Knowledge that Transforms

The role of marketers in sustaining traditions remains ambiguous. From weddings to funerals, commercial providers supply key resources to help consumers perform traditional practices. But marketization can also slide into crass commodification. However, past research remains unclear on how marketers can create consumer value from tradition. Our study resolves these ambiguities through an ethnographic study of zuò yuèzi, a Chinese postpartum confinement custom that continues to thrive in Chinese communities yet increasingly conflicts with contemporary ideals of autonomy, health, and scientific expertise. In the Asian cities where we conducted fieldwork (Singapore, Taipei, and Kuala Lumpur), a booming industry of confinement centers has emerged in response to these tensions. Drawing on practice theory, we show that the effectiveness of these commercial interventions depends on adapting key elements of tradition while preserving its teleoaffective structure: the moral purposes and affective orientations that define what a traditional practice is for and how it should feel. Our primary contribution is to advance a more constructive theorization of marketization that highlights the possibilities for value creation in the tradition domain.

Coupons have the potential to double, triple, or even quadruple sales (Neslin 2002). However, coupon redemption rates remain abysmally low, which causes inefficiencies in marketing, as coupons are sent to a large segment with only a small fraction responding. Hence, marketers are continuously trying to identify consumer segments that are more or less likely to respond to couponing efforts, as this knowledge allows marketers to fine-tune the segments to whom coupons are directed. Eight studies utilizing two field studies, a scanner panel dataset, and a series of experiments (and ten more studies in web appendix D) suggest that consumers higher in power distance belief are less likely to use coupons because they tend to be more skeptical about businesses’ motives. The authors also test several boundary conditions. This research provides managers with several strategies to enhance coupon use, including (a) targeting cultural segments lower in power distance belief, (b) activating low power distance belief via situational cues, (c) reducing skepticism towards businesses’ motives, and (d) offering price-matching guarantees.

How do multi-product firms adjust their product portfolios in response to increased competition, and what are the implications for policy evaluation? In high-tech markets, products with similar profits at launch may have predictably different future profit paths, shaping firms’ product introduction decisions. Using data from the Chinese smartphone market, the author shows that product life cycles (PLCs) vary systematically with product quality and market competition, and that firms act on these differences when introducing new products. The author embeds firms’ PLC expectations into a structural model of product portfolio competition and evaluates the effects of fringe entry induced by an industrial policy. Counterfactuals show that ignoring firms’ portfolio adjustments overstates consumer welfare gains from increased competition by 70%; conditional on portfolio adjustment, holding PLC expectations fixed understates firms’ portfolio response by 10% and overstates welfare gains by 9%. Increased low-end competition also shifts incumbent firms’ product introductions toward lower-quality “fighting brands.”

Major video streaming distributors are investing heavily in producing first-party (original) content, yet the economic viability of this high-cost strategy remains a subject of intense managerial debate. This paper develops an analytical model to investigate the optimal first-party content production strategy for asymmetric competing distributors. The analysis shows that two critical factors, existing content overlap and market price rigidity, affect their optimal strategies. In markets with high price rigidity, where subscription prices remain constant, increased existing content overlap may give distributors stronger incentives to invest in original content production. The equilibrium outcome can be both, only one, or neither producing first-party content. Conversely, in markets characterized by low price rigidity, where distributors can adjust subscription prices flexibly, high existing content overlap weakens their content production incentives. Importantly, compared to constant pricing, when prices are optimally adjusted, first-party and third-party content transition from substitutes to complements, and a win-win-win outcome can occur for distributors, third-party producer, and consumers. These findings challenge conventional wisdom regarding content competition and provide a strategic framework for managers to optimize content production investments based on their resource asymmetry and prevailing market pricing dynamics.

Protecting trade secrets is important for firms and policymakers because they are critical assets for firm performance and valuation. Extant research, however, seldom examines whether increases in trade secret protection have an impact on firms’ marketing actions to leverage their trade secrets, even though trade secret protection has limited value if firms cannot leverage them. Drawing on the attention-based view of the firm, this study proposes that stronger protection of trade secrets is likely to lead to higher managerial attention to leveraging trade secrets, resulting in higher advertising spending. The study tests this proposition by exploiting the staggered recognition of the inevitable disclosure doctrine (IDD) by U.S. state courts, a legal development that protects trade secrets by restricting employee movement to rival firms. The results show that firms headquartered in states that recognize IDD significantly increase their advertising spending. Consistent with the proposed contingency framework, the results also show that the positive effect of IDD recognition on advertising spending is weaker for firms with CEO duality but stronger for younger firms and firms in industries with higher peer advertising spending. Post hoc analyses show that increases in advertising spending following IDD recognition are associated with higher firm sales.

Price increases can elicit a range of negative customer responses, from dissatisfaction to complaints, exits, and even boycotts. Practicing managers and academics agree that firms must justify their price increases, and consider three justification types—cost, market, and quality—as the primary means to do so. Yet, the comparative effectiveness of these justifications in reducing customer attrition remains unknown. The authors collaborated with a multi-site Canadian storage provider to design and implement three experiments. Study 1 is a randomized field experiment involving 10 cohorts of 1,626 actual customers, demonstrating the effects of cost, market, and quality justifications on customer attrition, and variations in these effects across levels of justification concreteness, and price increase percentage and dollar amount. In marked contrast to prior practitioner recommendations and academic research, market justification is found to result in the lowest customer attrition. The authors use heterogeneity in the effects of the justifications to demonstrate that customers’ switching costs perceptions explain this finding. Studies 2 and 3 are online scenario experiments that further examine how these justifications affect customers’ switching costs and fairness perceptions. Together, these studies provide important insights to firms seeking to “cushion the blow” of price increases.

Social media is essential to how brands are built and managed, especially for person brands. This research investigates how political person brands’ internal linguistic consistency shapes social media engagement. Specifically, the authors examine linguistic consistency relative to a candidate’s own prior social media posts (i.e., internal linguistic consistency). Using social media data from the 2020 U.S. presidential election and adopting an empirics-first approach, the authors find that three distinct constructs comprise internal linguistic consistency of person brands: topic (consistency in subject matter or themes), psychological (consistency in psychological states), and semantic (consistency in information and meaning), revealing that each dimension has its own best strategy: (1) topic inconsistency, (2) psychological consistency, (3) semantic inconsistency. The authors find that these effects are moderated by sudden changes in word of mouth, such as a sudden spike in online conversation about a political opponent, and by whether the election is a primary or a general election, such that moderate semantic consistency is most effective during the general election. The findings demonstrate the importance of simultaneously considering multiple dimensions of internal linguistic consistency in person brand strategies.

This manuscript examines whether , when , how , and why sales managers should get involved in customer exchanges as members of sales teams. It does so by drawing on the literature on status and deference in teams to advance novel hypotheses and testing them across seven main studies. Results of Study 1—based on a multisource dataset involving over 5.5 million business-to-consumer (B2C) exchanges—indicate that a sales manager’s involvement as a member of a sales team enhances the team’s performance ( whether ). These performance-enhancing effects are stronger for new customers relative to returning customers ( when ). To address how managers should engage when involved in sales teams, the manuscript introduces the concept of selling position primacy and demonstrates that performance is enhanced when sales managers take on a secondary, rather than a primary, selling position within the team. Experimental results across several settings (e.g., automotive services, retail clothing, and kitchen showroom) reinforce these findings and further identify customer-perceived team status and customer orientation as the mechanisms explaining why sales manager involvement and selling position primacy impact sales performance.

People with disabilities are among the most stigmatized groups in society, and the most underrepresented in advertising. We investigate advertising practices by which brands can include people with disabilities in ways that go beyond mere visibility. Across nine preregistered studies involving both hedonic and functional goods and services, we show a robust positive effect of featuring people with disabilities in advertisements on consumers’ attitudes toward the ad, brand, and product. This disability inclusion effect generalizes broadly across products, endorsers (e.g., customers, models), disabilities (both visible and invisible), and consumer segments (people with and without disabilities). It arises because the brand demonstrates its support for the societal integration of people with disabilities. Accordingly, the effect arises whether the brand includes people with disabilities voluntarily or to comply with industry regulation, because both actions can produce the same perceived outcome—meaningful, concrete support of people with disabilities. On the contrary, the effect disappears when a brand’s portrayal emphasizes vulnerability or impairment rather than agency and social inclusion, or the brand conspicuously highlights the model’s disability in the ad itself in a tokenizing manner. Collectively, these studies reveal how managers can support people with disabilities and earn consumers’ patronage without risking their backlash.

How do brands provide identity value to consumers? The marketing literature provides three primary answers to this key managerial question: by building brand communities; by forging anthropomorphized relations whereby consumers regard brands as relationship partners; and by following cultural branding principles. This article argues that these three conceptual frameworks have often misdiagnosed the sources of the identity value that consumers derive from brands. Accordingly, it proposes that brand performativity is an unrecognized explanatory factor that underlies these extant theorizations. Drawing on sociological theories of performativity, it conceptualizes brand performativity as an arrangement of discourses, practices, material resources, normative standards, metrics, and goals that coalesce as a script that consumers can use to cultivate identity value through brand-mediated experiences. Through an analysis of CrossFit, it demonstrates that a theoretical sensitivity to brand performativity provides a fuller picture of how brands generate consumer identity value. It explains how this conceptualization revises strategic implications that follow from the aforementioned theorizations, especially for brands implementing more extensive modes of performativity. It closes with a discussion of the broader applicability of brand performativity framework and how it can help marketing managers transcend the conventional product versus service brand and functional versus expressive branding strategy distinctions.