Knowledge that Transforms

Technological advances have resulted in a hyperconnected world, requiring a reassessment of branding research from the perspectives of firms, consumers, and society. Brands are shifting away from single ownership to shared ownership, as heightened access to information and people is allowing more stakeholders to cocreate brand meanings and experiences alongside traditional brand owners and managers. Moreover, hyperconnectivity has allowed existing brands to expand their geographic reach and societal roles, while new types of branded entities (ideas, people, places, and organizational brands) are further stretching the branding space. To help establish a new branding paradigm that accounts for these changes, the authors address the following questions: (1) What are the roles and functions of brands?, (2) How is brand value (co)created?, and (3) How should brands be managed? Throughout the article, the authors also identify future research issues that require scholarly attention, with the aim of aligning branding theory and practice with the realities of a hyperconnected world.

Managers often use music as a marketing tool. For example, in advertising, they use music to intensify emotions; in service settings, they use slow music to boost relaxation and classical music to convey sophistication. In this article, the authors posit a novel effect—higher-pitched music can boost healthier choices. Recognizing that many perceptual characteristics of higher pitch (e.g., lighter, elevated) are conceptually associated with morality, they theorize that listening to higher- (vs. lower-) pitched music can cue morality. Furthermore, thoughts about morality can prompt moral self-perceptions and, in turn, thoughts about “good” behaviors, including healthy choices. Thus, listening to higher-pitched music may increase healthier choices. Employing field settings and online studies, the authors find that listening to higher-pitched music increases consumers’ likelihood to choose healthy options (Studies 1, 3, and 5), choose lower-calorie foods (Study 2), and engage in health-boosting activities (Study 4). This effect arises because high pitch raises the salience of morality thoughts (Studies 4 and 5). The article concludes with a discussion of theoretical and managerial implications.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) business models have become increasingly prevalent in the marketplace. However, little is known about what factors influence consumer perceptions of purchases from firms using these models. The authors propose that features inherent to the P2P model lead consumers to perceive high provider–firm independence, where providers are viewed as relatively independent from the platform on which they offer goods/services. Across a series of studies, the authors show that when P2P brands use provider-focused (vs. platform-focused) marketing communications, consumers perceive a purchase as helping an individual provider to a greater extent, which increases consumers’ willingness to pay and their likelihood of both making a purchase and downloading the brand’s app. This is because provider-focused marketing communications in this context lead consumers to think about their purchase from the provider’s perspective, thus adopting an “empathy lens.” The authors further show that this effect does not extend to other business models. This work thus identifies provider- (vs. platform-) focused marketing communications as a way for marketing managers of P2P brands to drive important purchase-related outcomes.

Marketing excellence is a foundational principle for the discipline that is gaining increasing attention among managers and investors. Despite this, the nature of marketing excellence and its effectiveness remain unclear. This research offers insight by addressing two questions: (1) How do managers understand and exercise marketing excellence? and (2) How do investors evaluate marketing excellence? Study 1 merges insights from 39 in-depth interviews with senior executives and secondary data from 150 firm strategies to find that marketing excellence is a strategy type focused on achieving organic growth by executing priorities related to the marketing ecosystem, end user, and marketing agility. Study 2 quantifies the impact of marketing excellence on firm value by using a machine learning algorithm and text analysis through an original dictionary to classify the text from 8,317 letters to shareholders in 1,727 U.S. firm annual reports. Calendar-time portfolio models reveal abnormal one-year returns of up to 8.58% for marketing excellence—returns that outpace those associated with market orientation and marketing capabilities. Findings offer guidance to managers, educators, and investors regarding how marketing excellence manifests—paving the way for the allocation of firm resources to ensure that marketing drives organic growth.

When advertising products to consumers, firms sometimes conceal key aspects in an effort to arouse consumer curiosity. This research investigates when and how visual concealment tactics may benefit or hurt aesthetic product evaluations. The authors propose that when consumers are only able to view a portion of an aesthetic product, assessments of its appeal will be influenced by two interrelated mechanisms: curiosity to see the item completed and inferences about the item’s fully disclosed appearance. The authors show that heightened curiosity triggers feelings of positive affect that are transferred to the product itself, a process that may inflate preferences and choice likelihoods for products beyond what would occur if the full image were known. This transference effect, however, has an important boundary: it works only when initial consumer inferences about the appeal of the product are positive or emotionally congruent with the positive affect triggered by curiosity. The key implication is that, ironically, the products likely to benefit most from concealment tactics are those that have the least to hide. The authors provide evidence for these effects and the underlying mechanism using six experiments that manipulate concealment in a variety of task settings.

Companies are increasingly held accountable for their corporate social irresponsibility (CSI). However, the extent to which a CSI event damages the firm largely depends on the coverage of this event in high-reach news media. Using the theory of news value developed in communications research, the authors explain the amount of media coverage by introducing a set of variables related to the event, the involved brand, and media outlet. The authors analyze a sample of 1,054 CSI events that were reported in 77 leading media outlets in five countries in the period 2008–2014. Estimation results reveal many drivers. For example, the number of media covering the story may be 39% higher for salient and strong brands. 80% more media report the event if a foreign brand is involved in a domestic CSI event. When a brand advertises heavily or exclusively in a news medium, this reduces the likelihood of the news medium to cover negative stories about the brand. The average financial loss at the U.S. stock market due to a CSI event amounts to US$321 million. However, the market reacts to the event only if 4 or more U.S. high-reach media outlets report on the event.

Stakeholders have long pressured firms to provide societal benefits in addition to generating shareholder wealth. Such benefits have traditionally come in the form of corporate social responsibility. However, many stakeholders now expect firms to demonstrate their values by expressing public support for or opposition to one side of a partisan sociopolitical issue, a phenomenon the authors call “corporate sociopolitical activism” (CSA). Such activities differ from commonly favored corporate social responsibility and have the potential to both strengthen and sever stakeholder relationships, thus making their impact on firm value uncertain. Using signaling and screening theories, the authors analyze 293 CSA events initiated by 149 firms across 39 industries, and find that, on average, CSA elicits an adverse reaction from investors. Investors evaluate CSA as a signal of a firm’s allocation of resources away from profit-oriented objectives and toward a risky activity with uncertain outcomes. The authors further identify two sets of moderators: (1) CSA’s deviation from key stakeholders’ values and brand image and (2) characteristics of CSA’s resource implementation, which affect investor and customer responses. The findings provide new and important implications for marketing theory and practice.

Online virality has attracted the attention of academics and marketers who want to identify the characteristics of online content that promote sharing. This article adds to this body of research by examining the phenomenon of improvised marketing interventions (IMIs)—social media actions that are composed and executed in real time proximal to an external event. Using the concept of quick wit, and theorizing that the effect of IMIs is furthered by humor and timeliness or unanticipation, the authors find evidence of these effects on both virality and firm value across five multimethod studies, including quasiexperiments, experiments, and archival data analysis. These findings point to the potential of IMIs in social media and to the features that firms should proactively focus on managing in order to reap the observed online sharing and firm value benefits.

This research documents how negative reviews, when perceived as unfair, can activate feelings of empathy toward firms that have been wronged. Six studies and four supplemental experiments provide converging evidence that this experienced empathy for the firm motivates supportive consumer responses such as paying higher purchase prices and reporting increased patronage intentions. Importantly, this research highlights factors that can increase or decrease empathy toward a firm. For instance, adopting the reviewer’s perspective when evaluating an unfair negative review can reduce positive consumer responses to a firm, whereas conditions that enhance the ability to experience empathy—such as when reviews are highly unfair, when the identity of the employee is made salient, or when the firm responds in an empathetic manner—can result in positive consumer responses toward the firm. Overall, this work extends the understanding of consumers’ responses to word of mouth in the marketplace by highlighting the role of perceived (un)fairness. The authors discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the findings for better management of consumer reviews.

The role of culture in consumers’ price search and behavior has received limited attention in the literature. In the present research, the authors examine how the cultural dimension of power distance belief (PDB)—the extent to which people accept and endorse hierarchy—influences consumers’ price sensitivity. The authors propose that consumers high (vs. low) in PDB are less price sensitive because they have a higher need for closure, which motivates them to “seize and freeze” on a current offer and quickly arrive at the final purchase decision rather than search for a better price. Accordingly, the relationship between PDB and price sensitivity is moderated by variables that alter consumers’ need for closure, such as social density. Six studies (and five more summarized in the Web Appendices) using a variety of operationalizations of the key variables provide robust support for the relationship between PDB and price sensitivity and shed light on the underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.