Knowledge that Transforms

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.

Despite firms’ emphasis on product visual aesthetics (PVA) for competitive advantage, questions remain regarding which aesthetic properties enhance PVA the most, the strength of PVA's effect on consumer responses, and moderating factors. To address these gaps, the authors conduct a meta-analysis of 727 effect sizes from 263 independent samples spanning 1993–2024. Findings reveal that both organizational and meaningful aesthetic properties positively impact PVA, and harmony is the strongest property. PVA positively influences both consumer attitudes and behaviors. The authors develop a comprehensive framework of moderators across five key groups: brand, product, communication, consumer, and environmental factors. The moderator analyses yield multiple important insights and (1) identify economic growth and consumption publicity as particularly influential, (2) recognize previously unexplored but relevant moderators (e.g., aesthetic object type, individualism, and income inequality), (3) clarify debated moderators (e.g., brand familiarity, product quality level, and gender), (4) reveal that certain moderator combinations can turn PVA effects negative (e.g., focusing on packaging aesthetics with utilitarian, private, nondurable, and low-quality products can turn the effect of PVA on attitudes negative), and (5) find an attitude–behavior gap in the moderating effects of PVA. The study provides new insights into the nuanced effects of PVA for effective application.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to transform how brands communicate with consumers. Recent research demonstrates AI's benefits in producing text, but marketing research has not yet explored how marketers can leverage AI to create visual advertising. Despite their impressive capabilities, “off-the-shelf” generative AI models are not aligned with marketing objectives, raising the question of whether it is possible to fine-tune generative AI directly on conventional advertising objectives (e.g., evoking attention, driving interest). In this research, the authors train an open-source generative AI model on marketing mindset metrics and show that the resulting visual content can match and even exceed conventionally produced advertising content in associated performance metrics. The results demonstrate that generative AI can be fine-tuned on multiple communication objectives simultaneously and adapted to specific audiences. In addition to highlighting generative AI's potential in marketing, this article explores the limitations of aligning visual generative AI with marketing objectives.

This research investigates whether business professionals, on average, exhibit racial bias in strategic marketing decisions involving Black consumers. Across nine studies and four replications with current and aspiring business professionals from the United States, France, and Brazil, the authors find evidence that commonly held lay theories linking Blackness with economic hardship are associated with racialized interpretations of income. Specifically, professionals tend to perceive Black consumers as lower income than equally earning White consumers. These perceptions, in turn, are associated with consumption-specific stereotypes that characterize Black consumers as more price sensitive and less attuned to quality, innovation, and customization. As a result, professionals are less likely to prioritize predominantly Black consumer markets in core marketing decisions, such as market entry and product portfolio selection, even in contexts where these markets offer greater objective economic potential (i.e., higher individual and aggregate income). Importantly, the findings show that both diversity training and deliberation-based interventions reduce the likelihood of such biases. The authors discuss implications for marketing practice and marketplace equity.

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.

Following trends on social media has become increasingly popular. But what is the best way to do so? Should brands and other creators copy the trend as closely as possible, or should they put a more unique spin on it? To answer this question, the authors develop a multimodal, unsupervised video analytics tool (MUVID) to quantify the typicality of over 85,000 TikTok dance videos. Results indicate that more atypical videos (i.e., more differentiated from the trend) generate more engagement. Consistent with the notion that atypicality drives engagement, this relationship is amplified when atypicality is easier to observe (i.e., when audiences have seen more trend videos). Follow-up experiments, including a content-creator field experiment, manipulate atypicality and confirm its causal impact. The findings provide practical guidance on how to create more impactful content, shed light on effective trend-following, and offer a tool (available through an app) that researchers and practitioners can use to quantify typicality and analyze short videos more generally.

The sharing economy has become an increasingly widespread way for peers to rent out their owned goods to others seeking to rent them. This research (1) investigates how providers (i.e., owners renting out their belongings) decide what price to charge and (2) identifies the provider WTA effect, where, in the context of a peer-to-peer collaborative consumption model, providers are willing to accept (WTA) less than renters (i.e., nonowners) are willing to pay (WTP). These findings diverge from prior research, which has repeatedly demonstrated that owners typically demand more to part with their belongings than nonowners are WTP in a seller–buyer transaction (i.e., the endowment effect). The provider WTA effect is explained by providers having a more accessible empathy lens, which in turn dampens the accessibility of their exchange lens when renting out their item. This drives WTA below WTP. The effect is moderated when the renter is identified as a dissimilar transaction partner. This research provides actionable implications for providers and platforms.

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.

There has been little exploration of how audience content consumption may change in response to advertising permissions on live streaming platforms. Brands use ads to generate revenue through ad exposure, but is this benefit thwarted by the reduction of audience consumption of content? Using a dataset containing over 12 million observations in the live streaming space and a difference-in-differences estimation approach, the authors study the effects of a policy intervention by a live streaming platform that provided (some) streamers the ability to display midroll advertisements. Although the ad avoidance literature infers that audiences view ad-supported content unfavorably, the results of this study indicate that providing the mere ability to introduce midroll advertisements has a notable positive effect on live streaming content consumption (average viewership and total hours watched). The authors discover that a viable explanation for this response is through increases in broadcasting airtime, stream frequency (somewhat), and quality by streamers after the intervention, as these adjustments are drastically easier to implement in a live streaming setting than in more traditional forms of media. The authors further explore heterogeneity in these effects in relation to initial streamer success, streaming tenure, content activity, culture (of the streamer and audience), and impact across time.

Extended reality (XR) technologies hold the potential to transform buyer–seller relationships in business-to-business (B2B) sales. Yet, the consequences, antecedents, and contingency effects of XR integration in B2B organizations remain underexplored. Drawing on multimethod evidence, including a prestudy, quasi-experimental field data (Studies 1a and 1b), a cross-industry salesperson survey (Study 2a), and between-subjects experiments with B2B salespeople (Study 2b) and buyers (Study 3), the authors find that XR improves buyer- and seller-related outcomes (e.g., loyalty, upselling) by strengthening customers’ mental imagery ability, ultimately improving sales success. However, the findings reveal contingencies: XR is most successful for complex, haptic products, with benefits holding across face-to-face and remote meetings. On the buyer side, any incremental information load associated with XR is modest and, where present, outweighed by imagery-mediated gains. On the seller side, however, XR can increase role stress, while an adaptive selling orientation attenuates this effect. Beyond outcomes, the authors examine adoption drivers and inhibitors at the individual and technology-utility levels and highlight organizational innovativeness and salespeople’s XR experience as contingencies. Overall, the findings specify when, why , and how XR creates value in B2B sales and how firms can implement it to maximize customer engagement and sales while safeguarding salespeople’s well-being.