Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science最新文献

This study offers a comprehensive view of the network centrality–firm performance relationship through a meta-analysis. Drawing on a data set of 1,699 effect sizes retrieved from 147 studies published during 2000–2022, the authors establish a positive association between degree, closeness, betweenness, and eigenvector measures of centrality with firm performance on average. Nevertheless, these measures show significant differences in their effectiveness across various contexts. While the associations of degree, closeness, and betweenness centralities with firm performance have diminished over time, the relationship between eigenvector centrality and performance has strengthened. Moreover, the linkage between degree centrality and overall performance is more pronounced in customer-oriented and larger markets, whereas closeness centrality demonstrates a stronger relationship with overall performance in larger markets. Also, social trust amplifies the relationships of degree, closeness, and betweenness centralities with overall performance. Furthermore, the centrality–performance linkage and the moderating effects of the contingency factors depend at least partially on the type of network (i.e., board interlock vs. alliance vs. supplier–customer) and the measure of firm performance used (i.e., innovation vs. financial outcomes). Incorporating these factors into social network analyses helps managers refine their networking strategies and enables scholars to improve the generalizability of their findings.

Despite efforts by business schools, journals, and researchers to broaden the reach of marketing research beyond academia, the average article earns merely 0.6 press mentions and 3.5 social media citations. This study investigates how academic marketing research gains attention in news and social media and which factors mediate this process. Through an analysis of 15,900 marketing articles published from 2011 to 2019 and two experiments involving journalists and PR managers, we show that female co-authorship, involving a practitioner, and choosing a topic related to Better-Marketing-For-A-Better-World leads to substantially more news and social media mentions. Specifically, including at least one female author or a practitioner can boost press citations by 20% and 57%, respectively. In addition, we identify several other factors related to writing style, topic choice, and journal chararcteristics significantly impacting media attention.

Inspired by the goal of making marketplaces more inclusive, this research provides a deeper understanding of consumer vulnerability dynamics to develop strategies that help reduce these vulnerabilities. The proposed framework, first, conceptualizes vulnerability states as a function of the breadth and depth of consumers’ vulnerability; then, it sketches a set of vulnerability indicators that illustrate vulnerability breadth and depth. Second, because the breadth and depth of vulnerability vary over time, the framework goes beyond vulnerability states to identify distinct vulnerability-increasing and vulnerability-decreasing pathways, which describe how consumers move between vulnerability states. In a final step, the framework proposes that organizations can (and should) support consumers to mitigate vulnerability by helping consumers build resilience (e.g., via distinct types of resilience-fueling consumer agency). This framework offers novel conceptual insights into consumer vulnerability dynamics as well as resilience and provides avenues for future research on how organizations can better partner with consumers who experience vulnerabilities.

Governments enact various regulations to decrease the use of plastic. This raises the question of whether the effectiveness of such measures is restricted to the realm of the plastic products being regulated, or whether and how it ‘spills over’ on to the use of other plastic products. Leveraging scanner and survey data across 22 countries, the authors show that a ban or a charge on plastic bags strengthens descriptive social norms to avoid plastic, which in turn curbs the purchasing and use of plastic bottles, as well as of other plastics. Yet there is also a dark side to charging consumers for plastic bags, as a negative cueing effect can lower concerns about plastic pollution and make consumers less vigilant about their use of other plastic products. Taken together, this research shows that government regulation aimed at changing small common behaviors potentially has a much larger impact via spillover effects.

The now-mature sharing economy has not delivered on its original utopian promises. Instead of providing prosocial benefits for consumers and society, incumbent platforms dominate monopolistic markets. In this article, we study a novel business model in the sharing economy––the platform cooperative––to ask how can a responsible marketing strategy can be viable and effective for market challengers. We draw on a qualitative, ethnographic study of the lived experiences of consumers and managers in leading platform cooperatives Fairbnb and Drivers Cooperative, and find that while challengers cannot overhaul the system, they can engender change from the margins. We identify three dimensions of a change from the margins strategy in decentralizing the marketplace, shaping authentic narratives, and building institutional partnerships. We discuss implications of a responsible marketing strategy for market incumbents and challengers within the sharing economy and beyond, and for theorizing new frameworks in the marketing strategy literature.

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12 seeks to achieve sustainable food production and consumption, including reduced food loss and waste; SDG 2 proposes the goal of zero hunger. In pursuit of these goals, technology arguably has a central role, at every level of the food value chain. To establish this role, the authors identify and examine current technologies aimed at increasing food production and suitably redistributing unused food, as tactics to combat food loss and waste, with the shared end goal of reducing food insecurity. A proposed 2 × 2 typology illustrates how existing technologies can influence food production, distribution, and consumption, as well as influence the stakeholders in the food production–consumption chain. These insights also inform a research and development agenda pertaining to the need for technology applications that can increase food production and/or reduce food waste effectively enough to achieve the goal of zero hunger.

Product efficacy is an important driver of product evaluation and product usage. This research examines how marketers can improve perceived and actual product efficacy. Given the managerial ease of adjusting product design, we demonstrate that adding a sensory signal (e.g., tingling, cooling, fizzing) to a product that promises positive outcomes would improve product evaluations and actual product efficacy. In five studies (and two additional studies reported in the Web Appendix), we show that sensory signaling (vs. nonsignaling) products elicit actual product choice and improve product evaluations, repurchase likelihood, recommendation likelihood, as well as objective measures of product efficacy (such as consumer performance). This occurs because the sensory signals make consumers feel a greater transfer of benefits to the body during product usage. We further demonstrate that the effect holds even when persuasion knowledge is activated. Together, this research provides important insights on product designs that benefit not only marketers but also consumers.

Despite retailers’ interest in moving away from thin-model photography to embrace body-size diversity, online fashion shopping predominantly features thin models. While concerns about negative consequences for sales impede industry-wide changes, we demonstrate that consumers and retailers benefit from optimally portraying diverse bodies. Three studies unveil the “Dissimilarity-Risk Deterrence Effect,” wherein thin models dissuade consumers with larger clothing sizes from online purchasing due to perceived body-size dissimilarity and heightened fit-risk perception. Eight experiments demonstrate that models of consumers’ own size mitigate the effect, enhancing online purchase decisions, while controlling for mechanisms like positive affect, authenticity and social identification. The effect extends across various clothing items but attenuates when body size matters less to fit evaluation. Moreover, the effect is concealed by retailers’ risk-reducing strategies, such as measurement information and free product return policies. This research underscores the strategic significance of diverse product imaging to improve supply chain efficiency and consumer well-being.

Tackling grand challenges and making sustainable development a reality through sustainable consumption crucially depends upon both companies’ activities as well as individuals’ consumption choices. In opinion polls, many consumers claim to favor sustainable products over conventional ones. However, a large gap remains between their stated purchasing intentions and actual decisions, posing a challenge for companies in predicting product demand and strategically managing their product portfolios. In this study, we develop a conceptual framework to demonstrate how companies can encourage sustainable consumption behavior among their customers by involving them in their corporate sustainability (CS) activities. We introduce psychological ownership as the underlying mechanism explaining how customer involvement in CS activities translates into changes in their consumption choices. We further argue that the link between customer involvement and psychological ownership depends on the type of a company’s CS—that is, whether CS is embedded in or peripheral to the company’s core business. The results from three experiments, including one field experiment conducted in collaboration with a fashion retailer and involving real customer purchase decisions, support our theorizing. The findings reveal the power of customer involvement as a marketing tool in promoting sustainable consumption.

This work illustrates a case in which the implementation of automated digital screens in an apparel retail store led to unintended side effects involving decreased customer spending. Using an empirics-first approach, researchers have investigated this topic through the conducting of field experiments, intercept surveys, and online experiments involving both consumers and frontline employees (FLEs). In this research, the unintended outcomes of technology implementation are first revealed, and then the potential reasons and boundary conditions underlying those outcomes are explored. The findings indicate that while automated digital screens increase customer convenience, they can also restrict the ability of FLEs to perform extrarole behavior. This restriction results in a negative shopping experience and reduced spending, particularly in settings in which FLE interaction is critical. The research also reveals that reintroducing extrarole behavior in the presence of technology can offset this negative effect. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are then discussed, and future research directions are proposed.