, we study offline-only consumers who adopt online shopping through four pathways: organic adoption, the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Friday promotions, and a loyalty program. Using consumer-level panel data and difference-in-differences estimates, we examine how these pathways are associated with post-adoption spending, profitability, and channel usage. We find that all adopters spend more than comparable offline-only consumers, but their post-adoption behavior differs systematically by adoption pathway. Promotion-driven adopters exhibit patterns consistent with forward buying and lower subsequent profitability, whereas COVID adopters display stronger offline persistence consistent with consumer inertia and habit persistence. These findings suggest that managers may benefit from accounting for adoption-pathway heterogeneity when forecasting customer lifetime value and assessing the breakeven and ROI of promotions designed to induce online adoption.
This research investigates how the situational salience of local versus global identity shapes consumers’ creative performance. One field study, six controlled experiments, secondary data from a large crowdsourcing platform, and interviews with managers demonstrate that consumers with a situationally accessible local identity generate more creative outputs than those with a salient global identity. Group-based pride is the key mechanism underlying this effect. Consistent with the group-based pride account, externally enhancing group-based pride increases creativity among consumers with a salient global identity, while externally reducing group-based pride decreases creativity among consumers with a salient local identity. By identifying local–global identity as a novel antecedent of consumer creativity, this research contributes to the literature on creativity and identity salience and highlights group-based pride as a distinctive pathway linking identity salience to creativity. These findings also suggest that contextual cues that activate local versus global identity may serve as a useful managerial tool for enhancing consumer creativity in ideation, crowdsourcing, and co-creation contexts.
Brands that engage in cultural difference marketing—the use of elements from another culture to create novelty, distinction, and value—face increasing public scrutiny over the issue of potential cultural appropriation. Yet the question of how brands can ethically address this issue while continuing to pursue the benefits of cultural difference marketing remains undertheorized, leaving many brands to respond reactively. Drawing on foundational social theory and an extended qualitative study of the Korean pop (K-pop) industry, this work synthesizes key ethical concerns about cultural appropriation. It identifies three distinct facets of cultural appropriation harm that brands may inflict when using diverse cultural elements: disconnection (unfair attribution), distortion (unfair representation), and dispossession (unfair distribution of benefits). It further identifies three brand strategies that can mitigate such harm in different ways—correcting (recognizing harm through expressions of accountability), connecting (preventing harm by learning and collaborating with source cultures), and championing (resisting the structural foundations of harm through initiatives that combat marketplace inequality). Together, these findings comprise a novel framework for the ethical marketing of cultural difference. This framework disambiguates when and how cultural difference marketing may lead to cultural appropriation and theorizes the emerging role of brands as proactive mitigators of cultural appropriation harm.
How do consumers form preferences when they cannot rely on established quality standards? This question is examined in the context of nonfungible token (NFT) art markets, where buyers lack evaluative anchors such as provenance, conventional aesthetic criteria, or institutional endorsement. This article demonstrates that view counts, a social cue that reflects others’ attention, are one key attribute. Across a 150-day observational dataset (n = 1,459,979), a preregistered 20-wave panel study, and six experiments, the researchers documented that artworks that attract early views accumulate disproportionately greater attention over time, while other artworks fall further behind. This “snowballing” effect is driven by investment motives. When consumers approach markets with the motive to invest rather than collect, they rely on others’ attention as a proxy for market value. Two structural features of the NFT market amplify this reliance: high price volatility and purely digital ownership, both of which heighten the salience of investment outcomes. By attenuating volatility or introducing tangible ownership cues, this study diminished this reliance on social signals. These findings extend theory on social influence and digital consumption, demonstrating that in the absence of objective quality standards, social cues shift from supplementary information to the primary basis for preference formation.
Prior research on marketing principles focuses mainly on the benefits of using a relatively small set of high-level principles. However, based on 38 in-depth interviews with marketing professionals across firms and industries, the authors find that principles are far more widespread and hierarchically layered. Informed by these insights, the present research complements prior research by introducing the ABC (articulating, bridging, calibrating) framework of marketing principles: a principles-based system of marketing alignment and adaptation based on the processes of articulating, bridging, and calibrating principles throughout an organization. Articulating highlights the trade-offs of varying a principle's specificity. Less specific principles offer decision-making flexibility that fosters adaptation but increases misalignment costs (i.e., increased marketing resource misallocation, marketer mental burden, and marketing sprawl). More specific principles offer decision-making clarity that fosters alignment but increases maladaptation costs (i.e., increased marketing staleness, reduced marketer professional development, and increased opportunity costs). To address these tensions, this research identifies two key cost-mitigation processes: bridging, which involves translating less specific principles into more contextualized guidance, and calibrating, which involves evaluating and refining more specific principles to ensure they fit with changing conditions. Collectively, these insights underscore a new prescriptive framework for executing the ABC framework to achieve aligned and adaptive marketing strategy execution.
Social media is essential to how brands are built and managed, especially for person brands. This research investigates how political person brands’ internal linguistic consistency shapes social media engagement. Specifically, the authors examine linguistic consistency relative to a candidate’s own prior social media posts (i.e., internal linguistic consistency). Using social media data from the 2020 U.S. presidential election and adopting an empirics-first approach, the authors find that three distinct constructs comprise internal linguistic consistency of person brands: topic (consistency in subject matter or themes), psychological (consistency in psychological states), and semantic (consistency in information and meaning), revealing that each dimension has its own best strategy: (1) topic inconsistency, (2) psychological consistency, (3) semantic inconsistency. The authors find that these effects are moderated by sudden changes in word of mouth, such as a sudden spike in online conversation about a political opponent, and by whether the election is a primary or a general election, such that moderate semantic consistency is most effective during the general election. The findings demonstrate the importance of simultaneously considering multiple dimensions of internal linguistic consistency in person brand strategies.
Price increases can elicit a range of negative customer responses, from dissatisfaction to complaints, exits, and even boycotts. Practicing managers and academics agree that firms must justify their price increases, and consider three justification types—cost, market, and quality—as the primary means to do so. Yet, the comparative effectiveness of these justifications in reducing customer attrition remains unknown. The authors collaborated with a multi-site Canadian storage provider to design and implement three experiments. Study 1 is a randomized field experiment involving 10 cohorts of 1,626 actual customers, demonstrating the effects of cost, market, and quality justifications on customer attrition, and variations in these effects across levels of justification concreteness, and price increase percentage and dollar amount. In marked contrast to prior practitioner recommendations and academic research, market justification is found to result in the lowest customer attrition. The authors use heterogeneity in the effects of the justifications to demonstrate that customers’ switching costs perceptions explain this finding. Studies 2 and 3 are online scenario experiments that further examine how these justifications affect customers’ switching costs and fairness perceptions. Together, these studies provide important insights to firms seeking to “cushion the blow” of price increases.
As many B2B companies are transforming their sales processes by adding online channels to the sales force, it is critical to better understand how salespeople respond, adapt, and manage relationships after customers adopt them. Leveraging data from a large B2B firm, the authors investigate how customers’ integration of an online channel affects salesperson–customer relationships. The results show that customer online channel integration leads to a 7% increase in quarterly customer gross margins, with 28% of a customer's sales volume shifting online, but only a 9% reduction in face-to-face sales transaction meetings relative to the number of meetings before the online channel integration. Salespeople continue to hold a substantial number of face-to-face meetings to handle transactions and engage in other activities with customers that integrate the online channel more than would be expected, given the proportion of sales volume that those customers shift online. Relatedly, customer integration of the online channel enhances the quality of salesperson–customer interaction within those relationships, reducing products sold at a loss and increasing the breadth of product categories sold. This research also identifies important contingency factors regarding online channel integration, including that its effectiveness when use is highly synchronized with face-to-face sales transaction meetings can lead to an even greater increase in customer gross margins of about 16%.
Coupons have the potential to double, triple, or even quadruple sales (Neslin 2002). However, coupon redemption rates remain abysmally low, which causes inefficiencies in marketing, as coupons are sent to a large segment with only a small fraction responding. Hence, marketers are continuously trying to identify consumer segments that are more or less likely to respond to couponing efforts, as this knowledge allows marketers to fine-tune the segments to whom coupons are directed. Eight studies utilizing two field studies, a scanner panel dataset, and a series of experiments (and ten more studies in web appendix D) suggest that consumers higher in power distance belief are less likely to use coupons because they tend to be more skeptical about businesses’ motives. The authors also test several boundary conditions. This research provides managers with several strategies to enhance coupon use, including (a) targeting cultural segments lower in power distance belief, (b) activating low power distance belief via situational cues, (c) reducing skepticism towards businesses’ motives, and (d) offering price-matching guarantees.
Protecting trade secrets is important for firms and policymakers because they are critical assets for firm performance and valuation. Extant research, however, seldom examines whether increases in trade secret protection have an impact on firms’ marketing actions to leverage their trade secrets, even though trade secret protection has limited value if firms cannot leverage them. Drawing on the attention-based view of the firm, this study proposes that stronger protection of trade secrets is likely to lead to higher managerial attention to leveraging trade secrets, resulting in higher advertising spending. The study tests this proposition by exploiting the staggered recognition of the inevitable disclosure doctrine (IDD) by U.S. state courts, a legal development that protects trade secrets by restricting employee movement to rival firms. The results show that firms headquartered in states that recognize IDD significantly increase their advertising spending. Consistent with the proposed contingency framework, the results also show that the positive effect of IDD recognition on advertising spending is weaker for firms with CEO duality but stronger for younger firms and firms in industries with higher peer advertising spending. Post hoc analyses show that increases in advertising spending following IDD recognition are associated with higher firm sales.
People with disabilities are among the most stigmatized groups in society, and the most underrepresented in advertising. The authors investigate advertising practices by which brands can include people with disabilities in ways that go beyond mere visibility. Across nine preregistered studies involving both hedonic and functional goods and services, the authors show a robust positive effect of featuring people with disabilities in advertisements on consumers’ attitudes toward the ad, brand, and product. This “disability inclusion effect” generalizes broadly across products, endorsers (e.g., customers, models), disabilities (both visible and invisible), and consumer segments (people with and without disabilities). It arises because the brand demonstrates its support for the societal integration of people with disabilities. Accordingly, the effect arises whether the brand includes people with disabilities voluntarily or to comply with industry regulation, because both actions can produce the same perceived outcome: meaningful, concrete support of people with disabilities. However, the effect disappears when a brand's portrayal emphasizes vulnerability or impairment rather than agency and social inclusion, or the brand conspicuously highlights the model's disability in the ad itself in a tokenizing manner. Collectively, these studies reveal how managers can support people with disabilities and earn consumers’ patronage without risking their backlash.
Brand manufacturers, big and small, regularly prune brand portfolios by deleting brands from categories. Competing brands try to fill the void, including sister brands owned by the same manufacturer, rival national brands, and private labels. This research examines which competing brands benefit from brand deletions, how these gains depend on brand- and category-level characteristics, and how brands adjust their marketing mix following brand deletions. A difference-in-differences analysis of 1,046 national brand deletions over 10 years across 201 US markets shows that deletions benefit private label revenue the most, followed by sister brands, and rival national brands the least, while category revenue does not fully recover. Competing brands gain more revenue when they have greater price similarity with the deleted brand, when the deleted brand’s pre-deletion market share is higher, and when the category is less concentrated. Post-deletion gains are strongly shaped by marketing mix responses, especially through distribution increases and, for sister brands, longer line length. However, regular price increases constrain gains, as does the limited use of relatively effective price promotions, and the extensive use of relatively ineffective feature advertising. On average, manufacturers retain 38% of deleted brands’ revenues through sister brands, highlighting risks of brand pruning.
Dual market navigation refers to consumers’ ongoing engagement across structurally distinct and institutionally separate markets. While prior research has focused on how consumers use service cues to evaluate individual service providers or products, little is known about how consumers use these cues across structurally distinct markets, despite their growing prevalence. We address this gap by extending cue utilization theory to the market level, shifting attention from firm-led, market-expansion strategies to consumer-led, dual-market strategies. Drawing on qualitative data from insured consumers living and routinely shopping for healthcare along the U.S.-Mexico border, we develop the concept of strategic cue auditing: the sensemaking process consumers use to evaluate intrinsic and/or extrinsic cue(s) and make comparative assessments of market-level quality cues across different contexts. We identify three cue auditing strategies (reactive, cultural-relational, and cross-comparative) that reveal how consumers make sense of competing market logics when judging service and product quality. These strategies shape healthcare choices and reveal what we conceptualize as cue misfires and misalignments. By theorizing cue utilization as structurally contingent and market-level, this research advances understanding of dual-market navigation beyond healthcare and offers implications for marketers and policymakers operating in contexts including cross-border, online-offline, and formal-informal markets.
Although mental health conditions have worsened globally, many consumers remain insufficiently engaged in mental healthcare. Intuitively, practitioners can address this challenge by applying strategies that research has shown to promote physical healthcare. However, this approach might not be optimal because the decision-making process for seeking mental healthcare differs significantly from that for seeking physical healthcare. This research examines how consumers’ relative preference for ingroup (i.e., consumers’ own groups) versus outgroup healthcare providers varies when seeking healthcare for mental versus physical illness. Using a large-scale dataset comprising approximately 25 million medical consultations and 11 randomized controlled experiments (10 reported in the article and 1 reported in Web Appendix A), the current research consistently found that when seeking healthcare for mental (vs. physical) illness, consumers placed greater importance on healthcare provider empathy. This resulted in a stronger preference for ingroup over outgroup healthcare providers. The effect of illness type on healthcare provider preference was reduced when consumers were presented with ratings that demonstrated healthcare provider empathy; the main effect was attenuated among consumers with higher global identity. This research contributes to the literature on mental health, healthcare decision-making, empathy, and accessible healthcare. It offers practical implications for marketers, healthcare professionals, and policymakers for promoting mental healthcare and mitigating health disparities.
Major video streaming distributors are investing heavily in producing first-party (original) content, yet the economic viability of this high-cost strategy remains a subject of intense managerial debate. This paper develops an analytical model to investigate the optimal first-party content production strategy for asymmetric competing distributors. The analysis shows that two critical factors, existing content overlap and market price rigidity, affect their optimal strategies. In markets with high price rigidity, where subscription prices remain constant, increased existing content overlap may give distributors stronger incentives to invest in original content production. The equilibrium outcome can be both, only one, or neither producing first-party content. Conversely, in markets characterized by low price rigidity, where distributors can adjust subscription prices flexibly, high existing content overlap weakens their content production incentives. Importantly, compared to constant pricing, when prices are optimally adjusted, first-party and third-party content transition from substitutes to complements, and a win-win-win outcome can occur for distributors, third-party producer, and consumers. These findings challenge conventional wisdom regarding content competition and provide a strategic framework for managers to optimize content production investments based on their resource asymmetry and prevailing market pricing dynamics.
Consumers’ portion size choices are important, as they can influence how much food is eaten and wasted. While previous research has focused on self-selected portion sizes, this research examines portion size choices for others. The authors demonstrate that consumers choose larger portion sizes for others than for themselves, across both healthy and unhealthy foods, and for a wide range of different others. Choosing larger portion sizes for others is problematic, as the authors show that it can contribute to increased food waste. Both process-consistent moderation and mediation show that one driver of choosing larger portion sizes for others is consumers’ desire to view themselves as being caring. Alternative accounts (e.g., predicting that others want to eat more than the self, greater consumption amount uncertainty for others than the self) are addressed. Finally, a process-consistent intervention that reframes the meaning of being caring as mitigating the burden of unwanted leftovers for others decreases portion size choices for others. Altogether, this research offers theoretical contributions to the literatures on food decision-making and choices for others and offers practical contributions by identifying a novel contributor to food waste in social contexts and thus a potential target for interventions aimed at mitigating food waste.
The role of marketers in sustaining traditions remains ambiguous. From weddings to funerals, commercial providers supply key resources to help consumers perform traditional practices. But marketization can also slide into crass commodification. However, past research remains unclear on how marketers can create consumer value from tradition. Our study resolves these ambiguities through an ethnographic study of zuò yuèzi, a Chinese postpartum confinement custom that continues to thrive in Chinese communities yet increasingly conflicts with contemporary ideals of autonomy, health, and scientific expertise. In the Asian cities where we conducted fieldwork (Singapore, Taipei, and Kuala Lumpur), a booming industry of confinement centers has emerged in response to these tensions. Drawing on practice theory, we show that the effectiveness of these commercial interventions depends on adapting key elements of tradition while preserving its teleoaffective structure: the moral purposes and affective orientations that define what a traditional practice is for and how it should feel. Our primary contribution is to advance a more constructive theorization of marketization that highlights the possibilities for value creation in the tradition domain.
