Knowledge that Transforms

Political polarization continues to intensify and has inspired substantial research on how individuals’ political identities shape their behaviors as consumers. This stream of research has focused primarily on differences between those on the “left” and the “right” of the political spectrum, offering valuable insights but addressing only one dimension of polarization. The current research introduces the other, currently overlooked dimension, political extremism, and examines how individuals closer to each end of the ideological spectrum differ in post-purchase decision-making from those with weaker or moderate identities. It shows that politically extreme consumers exhibit stronger repurchase likelihood, potentially deriving benefits associated with committing to brands. However, they are also less sensitive to price increases by their chosen brands, even when viable alternatives exist, increasing the risk of overpaying and undermining their financial well-being. These effects are driven by politically extreme consumers’ beliefs in the superiority of their consumption choices and are more pronounced in the presence of threats that originate from the consumption domain (e.g., focal brand product/service failures, competitor new product launches), whereas they diminish in the presence of threats originating from the political domain (e.g., customer–focal brand political misalignment, customer–competitor political alignment).

Firms in business-to-government (B2G) marketplaces often invite former government officials to join their boards of directors, in search of their critical government connections and knowledge. However, the marketing implications of these revolving door directors are unclear. By analyzing multisource, secondary panel data of 1,731 publicly traded U.S. firms in the B2G market between 2005 and 2021, the authors find that revolving door directors exert significantly positive effects on three dimensions of customer relationship performance: customer acquisition, customer retention, and cross-selling performance. Their government connections and expertise both mediate the effects of revolving door directors on acquisition performance, whereas only government connections mediate the effects on retention and cross-selling performance. The beneficial effects of revolving door directors are contingent on the competitive pressure a firm faces when serving government customers. Specifically, customers’ competitive procurement preference (customer-initiated competition) and exposure to bid protests (competitor-initiated competition) together create procurement uncertainty for sellers in B2G markets, such that revolving door directors are less effective at improving customer relationship performance when customers prefer competitive procurement processes, but more effective when those customers face greater exposure to bid protests.

Consumers increasingly rely on smartphones to browse and compare products, yet they remain substantially less likely to purchase on smartphones than on PCs. This research examines the psychological mechanisms underlying this mobile conversion gap, the conditions under which it dissipates, and whether consumer reluctance is warranted. A pilot study, nine controlled experiments, real-world sales analysis, and a field experiment show that smartphone (vs. PC) use reduces purchase likelihood by altering how consumers evaluate their decision process. Specifically, four characteristics of smartphones lead consumers to feel they think less thoroughly when using the device, which then lowers perceived decision quality and reduces purchase likelihood. Consistent with this mechanism, the negative effect of smartphone use on purchase attenuates when decisions are perceived as requiring little thought, whether due to product characteristics, individual differences, or situational contexts, and can be mitigated by interventions that enhance perceived decision quality on smartphones. Importantly, we show that this reluctance is not fully warranted; even when objective performance is equal to or better on smartphones, consumers perceive their decisions more negatively than they do on PCs. The findings reveal a device-specific bias in self-assessment underlying the mobile conversion gap and offer actionable strategies for improving mobile performance.

Verbal responses are widely collected in marketing through voice surveys and phone calls. Recent advances in voice technology enable firms to go beyond textual content and extract information from voice, such as speaker identity and sentiment. However, little is known about whether voice can be used to infer response uncertainty, a key construct for understanding and reducing bias in customer feedback. Existing marketing measures of uncertainty were developed largely for selected-response surveys and face limitations in cognitive simplicity, predictive robustness, and applicability. We examine two methods that infer uncertainty as expressed in vocal delivery: one based on raw audio data, and the other based on a voice feature (i.e., pitch). We evaluate both methods in a laboratory net promoter score (NPS) study and a field NPS study conducted with a full-service music store chain; the voice feature approach outperforms the raw audio approach in marketing applications while preserving privacy. The collaborating firm suggested two managerial benefits of inferring response uncertainty: improving incentive program effectiveness by targeting customers hypothesized to be more likely to redeem coupons, and identifying brand ambassadors who provide persuasive testimonials. These firm-driven insights inform an actionable framework for using voice-inferred uncertainty in marketing practice.

AI agents now search, negotiate, and transact for firms and customers, reshaping how marketing relationships form and evolve. We introduce Business to Agent to Customer (B2A2C) marketing , a triadic exchange structure in which firms and their AI agents interact directly with customers and their AI agents. B2A2C rests on delegation, multiplicity, and infrastructural mediation, and creates coordination and governance problems that existing marketing theories do not fully address. To explain relationship management in these markets, we propose Customer-Agent Relationship Marketing (CARMA) , an organic marketing theory built around five interdependent mechanisms: calibration, accountability, reciprocity, mediation, and adaptivity. CARMA departs from relationship marketing and principal-agent theory by treating exchange not as direct firm-customer interaction or single-agent alignment, but as a system in which both sides delegate to learning agents governed together. We develop eight propositions on the antecedents of delegation, the relational failures arising without CARMA’s mechanisms, and how these mechanisms vary by context and agent capability. We argue that trust becomes an ex-ante condition, infrastructure and machine-readable reciprocity shape loyalty through protocol design, and that alignment across human, infrastructural, and agentic layers becomes a source of competitive advantage. We close with six CARMA KPIs and a CARMA Readiness Assessor for evaluating B2A2C readiness.

An ongoing, inconclusive debate in strategic marketing research centers on the relative importance of brand management versus customer management—two key dimensions of marketing strategy. However, empirical evidence on how firms prioritize these two dimensions, how their strategic emphasis shifts over time, and how these dimensions shape financial performance remains limited. Using longitudinal data collected from automated text analysis of +95,000 earnings conference call transcripts involving +1,800 firms over 22 years, complemented by manual coding and secondary data, the authors show that brand and customer management foci are uncorrelated, indicating neither a systematic trade-off nor a systematic complementarity between the two strategic foci. Consistent patterns emerge across industries and business types. Importantly, the two strategic foci have distinct effects on revenue- and cost-related performance outcomes. Strikingly, a dual emphasis on both brands and customers is less attractive than focusing on either one. Moderating environmental factors influence the effectiveness of each strategic focus.

This special issue is about the last mile in marketing scholarship. The last mile is a metaphor borrowed from logistics and telecommunications, where it refers to the final segment of physical delivery that is often the costliest and the most frequent to fail. In marketing scholarship, the last mile is the final segment of intellectual delivery: the move from a published finding to a situated decision made in its light. Marketing research is strongest in the upstream work of scholarly production. The field generates insight, explanation, and generalizable knowledge through experiments, econometrics, machine learning, text analysis, multimodal analytics, and causal inference. It struggles at the last mile, where stakeholders must translate research findings into context-specific action. Between the published finding and the situated decision lies a gap of interpretation, adaptation, and execution. As authors, we frequently stop short of providing the instruments that would help readers cross it. Our three recommendations in the closing pages of a published article might be insufficient.

The rapid growth of digital shopping channels has led many traditional retailers to invest in e-commerce websites and mobile apps. While prior research shows that multichannel customers are more valuable, it overlooks how the motive for adopting a new channel shapes post-adoption behavior. Using transaction-level data from a major Brazilian pet supplies retailer, we study offline-only consumers who adopt online shopping through four pathways: organic adoption, the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Friday promotions, and a loyalty program. Using consumer-level panel data and difference-in-differences estimates, we examine how these pathways are associated with post-adoption spending, profitability, and channel usage. We find that all adopters spend more than comparable offline-only consumers, but their post-adoption behavior differs systematically by adoption pathway. Promotion-driven adopters exhibit patterns consistent with forward buying and lower subsequent profitability, whereas COVID adopters display stronger offline persistence consistent with consumer inertia and habit persistence. These findings suggest that managers may benefit from accounting for adoption-pathway heterogeneity when forecasting customer lifetime value and assessing the breakeven and ROI of promotions designed to induce online adoption.

This research investigates how the situational salience of local versus global identity shapes consumers’ creative performance. One field study, six controlled experiments, secondary data from a large crowdsourcing platform, and interviews with managers demonstrate that consumers with a situationally accessible local identity generate more creative outputs than those with a salient global identity. Group-based pride is the key mechanism underlying this effect. Consistent with the group-based pride account, externally enhancing group-based pride increases creativity among consumers with a salient global identity, while externally reducing group-based pride decreases creativity among consumers with a salient local identity. By identifying local–global identity as a novel antecedent of consumer creativity, this research contributes to the literature on creativity and identity salience and highlights group-based pride as a distinctive pathway linking identity salience to creativity. These findings also suggest that contextual cues that activate local versus global identity may serve as a useful managerial tool for enhancing consumer creativity in ideation, crowdsourcing, and co-creation contexts.

Brands that engage in cultural difference marketing—the use of elements from another culture to create novelty, distinction, and value—face increasing public scrutiny over the issue of potential cultural appropriation. Yet the question of how brands can ethically address this issue while continuing to pursue the benefits of cultural difference marketing remains undertheorized, leaving many brands to respond reactively. Drawing on foundational social theory and an extended qualitative study of the Korean pop (K-pop) industry, this work synthesizes key ethical concerns about cultural appropriation. It identifies three distinct facets of cultural appropriation harm that brands may inflict when using diverse cultural elements: disconnection (unfair attribution), distortion (unfair representation), and dispossession (unfair distribution of benefits). It further identifies three brand strategies that can mitigate such harm in different ways—correcting (recognizing harm through expressions of accountability), connecting (preventing harm by learning and collaborating with source cultures), and championing (resisting the structural foundations of harm through initiatives that combat marketplace inequality). Together, these findings comprise a novel framework for the ethical marketing of cultural difference. This framework disambiguates when and how cultural difference marketing may lead to cultural appropriation and theorizes the emerging role of brands as proactive mitigators of cultural appropriation harm.