Knowledge that Transforms

Academic research and publication hold vital positions in an academic’s career. Publishing research serves a critical purpose in disseminating knowledge to information seekers, contributing to the body of knowledge, showcasing scholarship, and securing tenure/promotion. Although it is necessary to an academic’s work and career, the academic publication process can present daunting challenges. For a premier journal such as the Journal of Marketing (JM), which publishes only the best work in the field of marketing and accepts only 7%–8% of all submissions, navigating the peer review process becomes all the more demanding. Amid these high stakes, it is essential that JM’s marketing scholarship is captured in its entire essence and presented to the readers in a timely manner. In this regard, it is necessary to nurture a positive and constructive approach to scholarship so that the body of knowledge can experience incremental gains. This editorial is a step in this direction. In this editorial, we review the recurring feedback that emerged from the decision letters during our editorial term. Our goal is to offer a perspective that is based on our reflection and not what an “ideal” JM submission ought to be. We hope that such a perspective will benefit future contributors in better designing their submissions to JM. In doing so, we provide a synthesis of this review and organize this editorial as follows. First, we present a set of guidelines for crafting manuscripts for JM that are truly compelling and therefore can survive the “desk rejection” stage. In addition, we present a set of “survival tips” for authors to avoid some common mistakes that surface during the initial submission. Then, we offer guidelines on how to address reviewer comments. Finally, we provide directions for how to prepare the manuscript for resubmission.

The marketing-finance interface literature has investigated the direct link between innovativeness and stock returns. Moving a step further, we investigate two unanswered questions: How and under what conditions is innovativeness associated with stock returns? Answering these questions is important for managers who have to defend innovation investments to board members and time the introductions of new products. We investigate large individual investors and their national culture in the food and beverage industry. Combining multiple datasets, we first investigate the relationship between innovativeness and large individual investor's stock holding decisions (i.e., to sell, hold onto or buy a firm's stocks). The results indicate that national culture moderates this relationship. At the firm level, we show that large investors' stock holding partially mediates the innovativeness-stock returns relationship and that the culture of a firm's large investors moderates this mediated relationship. Hence, we unveil...

Although sales force downsizing represents a challenging marketing resource change that can signal uncertainty about future firm performance, little is known about its impact on financial-market performance. Drawing from information economics, the authors address this knowledge gap by developing a comprehensive framework to (1) examine the impact of the size of a firm’s sales force downsizing on firm-idiosyncratic risk, (2) uncover investors’ screening processes that influence this relationship, and (3) identify firms’ mitigating signaling processes that can alleviate investor uncertainty linked to downsizing. The authors draw from several secondary sources to assemble a longitudinal data set of 314 U.S. public firms over 12 years and model their framework using a robust econometric approach. Findings show that larger sales force reductions are associated with greater firm-idiosyncratic risk. Furthermore, this increase in risk is amplified when firms face high levels of future competitive threats and lack transparency in financial reporting. However, chief executive officers can mitigate these deleterious moderating effects by signaling a commitment to growth (i.e., increasing advertising expenditures) and formally communicating an external strategic focus to Wall Street.

The authors investigate compliance behavior and revenue implications in winner-pay and voluntary-pay auctions in charity and noncharity settings. In the voluntary-pay format, the seller asks all bidders to pay their own high bid. The authors explore motives and boundary conditions for compliance behavior based on internal and external triggers of social norms. The voluntary-pay format generates higher revenue than the winner-pay format for charity auctions, despite imperfect compliance, but it generates lower revenues in noncharity settings. To characterize bidding strategy, the authors study time to bid, auction choice, and jump bidding and find evidence that bidders in voluntary-pay auctions more commonly use jump bidding and late entry. The findings have important implications for marketing managers, augmenting the growing stream of empirical auction studies and work on corporate social responsibility. Specifically, combining an auction with a charitable cause may result in increased revenues, but managers should ensure that they are accounting for differential compliance rates between auction formats. Even if low-compliance bidders can be identified and screened out, doing so is not advantageous, because noncompliant bidders bid up prices.

This article develops a decision-making framework that highlights how display of numeric attribute information (e.g., display of calorie information) and shoppers’ goals (i.e., having a diet focus vs. a taste focus) jointly influence shoppers’ choices and preferences. Across two sets of studies, including a field study involving the launch of a new Coca-Cola product, the authors show that when food items are displayed in an aligned manner (i.e., when food items with lower-value calorie information are displayed below food items with higher calorie values), shoppers assign more importance weight to calorie gap information. In turn, higher importance weight assigned to calorie gap information leads diet-focused shoppers to relatively prefer low-calorie food items but leads taste-focused shoppers to relatively prefer higher-calorie food items. The third set of studies shows that this decision-making framework has widespread applicability and is relevant in any domain in which advertising, retail, and online displays show comparisons of numeric attribute information.

Intuition suggests that a salesperson should not refer consumers to a competitor for products that they both sell. However, myriad examples reveal salespeople doing just that. The authors study specialist competitor referrals, a sales strategy by which one increases consumers’ purchase likelihood of a focal product (e.g., a painting at an art gallery) by (1) referring consumers to a competitor (e.g., a frame warehouse store) that offers a nonfocal product (e.g., a frame) at a lower price, while (2) stating that the stores differ in their specializations (i.e., the stores concentrate their efforts on different goods). Using a study and survey with salespeople, experimental studies, an incentivized negotiation experiment, and a field study, the authors show that specialist competitor referrals can indeed benefit sellers. Specifically, they build on equity theory to show that specialist competitor referrals increase focal product sales by reducing consumers’ perceived overpayment risk for the focal product via increasing perceived equity in the exchange. The authors also show that competitor referrals for nonfocal products that do not justify the price difference on the nonfocal product are ineffective.

Careers evolve over time and can take many paths as they develop. Within marketing and sales, a common variant of career progression is to begin in a sales position and then advance internally into a marketing role. Doing so provides employees with unique but complementary sets of skills, experiences, and perspectives that may increase their efficacy as marketers. However, sales-to-marketing job transitions (SMJTs) can also be suboptimal and result in adverse outcomes. Although the sales–marketing interface literature has examined how the two functions work together, the SMJT process is unclear. To provide an understanding of this phenomenon, the authors conduct in-depth interviews across a host of different companies and industries with 56 informants who successfully transitioned intraorganizationally from sales to marketing, informants who transitioned but did not remain in marketing, and executives. They develop a theoretical model consisting of transition motivation, acquisition, preparation, and encounter. They also advance individual and organizational facilitators of SMJTs and discuss SMJTs’ potential positive and negative effects on the organization.

The marketing–finance interface literature has investigated the direct link between innovativeness and stock returns. The authors extend this research by focusing on two open questions: How and under what conditions is innovativeness associated with stock returns? Answering these questions is important for managers who have to defend innovation investments to board members and time the introductions of new products. The authors investigate large individual investors and their national culture in the food and beverage industry. Combining multiple data sets, they first examine the relationship between innovativeness and large individual investors’ stock holding decisions (i.e., to sell, hold onto, or buy a firm’s stocks). The results indicate that national culture moderates this relationship. At the firm level, the authors show that large investors’ stock holding partially mediates the innovativeness–stock returns relationship and that the culture of a firm’s large investors moderates this mediated relationship. Thus, they unveil a special segment of investors, large individual investors, who influence the extent to which firms benefit from innovativeness in the stock market in the food and beverage industry.