Knowledge that Transforms

When consumers struggle with a difficult task, using a brand can help them perform better. The authors report four studies showing that brand use can enhance feelings of self-efficacy, which can lead to better task performance. Students scored higher on difficult Graduate Records Examination questions when they took the test using a Massachusetts Institute of Technology pen (Study 1) and showed better athletic performance when they drank water from a Gatorade cup during strenuous athletic exercise (Studies 2 and 3). These increases in task performance were mediated by feelings of self-efficacy (Studies 3 and 4). Furthermore, the results show that not everyone experiences the beneficial effect of brand use; it depends on the person's implicit self-theory. Across studies, users adopting entity theories (“entity theorists”) showed increased self-efficacy and better task performance, whereas users adopting incremental theories (“incremental theorists”) were unaffected by brand use.

Research on sales force evaluation has mostly relied on reflective metrics such as sales volume, revenue, and manager evaluations to assess and manage a sales force. However, businesses are moving from a product-centric to a customer-centric view and from a backward-looking to a forward-looking strategic perspective, so sales organizations must adapt to the ever-changing marketplace to maximize performance. The authors propose a forward-looking and profit-oriented metric to evaluate and demonstrate the effects of training type and incentive type on a salesperson's future value. Using a latent class modeling approach, they identify two distinct segments in the sales force that exhibit different responses to varying levels of training and incentives. This suggests that a one-size-fits-all approach to sales force management may be suboptimal. Finally, the authors also evaluate the magnitude of the proposed effects in the short run as well as the long run and show that the magnitudes of the effects could vary depending on the time horizon being considered. The authors close with a discussion of the implications for research and practice, including sales force evaluation through customer relationship management–based heuristics and optimal training and incentive management.

In this research, the authors jointly model the sentiment expressed in social media posts and the venue format to which it was posted as two interrelated processes in an effort to provide a measure of underlying brand sentiment. Using social media data from firms in two distinct industries, they allow the content of the post and the underlying sentiment toward the brand to affect both processes. The results show that the inferences marketing researchers obtain from monitoring social media are dependent on where they “listen” and that common approaches that either focus on a single social media venue or ignore differences across venues in aggregated data can lead to misleading brand sentiment metrics. The authors validate the approach by comparing their model-based measure of brand sentiment with performance measures obtained from external data sets (stock prices for both brands and an offline brand-tracking study for one brand). They find that their measure of sentiment serves as a leading indicator of the changes observed in these external data sources and outperforms other social media metrics currently used.

This research demonstrates the effect of the completeness of a product's shape on size perceptions, preference, and consumption quantities. The authors show that people estimate an incompletely shaped product to be smaller and, therefore, prefer it less in general than a completely shaped one of equal size and weight. They also find that the reduced size estimations for incompletely shaped products lead to increased consumption quantities of this type of item. Finally, the authors demonstrate that the “completeness heuristic” operates even when the incompletely shaped item has a larger primary dimension than its completely shaped counterpart.

It is well established that differences in manufacturing location can affect consumer preferences through lay inferences about production quality. In this article, the authors take a different approach to this topic by demonstrating how beliefs in contagion (the notion that objects may acquire a special aura or “essence” from their past) influence perceptions of authenticity for everyday consumer products and brands. Specifically, they find that due to a belief in contagion, products from a company's original manufacturing location are viewed as containing the essence of the brand. In turn, this belief in transferred essence leads consumers to view products from the original factory as more authentic and valuable than identical products made elsewhere. The authors further reveal that consumers who are higher in sensitivity to contagion are more likely to exhibit this effect and that activating the concept of contagion enhances preferences for products made in the brand's original factory. The authors close by discussing theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

Technology enables a firm to produce a granular record of every touchpoint consumers make in their online purchase journey before they convert at the firm's website. However, firms still depend on aggregate measures to guide their marketing investments in multiple online channels (e.g., display, paid search, referral, e-mail). This article introduces a methodology to attribute the incremental value of each marketing channel in an online environment using individual-level data of customers’ touches. The authors propose a measurement model to analyze customers’ (1) consideration of online channels, (2) visits through these channels over time, and (3) subsequent purchases at the website to estimate the carryover and spillover effects of prior touches at both the visit and purchase stages. The authors use the estimated carryover and spillover effects to attribute the conversion credit to different channels and find that these channels’ relative contributions are significantly different from those found by other currently used metrics. A field study validates the proposed model's ability to estimate the incremental impact of a channel on conversions. In targeting customers with different patterns of touches in their purchase funnel, these estimates help identify cases in which retargeting strategies may actually decrease conversion probabilities.

The authors document that approximately 5% of product reviews on a large private label retailer's website are submitted by customers with no record of ever purchasing the product they are reviewing. These reviews are significantly more negative than other reviews. They are also less likely to contain expressions describing the fit or feel of the items and more likely to contain linguistic cues associated with deception. More than 12,000 of the firm's best customers have written reviews without confirmed transactions. On average, these customers have each made more than 150 purchases from the firm. This makes it unlikely that the reviews were written by the employees or agents of a competitor and suggests that deceptive reviews may not be limited to the strategic actions of firms. Instead, the phenomenon may be far more prevalent, extending to individual customers who have no financial incentive to influence product ratings.

This article investigates how Internet users’ perceptions of control over their personal information affect how likely they are to click on online advertising on a social networking website. The analysis uses data from a randomized field experiment that examined the effectiveness of personalizing ad text with user-posted personal information relative to generic text. The website gave users more control over their personally identifiable information in the middle of the field test. However, the website did not change how advertisers used data to target and personalize ads. Before the policy change, personalized ads did not perform particularly well. However, after this enhancement of perceived control over privacy, users were nearly twice as likely to click on personalized ads. Ads that targeted but did not use personalized text remained unchanged in effectiveness. The increase in effectiveness was larger for ads that used more unique private information to personalize their message and for target groups that were more likely to use opt-out privacy settings.