Knowledge that Transforms

Existing literature has concluded that employees who regularly interact with customers often find this central aspect of their work emotionally draining. But what if some customer interactions could emotionally regenerate service employees? This ethnographic research demonstrates that several factors influence emotional energy in service interactions, including staff copresence with customers, mutual focus, shared mood, and barriers to outsiders. In addition, service employees’ experience of autonomy and status in interactions plays an important role in influencing their emotional energy. Based on these insights, this study advances a framework for service organizations to manage a crucial asset: the emotional energy of frontline service employees.

Services marketing originated as a discipline to guide managers in marketing intangible products; in today's world, it must also guide managers in serving society. This research develops the concept of a social profit orientation, whereby organizations invest resources for the express purpose of enhancing the common good, especially the well-being of people and the health of the planet. Implementing social initiatives that serve this broader mission is no small challenge, but exemplary organizations are nevertheless charting a practical course. The authors conducted 62 in-depth executive interviews across 21 organizations in multiple countries, spanning both for-profit and nonprofit sectors, yielding valuable insights into how they create social profit for individuals, communities, and society at large through their initiatives. This research, grounded in published theory and directed toward practical implementation, defines the parameters of a social profit orientation and introduces an innovative framework that distills its antecedents, moderators, and outcomes. The experiences shared by the sample of forward-looking, future-oriented organizations can inform and inspire other companies, organizations, and institutions as they operate in environments where far more is expected of them than ever before.

Sponsored content allows brands to partner with creators to reach creators’ audiences on digital platforms. However, both creators’ and brands’ incomplete understanding of this object generates two critical ambiguities: how to determine the value of sponsored content and how to effectively coproduce it. To better understand these ambiguities, the authors theorize sponsored content as an epistemic market object : an object that facilitates marketing functions but is only partially understood by the actors who use it . They analyze a dataset of interviews, podcasts, media articles, and third-party platform reviews about—and by—content creators, brands, and intermediaries. The findings show that brands, creators, and intermediaries create and apply knowledge to address valuation and coproduction ambiguities. However, this knowledge work is incomplete, creating asymmetries in value outcomes and power relationships in a brand–creator partnership. This research contributes to marketing literature and practice by highlighting the role of epistemic market objects in transformative market disruptions that alter the roles of, and the relationships between, market actors. The findings are transferable to other substantive areas such as generative artificial intelligence, the metaverse, nonfungible tokens, online news, and the sharing economy.

How do managers time the launch of new technologies? Without actionable frameworks to ensure consumers and other stakeholders are ready, innovation releases remain a risky endeavor. Previous work on legitimacy has focused on stages following a product launch. However, launch timing involves shared expectations of when actions should occur prior to launch. This conceptual article evaluates the alignment between firm and stakeholder expectations regarding launch timing. It proposes that the market timing of new technology launches is structured by two dimensions: firm-led coordination and stakeholders’ willingness to change. Combining these dimensions, the authors map four types of market timing situations managers can encounter: antagonistic, synergistic, flexible, and inflexible timing. Temporal legitimacy is achieved when a firm and its key stakeholders share timing norms about the ideal moments when activities should occur in a market process. The authors conceptualize proto-markets as prefacing the well-known market legitimacy stages. This article concludes with a detailed managerial decision tree on how to create the optimal technology product launch moment and avenues of future research on market timing beyond technology launches.

This research introduces a novel conceptualization of immersive service, defined as service that consumers are embedded in and surrounded by, such that their life experience is within the service and, in great part, constructed by it for some period of time (e.g., hospital stays, residential care, air travel). The authors examine two key questions: (1) How can characteristics of immersive service challenge consumer agency? (2) How do consumers bolster their agency in immersive service? They study these questions through a novel theoretical lens (figured worlds theory) and based on an ethnography in a residential care facility. The analyses unearth, define, and describe four conceptually novel characteristics of immersive service: encapsulation, positionality, multivocality and protocolization. These characteristics are crucial for marketers because, as the authors find, these structural aspects of immersive service can threaten consumer agency. The research also shows how consumers overcome challenges to agency. Specifically, consumers pursue five pathways toward their individual and collective agency: expanding the figured world, voicing, seeking task responsibility, challenging figured world protocols, and playing and imagining within the figured world. These findings break new conceptual ground for scholars while also being relevant for managers, consistent with ideals of Better Marketing for a Better World and transformative service research.

Anatomical depiction is a technique whereby the product is decomposed into components that are spatially arranged layer by layer to visually explicate its inner structure. The authors demonstrate that anatomical depiction, compared with nonanatomical depiction, enhances product valuation. This effect occurs because anatomical depiction elicits a “coming together” of the inner components in consumers’ minds, thereby evoking a gestalt image of the product—a process labeled “simulated assemblage.” The elicitation of simulated assemblage in turn boosts confidence in the product's performance. Two field experiments demonstrate that anatomical depiction leads to greater engagement in online settings such as peer-to-peer selling and social media advertising. Subsequently, seven laboratory and online experiments show when and how anatomical depiction elicits simulated assemblage (Studies 1a–c), test the process underlying the effect of anatomical depiction on product valuation (Studies 2a–b), and delineate two boundary conditions, showing that the positive effect of anatomical (vs. nonanatomical) depiction attenuates for consumers higher (vs. lower) in technology anxiety (Study 3) and when consumers have a hedonic (vs. utilitarian) consumption goal (Study 4). Collectively, this work provides insights to firms on how and when to use anatomical depiction to enhance consumers’ confidence in and valuation of the product.

Marketing to investors—especially when seeking funding for startups—is unique, with investors facing extreme uncertainty. This study uses foundational work in marketing, economics, management, finance, and psychology, as well as theories-in-use development with angel and venture capital investors, to build a business-to-investor marketing theory. The theory proposes that investors rely on marketing signals from startups, whether they are costly (financial, social, human, and intellectual resource endowments) or costless (verbal passion and concreteness). Results of a large quantitative field study of 5,334 written proposals from startups show that costly and costless signals have interactive effects on investor acceptance. The natural entrepreneurial tendency to compensate for a lack of costly signals with the use of passionate language backfires, reducing investor acceptance. Only when costly signals are communicated does a greater use of passion increase investor acceptance. Further, written proposals should be moderately concrete when they lack costly signals and should be formulated abstractly when plenty of costly signals can be offered. These contingencies provide insights into costly–costless signal interdependence in business-to-investor marketing and suggest how startups can optimize their written proposals for investor acceptance.

“Buy now, pay later” (BNPL) installment payments allow customers to pay for purchases in a series of interest-free installments over a short period of time. This research provides novel insights into how customer adoption of BNPL installment payments impacts spending. The authors leverage customer-level transaction data before and after the introduction of a BNPL installment payment service at a large U.S. retailer. A difference-in-differences analysis indicates that the adoption of BNPL installment payments is associated with (1) an increase in purchase incidence and (2) larger purchase amounts. These effects are statistically and economically significant over time. Moreover, this increase in spending is greater for smaller- (vs. larger-) basket shoppers and for shoppers who relied more heavily on credit (vs. debit) cards before adoption. Three preregistered experiments show that BNPL installment (vs. lump sum) payments increase spending by reducing perceived financial constraints. Specifically, BNPL installments alleviate perceived financial constraints by reducing perceived costs and facilitating budget control. These findings highlight the substantive role of BNPL installment payments in shaping purchase behavior and provide important implications for the management of BNPL payment schemes.

Conservatives are often blamed for spreading misinformation, but it is unclear whether certain situations trigger them and, if so, why. The authors examine situations that are politically polarized, meaning the topic and/or its framing conveys conflict, discord, or disagreement between the two main political parties (conservatives and liberals). The authors study whether conservatives react to polarized situations by spreading ingroup-skewed political misinformation that is objectively inaccurate but not necessarily understood to be false and whether liberals are less reactive. Using a multimethod approach, the authors conduct six studies, including analyses of statements by public figures and speeches by U.S. presidents, as well as controlled experiments. The results indicate that in polarized situations, conservatives’ need for ingroup dominance is elevated, so they convey more misinformation than liberals. In less polarized situations, conservatives’ need for ingroup dominance is tempered, reducing their misinformation conveyance. These findings suggest that misinformation should not be blamed solely on the individual trait of conservativism, as polarized situations exaggerate conservative motives and behaviors. While news media, social media, political figures, and others may be incentivized to emphasize political polarization to gain audiences and bolster engagement, the resulting misinformation harms truth, trust, and democracy. Possible remedies include improved fact-checking and media literacy education.