Knowledge that Transforms

The author describes his career in marketing research, which involves a series of nonacademic positions. He argues that the commercial market research environment provides challenges that motivate methodological innovation, and he discusses the development of adaptive conjoint analysis in response to client problems. He suggests that young people should keep their options open, avoid early specialization, and follow their interests.

This article is a response to Richard Johnson's (2005) memoir. It notes some of the important contributions that Johnson has made to marketing research and reflects on his unique personal and professional characteristics.

The author believes that marketing would be strengthened by closer relationships between academics and practitioners. He argues that the commercial market research environment can be stimulating for methodological development, and he suggests that everyone would benefit if academics and practitioners had experience in both environments.

In the usual multinomial choice model, consumers choose to use “actual value” information; that is, utilities are continuous functions of product attributes (e.g., choices depend on actual magnitudes of price differences). The authors propose an alternative model in which consumers use only “ordered value” information; that is, utilities are functions only of the relative orderings of the attributes' values across alternatives (e.g., choices depend only on the price ordering and not on actual prices). The ordered value model is attractive because it fits well with psychological evidence that consumers often favor decision mechanisms that are cognitively less demanding. Using a supermarket shopper panel data set, the authors evaluate four models in which (1) all consumers use actual values; (2) all consumers use ordered values; (3) some consumers use actual values all the time, and some consumers use ordered values all the time; and (4) all consumers use both actual values and ordered values but with different propensities. In the analysis, the ordered value model finds stronger support than the actual value model: Model 1 outperforms Model 2; in the two hybrid choice models (Models 3 and 4), ordered value processing is more prevalent than actual value processing. These results suggest that consumers in some product categories engage more heavily in ordered value processing than in actual value processing.

Richard Johnson has had a remarkable career in an era that integrated the use of computers and mathematical models into marketing research. This article summarizes his contributions in terms of theoretical advances, practical solutions, and the development of a culture that links the academic and practitioner worlds. The author speculates on the personality traits that made Johnson so successful and ways that his critical roles can be fulfilled by others in the future.

This research examines the dynamic process of inference updating. The authors present a framework that delineates two mechanisms that guide the updating of personality trait inferences about brands. The results of three experiments show that chronics (those for whom the trait is accessible) update their initial inferences on the basis of the trait implications of new information. Notably, nonchronics (those for whom the trait is not accessible) also update their initial inferences, but they do so on the basis of the evaluative implications of new information. The framework adds to the inference-making literature by uncovering two distinct paths of inference updating and by emphasizing the moderating role of trait accessibility. The findings have direct implications for marketers attempting to understand the construction of brand personality, and they emphasize the constantly evolving nature of brand perceptions and the notion that both the consumer and the marketer have important roles to play in this process.

Marketing models are often intended to guide managers to make decisions. In this rejoinder, the author reviews three questions that must be addressed before a model can be established as useful for policy analysis.

Three studies examine the influence of brand-elicited affect on consumers' evaluations of brand extensions. When a brand spontaneously elicits affective reactions, consumers appear to form an initial impression of the brand's new extension based on these reactions. The affect that they experience for other reasons and attribute to the brand can influence this impression as well. Their later evaluations of the extension are then based on this impression. This is true regardless of the similarity between the extension and the core brand. These results contrast with evidence that affect influences brand extension evaluations through its mediating impact on perceptions of core-extension similarity. This latter influence occurs only when consumers are explicitly asked to estimate the extension's similarity to the core before they evaluate it.

The authors propose a new approach to obtaining stockkeeping-unit (SKU)-level preferences and response sensitivities. The authors distinguish an attribute-level model, in which the unit of analysis is the market share for an alternative created by aggregation (e.g., Colgate toothpaste), from a truly disaggregate SKU-level model, and they establish an analytical relationship between parameters that they obtain from the two models. The authors show that SKU-level parameters can be recovered by calculation from estimated attribute-level parameters, circumventing the need for direct estimation of the more complex SKU-level model. They calibrate the store data market share model using 98 weeks of data for ten brands and 168 SKUs of toothpaste. Rather than estimate 168 preference parameters (when there is an “outside” alternative in addition to the 168 “inside” ones), it is only necessary to estimate ten brand-preference parameters from which the 168 parameters can be computed, as long as share and marketing-mix data are available at the SKU level. Covariate effects, such as marketing-mix response parameters, can be recovered in a similar fashion. Holdout tests demonstrate superior predictive performance, and the authors discuss implications for the derivation of elasticities for new SKU introductions.