Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science最新文献

Financial literacy programs aim to prevent consumer overspending by teaching and encouraging fiscally sound habits (purchase restraint, responsible credit use, savings). Unfortunately, trying not to spend is at odds with the emotions consumers experience in a tempting marketplace. The theory of trying considers attitudes and intentions, but not emotions, when trying to consume. To address this gap, we examine indebted consumers opting into formal financial literacy training explicitly designed for debt repayment and avoidance of future debt. Through indebted consumers’ diary reflections and interviews with clients and debt management counselors, we show that financial literacy’s emphasis on budgeting needs versus wants is not sufficient when consumers try not to spend. To reconcile budgets with actual purchasing behavior when faced with temptations in the marketplace, consumers often adopt a linguistic exercise of imaginatively bending and blending utilitarian and hedonic discourses to justify purchases by recategorizing wants as needs. Further, consumers trying not to spend experience negative emotions; how they regulate those emotions impacts their success in getting out of debt. While financial literacy courses only give consumers budget-setting tools, indebted consumers cannot be successful without tools for trying not to spend in the marketplace.

Extant research suggests that higher levels of customer and employee satisfaction signal a firm’s competitive advantage, resulting in greater firm value. This article advances the understanding of how firms can manage customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction to increase shareholder wealth in a new environment due to the emergence of social media and a new class of retail investors. Drawing from stakeholder theory and signaling theory, we argue that inconsistency in customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction can be informative to investors and lead to greater shareholder wealth in such a new environment. Our findings demonstrate that there is a negative joint effect of the two on shareholder wealth, such that unanticipated increases in employee satisfaction reduces shareholder wealth when customer satisfaction has also increased. Social media visibility and industry concentration are two key moderators that strengthen the negative joint effect. Our study provides important theoretical implications and valuable suggestions to managers to determine what their satisfaction indicators communicate in a new era where social media and the retail investor class have gained outsized importance.

The authors build on configuration theory to argue that the alignment of a customer-centric strategy and a customer-centric structure allows a firm to increase firm performance through new product portfolio innovativeness. They further contend that the influence of customer-centric strategy-structure alignment on new product portfolio innovativeness can be amplified by increasing the firm’s strategic resource emphasis toward R&D, relative to advertising. The model is tested using a 9-year panel dataset (2011–2019) involving 695 firm-year observations comprising 8,899 product launches across 91 firms. The findings indicate that new product portfolio innovativeness mediates the positive effect of customer-centric strategy-structure alignment on firm performance, and that the increase in strategic resource emphasis toward R&D amplifies the effect of customer-centric strategy-structure alignment on new product portfolio innovativeness. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

While pre-release consumer buzz may drive new product market performance, little is known about the importance of its distinct behavioral manifestations: communication, search, and participation. This paper not only studies how these three pre-release buzz behaviors affect market performance but also their dynamic interplay and how firms can drive pre-release buzz. Using movie data, we find self-enhancing and spillover effects of buzz throughout the pre-release period. For driving communication and search behaviors, firm social media posts are most effective, while movie trailers are most effective in evoking participatory behaviors. Furthermore, box office sales benefit the most from pre-release communication, followed by participation and search. These findings extend current knowledge by showing that while all buzz behaviors matter for driving market performance, communication plays a central role due to its powerful spillover effects on search and participation, and firms can effectively stimulate it through social media posts about the new product.

Today, firms face mounting challenges due to increasing international conflicts, wars, and economic sanctions. Our research, based on nine studies employing both experimental methods and secondary data, examines how firms’ response strategies in sanctioned countries affect consumer reactions (attitude toward the company and word of mouth). Drawing on signaling theory and the literature on economic sanctions, this research reveals that consumers respond more favorably to firms that adopt a full-suspension strategy as opposed to a scale-back strategy, which in turn elicits more positive reactions than a continuation strategy. Our findings also show that the perceived morality of the firm mediates this effect. Furthermore, the effect can be generalized from the Russo-Ukrainian War to other causes of economic sanctions, such as human rights issues and terrorism. Given the logic of perceived morality, factors such as response time (early vs. late), corporate donation (yes vs. no), product type (essential vs. nonessential), and announcement source (CEO vs. company) serve as boundary conditions for the effect. Overall, our research not only makes significant contributions to the literature on economic sanctions, crisis management, and signaling theory, but also provides clear guidance for global firms on employing appropriate response strategies during economic sanctions. 

Many manufacturers introduce an online direct channel to create brand value that could benefit both manufacturer and retailers. However, retailers often view direct channel entry as a threat. Research on horizontal entry suggests retailers protect their sales by adjusting their marketing mix, particularly assortment and price. However, the direct channel is a vertical entry by a partner that is now also a competitor. The challenge for retailers is how to adjust their marketing mix. We employ a value creation/value capture framework to hypothesize and test how retailers contend for their “piece of the pie.” We analyze a consumer electronics manufacturer’s direct channel entry. The average retailer decreases assortment and increases price but there is ample heterogeneity depending on retailer characteristics. For example, small “mom-and-pop” stores follow the average, while large multichannel specialists increase assortment and increase price less. Manufacturers must develop segmentation strategies to market new direct channels to retailers.

Organizations face a considerable challenge in determining the appropriate balance between inside and outside salespeople, largely due to the uncertain effects that a high dependence on inside salespeople has on firm performance. To address this challenge, we employ a multimethod research design, combining a qualitative theories-in-use approach with a quantitative analysis using panel data from 194 firms to examine the relationship between dependence on inside salespeople and firm performance. The results reveal that while higher dependence on inside salespeople increases the volume of interactions between salespeople and customers, thereby increasing firm performance, these interactions tend to be of lower quality, thereby decreasing firm performance. Notably, the net effect on firm performance is more likely to be positive when customer exchanges are less demanding and when managers can exert more control over inside salespeople. This study provides actionable macro-level theory on inside sales, addressing a critical gap in academic knowledge and managerial practice.

In today’s competitive markets, creating a distinctive brand identity is crucial yet challenging, especially for new entrants. Complex markets with conflicting institutional logics offer unique opportunities to create a distinctive and resonant brand identity. We introduce hybrid branding as a novel strategy that resolves market-level cultural contradictions to create such identities. Our qualitative analysis of lingerie brand Savage X Fenty identifies four mechanisms of hybrid branding—selective adopting, selective distancing, juxtaposing, and integrating—through which the brand resolved contradictions between the conflicting ‘bombshell’ and ‘body-positive’ logics structuring the lingerie market to create an identity centered on inclusive sexual empowerment. We also identify threats that hybrid brands face: perceived deviations from logics, amplification of contradictions, and hybridization failures. We contribute to theory by introducing hybrid branding as a means of navigating institutional complexity and by identifying market complexity as a source of novel meaning creation. We also offer insights on managing brand authenticity, legitimacy, and hybrid brands.

Over the past decade, video games have dramatically risen in popularity, and marketers have started recognizing the research opportunities video games provide. However, much of the current research in the gaming space focuses on the video game experiences of individual consumers, whereas other participants in the video game ecosystem are often ignored. In addition, research frequently uses traditional data collection and analysis techniques that do not adequately account for the unique features of the data generated within this ecosystem. In this article, using a framework based on service-dominant logic and the customer journey, we identify six distinct pillars embedded in the video game ecosystem and describe the types of data generated through interactions among them. We then present three challenges with data gathering and analysis that arise from the co-creation of value within the video game ecosystem. Finally, we outline adaptations marketers can make to address these challenges and present future research directions to help access and analyze data generated throughout the video game ecosystem.

This research contributes novel insights into consumer-brand relationships and pricing literature by establishing the negative impact of product anthropomorphism on buyers’ purchase intentions and purchase prices for used products. Drawing on prior research on relationship-dissolution stigma (a pervasive stereotype toward people with dissolved relationships), we show that buyers apply stigma attributions to anthropomorphized used products. This stigma attribution, in turn, decreases consumers’ purchase intentions compared to their nonanthropomorphized counterparts. We establish this negative effect through the use of AI deep learning neural networks that classify products as anthropomorphized or not and five experiments. We further uncover several important boundary conditions. First, we show that the negative effect is mitigated when a seller describes a high level of attachment toward a used product. Second, our research establishes that the negative effect of product anthropomorphism reverses when consumers learn of external reasons for selling a used product. Finally, we provide significant managerial implications by demonstrating that a used product labeling strategy as certified pre-owned (vs. merely used) attenuates the negative effect of product anthropomorphism on the valuation of used products.