Knowledge that Transforms

People with disabilities are among the most stigmatized groups in society, and the most underrepresented in advertising. We investigate advertising practices by which brands can include people with disabilities in ways that go beyond mere visibility. Across nine preregistered studies involving both hedonic and functional goods and services, we show a robust positive effect of featuring people with disabilities in advertisements on consumers’ attitudes toward the ad, brand, and product. This disability inclusion effect generalizes broadly across products, endorsers (e.g., customers, models), disabilities (both visible and invisible), and consumer segments (people with and without disabilities). It arises because the brand demonstrates its support for the societal integration of people with disabilities. Accordingly, the effect arises whether the brand includes people with disabilities voluntarily or to comply with industry regulation, because both actions can produce the same perceived outcome—meaningful, concrete support of people with disabilities. On the contrary, the effect disappears when a brand’s portrayal emphasizes vulnerability or impairment rather than agency and social inclusion, or the brand conspicuously highlights the model’s disability in the ad itself in a tokenizing manner. Collectively, these studies reveal how managers can support people with disabilities and earn consumers’ patronage without risking their backlash.

When their identity is salient, consumers from historically marginalized and privileged groups are differentially influenced when it comes to choosing algorithmic service providers (e.g., AI-enabled tellers, chatbots, robots, and digital kiosks). Under identity salience, as it would be in a service context where the service providers are all from historically privileged groups, consumers from historically marginalized groups (e.g., Black people) become concerned about identity-based social judgment. Underrepresentation of historically marginalized groups in white-collar professions (e.g., financial services), regulatory pressures to abandon diversity hiring initiatives, and a tight labor market, make it increasingly difficult for companies to ensure diversity among frontline employees. How can managers provide consumers from historically marginalized groups the services they seek in non-diverse settings while balancing other constraints and reducing identity-based social judgment concerns? The results of a series of field studies and controlled experiments suggest that algorithmic service providers can provide a means to serve historically marginalized consumers in non-diverse service settings. The effect attenuates in service contexts where historically marginalized consumers are less concerned about identity-based social judgment. Interestingly, identity salience does not influence historically privileged consumers’ choice of algorithmic service providers.

Many marketers design their product packaging so that when individual units are positioned together, they form a coordinated and often larger image that spans multiple package faces. The authors coin the term “billboarding” to refer to this practice that blends product packaging and retail display and whose effectiveness remains unexplored in the marketing literature. They document that billboarding improves consumer responses and operates through a combination of heightened artistic perceptions of the brand display and consumer feelings of serendipity. Using an empirical approach that incorporates field data and experiments, the authors present eight studies that support this perspective. Because marketers are concerned that the improper implementation of billboarding can backfire, the authors further explore several moderators related to in-store (disorganized and incomplete billboarding) and design (image type) factors to understand how to maximize its utility. They further examine conceptual fluency as a moderator and show that the positive effects of billboarding are significantly weaker when the product category is conceptually less fluent with the inclusion of artistic qualities. This research offers the first examination of an important marketing tool that may help brand managers circumvent uncooperative retailers and advance actionable insights that are likely to boost consumer responses.

We find that inter-departmental distance between two departments in a store can significantly impact joint (combined) sales of that pair. Using data from blueprints and sales across 64 stores for 52 weeks, along with an experimental study to test our theorizing, we find a curvilinear (inverted U-shaped) relationship between inter-departmental distance and joint sales. Specifically, close departments are perceived to be substitutes, decreasing the likelihood of buying products from both departments. As distance increases, departments are perceived as somewhat related but different, increasing their diversity and the likelihood of buying from both departments. As distance between departments becomes large and products are seen as unrelated, the likelihood of buying from both departments decreases. This relationship is moderated when departments have non-identical layouts and when there are larger variety differentials across departments. Accordingly, we determine an optimal store layout using BARON solver by maximizing total store revenue. Our results suggest an increase in weekly revenue of about 4.08% for supermarkets (range of -.67% to 9.50%) and 3.20% for hypermarkets (range of .82% to 8.5%). While strategic locations of departments can help retailers increase overall sales, prior empirical work has not studied the impact of distance between departments at the store level.

Consumers expect managers to respond to positive reviews, but it is unclear whether these responses are beneficial. This research finds that managerial responses to positive reviews can positively impact consumers when managers follow conversational norms for responding to compliments. It proposes that managers downplay the compliments that their firms receive via positive reviews (e.g., “Dinner was fantastic!”) and examines two norms-based strategies for doing so: (1) shifting the content of the compliment (e.g., “We’re glad dinner was good.”) and (2) shifting the recipient of the compliment (e.g., “our suppliers helped.”). First, an experiment and Google Local data show a disconnect between how consumers think managers should respond and how managers currently respond. Second, six experiments test the proposed response strategies. Compared with managers who do not respond to positive reviews and managers who write responses currently recommended by industry or academics, managers who downplay compliments improve readers’ evaluations of the firm and engagement on the platform. Downplaying the compliment improves consumer outcomes by conveying the manager's humility, which is normative. Downplaying is most effective when the manager reduces credit to the firm, appreciates someone else involved (e.g., supplier, reviewer), and uses moderately positive descriptors (e.g., “good” rather than “fantastic”).

The vast amount of content on social media platforms makes it challenging for firms to create posts that get noticed. An increasingly popular approach to increase customer engagement relies on text overlays, where text is placed directly on images. Such practices raise questions of how to balance the visual and text elements for the best impact. Three key factors, commonly used by practitioners, can trigger engagement because of their visual salience: (1) the degree of dynamism or implied motion in the image as well as the (2) size and (3) centrality of the text overlay. Using multiple methods, including field studies, online experiments, and managerial interviews, the authors establish that a text overlay that is too large and centrally placed, combined with a dynamic image, has negative effects on consumer engagement, because these design combinations make the post visually unappealing. The authors leverage these findings to develop an interactive app that can help managers compose more engaging multimodal social media posts.

Ride-hailing platforms are expanding globally, making inroads into developing markets. However, the technological affordances of many ride-hailing platforms were built in response to conditions in developed markets. Unlike developed markets, developing markets are characterized by infrastructural deficiencies, informality, and regulatory voids, which influence how consumers in these markets experience and use ride-hailing platforms. How do the affordances of ride-hailing platforms from developed markets shape the platforms' performance in developing markets? The authors explore this question using a qualitative ethnographic approach to examine Uber's operation in Ghana, engaging with drivers, riders, investors, Uber executives, and government officials. The findings show that Uber's platform performance in Ghana is shaped by three platform–market interaction outcomes: platform infrastructural deficiencies, (in)formalization, and affordance-based regulation. These interaction outcomes affect the platform's performance and manifest platform–market tensions. Market actors respond to the resulting platform performance with acceptance, avoidance, adaptation, substitution, resistance, brand responsibilization, and subversion. These insights contribute to research on the sharing economy, marketing in developing markets, and affordance theory. They also help ride-hailing managers understand how their platforms’ affordances work in other developing markets with similar characteristics and how they can manage the resulting platform performance and tensions to succeed in these markets.

Consumption of addictive products, such as gambling, alcohol, tobacco, gaming, fast food, and illicit drugs, is an important public health and policy issue. Research identifies that political ideology influences positive consumer behaviors, but little is known about whether political ideology shapes negative consumer behavior. Through a ten-study multimethod investigation including a large correlational study, a field study, and eight online studies (including six experiments), the authors reveal the relationship between political ideology and consumer responses to addictive products. Results indicate that political conservatism, as opposed to liberalism, is associated with more favorable consumer attitudes, intentions, and behavior toward addictive products, due to a stronger sense of agency, which reduces perceptions of product danger. The findings show that the positive relationship between political conservatism, sense of agency, perceived product danger, and subsequent responses to addictive products can be attenuated through exposure to personally directed threat appeals (i.e., threat messages with second-person pronouns). This research advances political ideology research in marketing by demonstrating how political ideology shapes responses to addictive products and provides practical ways to shift its potential harmful effects.

This article examines how the number of information cues in recommender systems influences consumer search and purchase. E-commerce platforms often display a list of recommended products on product pages, where consumers can browse and click on individual items for details. Given space constraints, determining the appropriate amount of information to display is crucial, as it affects consumers’ use of both recommender systems and nonrecommender search tools. Through a randomized controlled field experiment with an online retailer, the authors test four information designs: no cues (product name only), single cues (either price or review), and dual cues (price and review). They find an inverted U-shaped relationship between the number of information cues and sales, with single cues yielding the highest sales compared with both more information (dual cues) and less information (no cues). This nonlinear effect stems from the interplay between search intensity and efficiency. The no-cue condition increases search intensity but forces consumers to rely on a less efficient nonrecommender search process. In contrast, the highly efficient dual-cue condition provides sufficient information for evaluation but discourages further exploration beyond recommenders. Single cues strike a balance, offering just enough information to aid product evaluation while maintaining high search intensity across both recommender and nonrecommender tools.

Returning products has become standard practice for consumers and a significant “pain point” for retailers. The authors contend that returns can be harnessed to increase profits. Doing so requires retailers to manage the interweaving dynamics of product returns and purchases. The strategy is to comanage a virtuous cycle, whereby current returns increase future purchases, and a vicious cycle, whereby current returns increase future returns. Marketing executes the strategy by generating purchases, and the returns that follow impose a direct cost due to the vicious cycle. However, the virtuous cycle of returns can offset the vicious cycle, enabling the retailer to “free ride” on returns by optimizing its marketing. The approach follows the decision support system paradigm by combining a conceptual model, a statistical model, data, and optimization. A core construct is a stock variable tracking consumers’ memory of return experiences, which drives both the virtuous and vicious cycles. The authors optimize marketing spend while accounting for return stock. The best results occur when dynamics are incorporated into both the statistical and optimization models. The results suggest that managers should avoid strict return policies aimed at eliminating returns. Instead, they should design policies that optimally balance the long-term benefits and costs of returns.