Knowledge that Transforms

Although team-based selling is highly prominent in practice, research on the drivers of its effectiveness is sparse. Drawing from the literature on climate consensus, the authors propose that in addition to leadership and team factors, team consensus plays a critical role in boosting sales team effectiveness. Using survey and archival data from a sample of 185 pharmaceutical sales teams, the authors find that high team consensus regarding team-level leadership empowerment behaviors (LEBs) and team interpersonal climate quality enhances team potency given high LEBs but weakens team potency given low LEBs. In turn, team potency translates into sales team performance through both extra-role (team helping behavior) and in-role (team effort) behavior. The authors discuss the implications of these findings.

Conventional wisdom in marketing holds that (1) retailer forward buying is a consequence of manufacturer trade promotions and (2) stockpiling units helps the retailer but hurts the manufacturer. This article provides a deeper understanding of forward buying by analyzing it within the context of manufacturer trade promotions, competition, and demand uncertainty. The authors find that regardless of whether the manufacturer offers a trade promotion, allowing the retailer to forward buy and hold inventory for the future can, under certain conditions, be beneficial for both parties. Disallowing forward buying by the retailer may lead the manufacturer to lower merchandising requirements and change the depth of the promotion. In competitive environments, there are situations in which retailers engage in forward buying because of competitive pressures in a prisoner's-dilemma situation. Finally, when the authors consider the case of uncertain demand, they find further evidence of strategic forward buying. In particular, the authors find cases in which the retailer orders a quantity that is higher than what it expects to sell in even the most optimistic demand scenario.

This research challenges the notion that increased search effort results in greater satisfaction with the choice by examining the impact of alignability on search quantity and search outcomes. Options that vary along comparable dimensions are alignable, whereas options that vary along unique dimensions are nonalignable. The results of three studies demonstrate greater search among nonalignable than among alignable options. Satisfaction initially increases but then declines with further search among nonalignable options. Although choice difficulty influences search and satisfaction, the primary mechanism driving the inverted U-shaped relationship of satisfaction with search among nonalignable options is feature learning. This research demonstrates a paradox: People continue searching more options precisely when their further search is detrimental to their satisfaction, falling down the slippery slope of search.

This research investigates how the valuation of delayed consumption of hedonic products, such as concerts and chocolate, varies with the passage of time between choice and consumption. The authors find that when consumers make their own choices, they exhibit increases in evaluations of delayed consumption, but only if the interval between choice and consumption is relatively short. The effect attenuates over longer periods, resulting in an inverted U-shaped relationship between evaluations and time. In contrast, when somebody else chooses the same option for the consumer, evaluations decrease with the passage of time. These effects depend on the extent of intrinsic motivation toward the object of consumption and occur only for consummatory consumption that is of inherent interest. Moreover, anticipatory increases in evaluations before consumption have ironic negative effects on postconsumption evaluations. The authors discuss implications and directions for further research.

Consumers’ impulsive choices have traditionally been attributed either to contextual factors, such as product attributes and store environment, or to individual personality traits. In this article, the authors find that type of food consumed can also influence impulsive choice. Specifically, food that enhances the levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin can reduce impulsive choice. To test the hypotheses on the influence of serotonin on postconsumption impulsive choice, the authors collected data on the eve of Thanksgiving. The occasion of Thanksgiving dinner provides a naturalistic setting in which people consume a tryptophan-rich meal (tryptophan is a precursor to serotonin). The authors replicate these findings and obtain converging evidence in a lab setting in which they give some participants a tryptophan-rich beverage and observe their postconsumption impulsive choices.

This research studies the effect of consumers’ lay theories of self-control on their choices of products for young children. The authors find that people who hold the implicit assumption that self-control is a small resource that can be increased over time (“limited-malleable theorists”) are more likely to engage in behaviors that may benefit children's self-control. In contrast, people who believe either that self-control is a large resource (“unlimited theorists”) or that it cannot increase over time (“fixed theorists”) are less likely to engage in such behaviors. Field experiments conducted with parents demonstrate that limited-malleable theorists take their children less frequently to fast-food restaurants, give their children unhealthful snacks less often, and prefer educational to entertaining television programs for them. Similar patterns are observed when nonparent adults make gift choices for children or while babysitting. The authors obtain these effects with lay theories both measured and manipulated and after they control for demographic and psychological characteristics, including own self-control. These results contribute to the literature on self-control, parenting, and consumer socialization.

Attitudes differ in terms of the functions they serve: Whereas attitudes toward some products may serve a utilitarian purpose of helping consumers maximize rewards, attitudes toward other products may symbolize or express consumers’ values. This article shows that branding alters the associations between products and attitude functions. Specifically, product categories that are generally associated with utilitarian attitudes are associated with less utilitarian, more symbolic attitudes when branded, whereas product categories that are generally associated with symbolic attitudes are associated with more utilitarian, less symbolic attitudes when branded. Branding also has important implications for persuasion and for the “function-matching” advantage: Although utilitarian appeals are most persuasive for “utilitarian” products (and symbolic appeals are most persuasive for “symbolic” products) at the category level, this article shows that this pattern does not emerge at the brand level, in part because attitude functions change with branding.

the JMR review team, whose comments improved the article greatly. The authors are listed alphabetically. All correspondence should be addressed to Aradhna Krishna. FRED M. FEINBERG, ARADHNA KRISHNA, and Z. JOHN ZHANG* Increased access to individual customers and their purchase histories has led to a growth in targeted promotions, including the practice of offer-ing different pricing policies to prospective, as opposed to current, cus-tomers. Prior research on targeted promotions has adopted a tenet of the standard economic theory of choice, whereby what a consumer chooses depends exclusively on the prices available to that consumer. In this arti-cle, the authors propose that consumer preference for firms is affected not just by prices the consumers themselves are offered but also by prices available to others. This departure from the conventional strong-rationality approach to targeted promotion results in a decidedly different optimal policy. Through a laboratory experiment, calibration of a stochas-