Excerpts from the Foreword: This report points out some ways to reduce the cost of distributing fresh fruits and vegetables in New York City. The present bill for getting fresh fruits and vegetables from the city limits to the retail stores in New York or to trucks of out-of-town buyers is about $42,000,000 a year. This report submits ways of reducing that annual bill by about $8,500,000. Some of these savings would accrue to the consumers of Greater New York, some to the wholesale and retail trade, some to the transportation agencies, and some to the growers who supply that market from farms in more than 40 States. The Department of Agriculture has made this study, as it has made similar studies in other important consuming centers, because it is necessarily concerned with the economical distribution of farm products. Efficient distribution is important to consumers who should be able to get these protective foods in the best possible condition, to dealers who are engaged in moving the products from producers to consumers, and to the growers. High distribution costs in any large city, and especially New York, press back upon the producing areas clear across the continent.

This research demonstrates that the physical properties of shopping carts influence purchasing and spending. Prior research on ergonomics indicates that standard shopping carts, which are pushed via a horizontal handlebar, are likely to activate arm extensor muscles. Prior research on arm muscle activation, in turn, suggests that arm extensor activation may elicit less purchasing than arm flexor activation. The authors thus deduce that standard shopping carts may be suboptimal for stimulating purchases. The authors predicted that shopping carts with parallel handles (such as on a wheelbarrow or “walker”) would instead activate the flexor muscles and thus increase purchasing. An electromyography study revealed that both horizontal and vertical handles more strongly activate the extensor muscles of the upper arm (triceps), whereas parallel handles more strongly activate the flexor muscles (biceps). In a field experiment, parallel-handle shopping carts significantly and substantially increased sales across a broad range of categories, including both vice and virtue products. Finally, in a simulated shopping experiment, parallel handles increased purchasing and spending beyond both horizontal and vertical handles. These results were not attributable to the novelty of the shopping cart itself, participants’ mood, or purely ergonomic factors.

This study investigates the effects of direct marketing communications and mass marketing communications on the adoption timing of a new e-service among existing customers. The mass marketing communications pertain to both specific new service advertising and brand advertising from both the focal supplier and the competitors. Using a split-hazard approach, the authors determine the effects of the considered marketing communications on adoption timing, accounting for a significant part of the customer base that never adopts the new e-service. They analyze individual adoption behavior with a sample of 6000 customers of a Dutch telecommunications operator over 25 months. The empirical results show that service advertising shortens the time to adoption, even when it is initiated by competitors. Furthermore, an exploratory analysis of the interaction effects between relationship characteristics and marketing efforts suggests that certain mass marketing efforts have a greater effect on loyal customers.

Understanding customer experience and the customer journey over time is critical for firms. Customers now interact with firms through myriad touch points in multiple channels and media, and customer experiences are more social in nature. These changes require firms to integrate multiple business functions, and even external partners, in creating and delivering positive customer experiences. In this article, the authors aim to develop a stronger understanding of customer experience and the customer journey in this era of increasingly complex customer behavior. To achieve this goal, they examine existing definitions and conceptualizations of customer experience as a construct and provide a historical perspective of the roots of customer experience within marketing. Next, they attempt to bring together what is currently known about customer experience, customer journeys, and customer experience management. Finally, they identify critical areas for future research on this important topic.

This article presents a framework for the evaluation of quantitative models. The framework is both simple and realistic and could be used profitably by most organizations. It incorporates not only internal accounting data but also the human elements of bias or antipathy toward the models on the part of company employees using them, which might tend to distort an internal assessment and even the capability of the model itself.

Why do some articles become building blocks for future scholars, whereas others remain unnoticed? The authors aim to answer this question by contrasting, synthesizing, and simultaneously testing three scientometric perspectives—universalism, social constructivism, and presentation—on the influence of article and author characteristics on article citations. They study all articles published in a sample of five major journals in marketing from 1990 to 2002 that are central to the discipline. They count the number of citations each of these articles has received and regress this count on an extensive set of characteristics of the article (i.e., article quality, article domain, title length, the use of attention grabbers, and expositional clarity) and the author (i.e., author visibility and author personal promotion). They find that the number of citations an article in the marketing discipline receives depends more on “what is said” (quality and domain) and “who says it” (author visibility and personal promotion) than on “how it is said” (title length, the use of attention grabbers, and expositional clarity). The insights gleaned from this analysis contribute to the marketing literature and are relevant to scientific stakeholders, such as the management of scientific journals and individual academic scholars, as they strive to maximize citations. They are also relevant to marketing practitioners; they inform practitioners on characteristics of the academic journals in marketing and their relevance to decisions they face. Conversely, the insights also raise challenges regarding how to make journals accessible and relevant to marketing practitioners: (1) Authors visible to academics are not necessarily visible to practitioners; (2) the readability of an article may hurt academic credibility and impact, but it may be instrumental in influencing practitioners; and (3) it remains questionable whether articles that academics assess to be of high quality are also managerially relevant.

This study examines frontline employee responses to corporate social responsibility (CSR) using a multisourced data set at a Global 500 financial services company. The authors find that frontline employees identify with the organization (i.e., organizational identification) and with customers (i.e., employee–customer identification) as a function of how much the employees perceive management and customers (respectively) to support the company's CSR activities. However, these respective effects are stronger among employees for whom CSR is already tied to their sense of self (i.e., CSR importance to the employee). In addition, both organizational identification and employee–customer identification are related to supervisor-rated job performance; however, only the effect of employee–customer identification is mediated by customer orientation, suggesting that these two targets of identification manifest through distinct mechanisms. The research empirically addresses the open questions of whether and when CSR can yield observable changes in employee behavior and alerts researchers to a novel target of identification for frontline employees.

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”).

We began our tenure as editors by sharing our vision for the Journal of Marketing (JM) as a vibrant “marketplace of ideas” that offers insight, challenge, debate, innovation, and impact (Moorman et al. 2019). We envisioned the journal as more than a repository of well-honed studies. Instead, we hoped it could become a platform for people, processes, and aspirations that shape the discipline in important ways. It has been a privilege and honor to lead JM toward this goal over the last four years. This experience has been transformative for each of us—it has widened our understanding of the field, its members, and its potential, while also creating awareness of some of its weaknesses and opportunities for future growth. This final editorial will share some of the lessons we learned along the way—lessons that we think are relevant to all members of our field, including Ph.D. students, young faculty, senior faculty, journal gatekeepers and the committees that select them —whether in Bangalore, Beijing, Boston, or Berlin. Importantly, we arrived at these lessons through our work with so many of you around the world—as authors, editorial team members, advisors, and staff. Thank you for taking this journey with us. When reflecting on these lessons, which we summarize in Table 1, we turned to the core activities in any healthy marketplace of ideas: knowledge development and knowledge dissemination. In each case, we detail important lessons we have learned. We close by discussing two broader lessons about the larger purpose of journals and publishing that are embodied in the earlier lessons.