Knowledge that Transforms

In-process promotions focus on promotional activities during marketing events such as auctions, crowdfunding, or fund-raising. Firms can observe consumers’ responses to these promotions and use this information to adjust future promotions sent during the same events. The authors study the impact of promotions on market outcomes and focus on one use of such promotions: messages sent during online auctions, in which the outcome is the final auction price. They propose that the effect of these messages can be understood by observing their aggregate impact on final auction prices and by examining how messages affect behaviors at the bid level, namely, new-bidder entry and jump bidding. These bid-level behaviors can, when summed at the auction level, affect auction prices. Besides examining the messages’ impact on bidder behavior, the authors study the auctioneer's strategy in issuing these messages. They distinguish between informative messages, which focus on product attributes, and persuasive messages, which try to motivate the message recipients to bid. They test hypotheses derived from their framework using data from online auctions of Air France airline tickets. The authors also conduct “what-if” simulations to help auctioneers identify the optimal number of messages to send during an auction.

An essential characteristic of marketing practice and theory is the promotion of exchanges, many of which are funded by money. Marketing literature thus places great emphasis on determining what factors influence consumers to engage in the marketplace. Less understood, however, is how consumers allocate monetary resources to fund exchanges. Scholars have demonstrated that people employ earmarks to segregate money by source, meaning, or purpose. The ethnographic study of provisioning in the current research adds to prior scholarship with an explanation of how money, as a fungible resource, is transformed into moral and social resources by the behavioral process of ascribing earmarks and approaching provisioning. As part of this study, the author develops a typology that incorporates thrift provisioning and splurge provisioning approaches to categorize consumer goals derived from the use of prosaic and indexical earmarks. These goals are defined as economizing, sustaining, treating, and rewarding. The article closes with a discussion of implications for marketing managers and potential avenues for further research.

Innovations commonly involve changes to iterated market offerings (e.g., new games, car models, film sequels). To better understand consumer iteration responses, the authors develop and test a theoretical framework grounded in (1) prior innovations serving as reference states (comparators) for later innovations and (2) consumer desires for both comfort and stimulation. In Study 1's online game, prior innovations and loss aversion (greater loss than gain impact) moderate evaluations of current innovations, whereby an introduction-weaker-stronger innovation sequence (Periods 1–3 of four periods) generates more entertainment than an introduction-stronger-weaker sequence because the former's weak-opening-then-rise does less harm than the latter's strong-opening-then-drop. Study 2 replicates Study 1 and shows that an introduction-weaker-weaker sequence produces enough habituation and diminishing negative returns to outperform an introduction-stronger-weaker sequence at Period 4. Study 3 offers marketplace corroboration with a film industry test in which minor (fewer) innovations perform better (e.g., sales, return on investment) earlier in franchises, whereas major (many) innovations perform better later, thereby reconciling prior research's opposing prescriptions for the use of major versus minor sequel innovations. The framework and results implicate carefully sequenced innovations for managing consumer iteration responses, including the possibility of interspersing weaker/minor innovations among stronger/major innovations.

In diverse industries, from grocery retailing to health care, retailers join buying groups to achieve better terms with suppliers. The authors track the buying group membership of Europe's largest grocery retailers over a 15-year period and evaluate why some buying groups are better than others in increasing retailer performance and why different members belonging to the same group do not always benefit equally from their membership. They find that, on average, buying groups indeed generate scale advantages for their members: group scale increases group members' productivity and sales and decreases their cost of goods sold. Still, bigger is not always better. Retailers benefit less from buying group scale when the group is more heterogeneous in terms of member size and when it extends its scope across too many markets. Moreover, the smaller a member is within the group and the more it overlaps with fellow members, the less it benefits.

Firms commonly add small financial benefits to communications designed to acknowledge consumers' loyalty or support. Yet is it always better to provide some financial benefit as opposed to simply saying “thank you”? Although this question has important implications for customer relationship management, research has not yet provided an answer. This article demonstrates that, indeed, a financial acknowledgment (defined as an acknowledgment with a monetary benefit) can lead to less positive outcomes than offering a verbal acknowledgment (defined as an acknowledgment without a monetary benefit), a phenomenon termed the “trivialization effect.” The results explain this effect in terms of shifting evaluation standards: whereas a verbal acknowledgement is evaluated relative to verbal gratitude expression norms, a financial acknowledgment is evaluated relative to both verbal norms and customers' monetary expectations. The authors also demonstrate two practical, theory-consistent ways firms can structure financial acknowledgments to eliminate the trivialization effect. Thus, this research shows both the peril of small financial benefits as a means of expressing customer appreciation and practical, low-cost ways to salvage their potential.

Companies often extend product lines with the goal of increasing demand for their products and responding to competitive threats. Although line extensions may lead to cannibalization and reduction of overall profit, the bulk of theoretical and empirical research has suggested that product line extensions result in a net gain of overall demand and market share. To mitigate cannibalization, the extant literature prescribes the addition of premium versions of products, or “upward line extensions,” with the intention of achieving gains not only in demand and market share but also in overall profit. In this research, the authors employ analytical and empirical methods to make the case that upward line extensions aimed at matching a competing product's attribute may lead consumers to reassess their perceptions about the brand and the attributes of products in the market in a way that erodes the advantages of the extending firm. Ultimately, this can result in a loss of demand, market share, and profit for the extending firm.

Introducing new products necessitates that manufacturers not only carefully craft the initial contract terms with retailers but also consider how the specificity of the terms influences a retailer's relational behaviors throughout the duration of the contract, contingent upon the new product's success. The authors develop a series of hypotheses to investigate new product introductions using a multimethod design consisting of a survey of manufacturers and a repeated measures experiment with retailers. The results indicate that manufacturers craft increasingly specific contract terms as new product creativity increases when frequency of new product introductions and performance ambiguity are higher. When they are lower, the positive influence of new product creativity on contract specificity weakens and can in some instances become negative. The results also indicate that there is no significant change in a retailer's relational behaviors throughout a contract's duration when contract specificity is lower, regardless of the new product's success. However, under the condition of higher contract specificity, the retailer's relational behaviors increase (decrease) over a contract's duration when the new product is successful (unsuccessful).