There is an ongoing debate about the role of market share and market share–based competition in shaping corporate behavior and performance. This study advances the discussion by analyzing how a firm’s specific competitive situation drives corporate misconduct and how such misconduct affects future market share. Based on a theory-in-use approach, the authors propose the Theory of Market Share–Based Competitive Pressure (TMCP) and introduce four new market share–based constructs that reflect different dimensions of competitive pressure. Using a global sample of 2,145 firms across 254 industries over 11 years, they find that firms that are closer to market leadership and more closely followed by competitors are more prone to misconduct. The results demonstrate that misconduct systematically weakens the very market positions that created the pressure in the first place, with particularly strong penalties for environmental and governance–related misconduct incidents. Importantly, organizational characteristics such as compensation design, board composition, and marketing capabilities condition the extent to which competition translates into corporate misconduct. Together, these findings demonstrate that while misconduct may appear as a shortcut to defend competitive positions, it ultimately undermines them, and there are ways to reduce incentives for misconduct in the first place.
Abstract Managers often struggle to make acquisition processes engaging. While the dominant approach to reducing search costs has been to streamline the acquisition process, seven preregistered studies plus one supplemental study (N = 3,306) reveal an alternative pathway: Prompting consumers to view purchasing as “collecting” by positioning products as additions to their own collections, rather than as ad hoc purchases, improves consumers’ acquisition experience and increases product desirability. The authors demonstrate that activating such a collecting mindset shifts consumers’ psychological focus of the shopping process from securing a standalone product to instead investing in advancing their collection, thereby making them derive positive experience utility from the process, and in turn, elevating the desirability of the sought products. This research also offers practical guidance on how marketers can maximize the effectiveness of activating a collecting mindset: (i) encouraging active engagement in search, (ii) ensuring that search yields products that meaningfully advance the collection, and (iii) aligning the collection with an identity consumers value, as the effect may otherwise attenuate or reverse. These findings advance theory on everyday collecting and consumer search, and show how retailers and brands can strategically turn purchasing into a more positive acquisition experience that enhances product desirability.
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.
