Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science最新文献

Contracting is a cornerstone of productive interorganizational exchange; and while much research has been conducted about how contracts impact exchange consequences (e.g., transaction costs, performance), there is less understanding of how contracts shape the mediating behaviors and exchange processes that lead to those consequences. We demonstrate how flexible and vigilant exchange processes mediate promotion and prevention frames in building expectations of relationship continuity. We further identify interpretive uncertainty—a perceptual misalignment between the exchange parties—as a key moderator weakening flexible exchange processes’ impact on continuity expectations. These insights are empirically verified in samples involving 661 managers and executives across a wide range of industry contexts. Our results provide key theoretical and managerial implications.

Corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) refers to violations of the social contract between corporations and society. Existing literature documents its tendency to evoke negative consumer responses toward the firm involved, including unethical consumer behaviors. However, limited research attention deals with its potential impacts on prosocial consumer behavior. With six studies, the current research reveals that when consumers perceive harm due to CSI, they engage in more prosocial behavior due to the arousal of their anger. This effect is weaker among consumers who find the focal CSI issue more personally relevant but stronger among consumers with strong self-efficacy for promoting justice. Perceptions of CSI harm increase with the degree of control that the focal firm has over the CSI. This research thus establishes an effect of CSI harm on prosocial consumer behaviors, through the emotional mechanism of anger; it further shows that consumers seek to restore justice by engaging in prosocial behaviors.

In response to increased avoidance of traditional banner advertising, publishers have turned to a subtler form of display advertising called native advertising. Unlike traditional banner ads, native ads are intentionally designed to be cohesive with editorial content and assimilated into the design of the publisher’s website. We examine the performance of native advertising placements across three studies. In Study 1, we use a large dataset from a native advertising platform to examine the interplay of ad placement and ad content. We find that clicks are higher when ads are (1) delivered in-feed and (2) contain lower levels of selling intent, highlighting the interplay between the ad content and delivery. Study 2 confirms that in-feed placements experience higher clicks, but they also result in more bounces relative to in-ad placements. As a result, their effect on net visits is similar to in-ad placements at a higher cost. To further understand this phenomenon, we conducted a lab study (Study 3), which shows that when consumers are redirected to an advertiser’s site from an in-feed (versus in-ad) placement they experience higher annoyance and, ultimately, higher bounce intentions and reduced advertiser purchase intentions.

We present a bottom-up marketing approach as a pathway to addressing the grand challenge of poverty and inequality for the marketing discipline. We derive this approach from the research stream on radically different contexts of subsistence marketplaces. Research on subsistence marketplaces has typically explored micro-level phenomena but also traversed upward and explained aggregate phenomena at higher levels. We present a conceptual framework to encapsulate general and granular elements of the bottom-up marketing approach. Study 1 demonstrates general elements of the framework through a retrospective examination of the global diffusion of a marketplace literacy program. Study 2 demonstrates the more granular elements of the framework through a qualitative analysis of five case studies of social enterprise start-ups. Though presenting a complementary counter-perspective to conventional thinking, we embed the process of interweaving the bottom-up with the macro level to present an actionable approach. We conclude with insights for marketing research and practice.

Even as artificial agents (AAs) become more prevalent in service encounters, customers continue to express generally unfavorable views of their creativity, which can lead to negative service evaluations. Drawing on anthropomorphism and group stereotyping literature, the authors propose a trait transference effect from human employees to AAs in dyadic service teams. The results of five studies confirm that an anthropomorphized (vs. nonanthropomorphized) AA paired with a creative employee boosts service evaluations, both attitudinal and behavioral. Anthropomorphism induces greater perceived entitativity of the AA–employee dyad, prompting customers to transfer the creativity exhibited by the employee to the AA and perceive the AA as more creative. This transference effect is attenuated when the temporal stability of the dyad is low, customers’ lay beliefs about group entitativity are challenged, or customers have utilitarian consumption goals. These results contribute novel insights about AAs in service teams, with compelling practical implications.

Abstract

Despite heightened interest in brand transgressions among academics and practitioners, the literature remains silent about the influence of a brand’s origin on consumer responses to brand misconduct. This leaves managers unaware of how to adapt post-transgression recovery strategies at home and abroad. Contrary to the in-group country bias literature, we theorize an “origin-backfire” effect: consumers forgive domestic brand transgressions less. Analyzing experimental, social media, and secondary-longitudinal data, we find that consumers treat domestic brand transgressors as home-country traitors deserving punishment. Social identity threats mediate this effect and consumer ethnocentrism attenuates it. Transgressions’ damage on brand reputation and value is larger and takes longer to recover from in domestic markets. Managers can alleviate post-transgression backlash through communication framing that construes the transgression as a response to intergroup threats (in foreign markets) and through collective compensation strategies (in domestic markets). The findings reveal cross-national variability in transgressions’ experience, impact, and recovery and inform post-transgression repair strategies.

Journey research has primarily analyzed agentic, solo travelers making rational single-purchase decisions. In contrast, we examine a journey where consumers and their traveling companions are vulnerable and must navigate an unfamiliar service system. We explore how vulnerability shapes consumer journeys, how service and system factors impact vulnerability, and how traveling companions influence agency and vulnerability. Using data from an extensive study into end-of-life care, our results reveal novel insights into the role of consumer vulnerability throughout a journey. We show how the ebb and flow of consumer vulnerability shapes the journey, and how the journey shapes vulnerability. Traveling companions, themselves vulnerable, play a major role in influencing vulnerability and the journey itself. We offer managerial implications for organizations whose consumers are in vulnerable situations.

The current study details how marketing campaigns featuring event-typical ads adapted to sporting events (e.g., a car ad that displays its brand logo on an Olympic podium) affect brand attitudes and incentive-aligned brand choice in more positive ways than proven advertising strategies such as product category consistency. Presenting four field and lab experiments across a total of 3 events and 32 ads, we show that these effects are driven by the combination of 3 mechanisms: event-typical ads’ capacity to trigger a sufficient feeling of knowing what the ad is about, provoke curiosity, and transfer attributes from the event to the brand, even with very short ad exposures. Advertisers, brand managers, or event organizers can thus exploit the creative potential around sporting events by using event-typical ads. Furthermore, when these stakeholders know the most typical elements of an event, they can either adapt their marketing activities or register them to avoid ambush marketing (i.e., advertisers willing to associate their brand with the event in the absence of any legitimate link with it).

A key advantage that brick-and-mortar retailers have over online retailers is their salespeople, who can adaptively interact with customers on a one-on-one basis. When starting an interaction with a customer, a retail salesperson generally first aims to determine their shopping goal (Hall et al., Journal of Marketing, 79(3), 91–109, 2015), often with questions such as, “How can I help you today?” Yet, little is known in the literature or in practice about how salespeople should adapt their sales approach based on customers’ shopping goals. This is unfortunate, because customers clearly want better help from salespeople, and the potential gains of doing so are substantial (Accenture, 2021; Hochstein et al., Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 47(1), 118–137, 2019). To address this limitation, this research focuses on the practice of adaptive selling in retail settings, in which salespeople adapt their tactics on the basis of customers’ shopping goals. Using information processing theory, we propose that matching sales influence tactics (SITs) to two aspects of customers’ shopping goals, namely goal specificity and product type (utilitarian vs. hedonic), improves purchase outcomes. Across a series of field and lab experiments, we demonstrate that purchase behavior and purchase intention are higher when salespeople use informational (emotional) SITs with customers who have a high (low) shopping goal specificity level, which we term the match strategy. The match strategy has a direct positive effect on purchase outcomes and an effect mediated by processing fluency on purchase outcomes, with product type serving as a moderator. This research concludes with specific, actionable recommendations for retail salespeople and managers.

Some charitable communications employ deprived beneficiary (DB) appeals (showcasing the distressing circumstances of suffering victims), while others feature satiated beneficiary (SB) appeals (depicting the improved state of victims after receiving help). We propose and demonstrate that the relative efficacy of these appeals depends on the perspective viewers are prompted to take. Across three incentive-compatible experiments, we demonstrate that while DB appeals are more effective in increasing donation behavior when an ad evokes a beneficiary-perspective (i.e., asking viewers to imagine how a beneficiary feels), SB appeals are more effective when an ad evokes a self-perspective (i.e., asking viewers to imagine how they themselves would feel if they were in the beneficiary’s position). We also provide evidence for the affect-based mechanism theorized to underlie this basic interaction, and proffer a managerially actionable, ad copy-based moderator.