Knowledge that Transforms

In recent years, marketing researchers have become increasingly interested in under- and overreporting. However, there are few suitable approaches to operationalize deviations from the truth, particularly in behavioral domains in which self-reports are usually the only viable method of choice to measure behavior or attitudes. An especially difficult situation arises if some people underreport while others overreport. This article proposes a Bayesian item response theory model to quantify under- and overreporting in surveys. The method utilizes within-person differences between answers obtained under direct questioning (no privacy protection) and randomized-response questioning (which ensures item-level privacy protection). This method has the important features of incorporating behavioral response-mode effects (e.g., privacy loss when switching from direct to randomized-response questioning, response-mode inertia effects) and allowing the direction of bias to differ across respondents. The authors provide an empirical application for excessive alcohol consumption involving 1,408 respondents from a commercial web panel. The results show that respondents are averse to decreases in privacy and that randomized response is less effective if respondents provide biased responses to earlier direct questions.

The authors identify customers, termed “Harbingers of failure,” who systematically purchase new products that flop. Their early adoption of a new product is a strong signal that a product will fail—the more they buy, the less likely the product will succeed. Firms can identify these customers through past purchases of either new products that failed or existing products that few other customers purchase. The authors discuss how these insights can be readily incorporated into the new product development process. The findings challenge the conventional wisdom that positive customer feedback is always a signal of future success.

Consumers readily indicate that they like options that appear dissimilar—for example, enjoying both rustic lake vacations and chic city vacations, or liking both scholarly documentary films and action-packed thrillers. However, when predicting other consumers’ tastes for the same items, people believe that a preference for one precludes enjoyment of the dissimilar other. Five studies show that people sensibly expect others to like similar products, but erroneously expect others to dislike dissimilar ones. While people readily select dissimilar items for themselves (particularly if the dissimilar item is of higher quality than a similar one), they fail to predict this choice for others—even when monetary rewards are at stake. The tendency to infer dislike from dissimilarity is driven by a belief that others have narrow and homogeneous ranges of preferences.

People who want to control their body weight often aim to regulate both energy intake (by reducing food consumption) and energy expenditure (by increasing physical activity), thus addressing both sides of the energy balance equation. Marketers have developed fitness-branded food that may lead restrained eaters (i.e., consumers who are chronically concerned about their body weight) to believe that they can achieve these two goals at the same time by consuming the food. The purpose of this research is to investigate the effects of fitness branding in food marketing (i.e., the integration of fitness into the branding of food) on consumption and physical activity in restrained (vs. unrestrained) eaters. The authors show that fitness branding increases consumption volumes for restrained eaters unless consumers view the food as dietary forbidden. Restrained eaters are also less physically active after consuming fitness-branded food, and food consumption volumes mediate this effect in restrained eaters. Fitness branding may therefore have undesirable effects on the weight-control behaviors of restrained eaters because it discourages physical activity despite an increase in consumption, which is contrary to the principle of energy balance.

Consumers frequently consume hedonic products together with other consumers and derive value from this shared experience. This article investigates the impact of shared consumption, a type of social influence that determines the enjoyment of joint experiences, in the context of a typical hedonic product: movies. The authors argue that this type of influence has important consequences for the diffusion curves of hedonic goods that are consumed together and the effectiveness of advertising in generating launch and postlaunch sales. An empirically validated agent-based model simulates the U.S. motion picture market, with new movies launching, competing, and exiting. The agent-based model serves as a means to demonstrate the essential role of shared consumption for explaining movie life cycles and tests how advertising expenditures accelerate and/or acquire movies’ demand in markets with varying levels of shared consumption. The results provide key theoretical insights for the new product diffusion of hedonic products and help managers predict the financial consequences of their strategic decisions.

Launching breakthrough and incremental new products is vital to firm performance; it also resonates with both ego (i.e., directly connected partners) and global (i.e., interconnected ties in an industry) network perspectives. Prior research has listed several ego network– and global network–level factors that affect innovations, but this study goes a step further, to reveal the interactions of these factors as critical product launch mechanisms. An analysis of alliance networks in the consumer packaged goods industry from 1990 to 2010 shows that a central position in a global network represents a double-edged sword: it improves a firm's incremental new product launches but harms its breakthrough new product launches. Furthermore, a firm's ego network (manifested as density and diversity) and R&D capability enable it to leverage its global network position by enhancing the benefits for incremental new products and mitigating its hazards for breakthrough new products. This study's findings thus offer new insights into the role of ego and global networks in facilitating or hindering new product launches.

Consumers often make product choices that involve the consideration of money and time. Building on dual-process models, the authors propose that these two basic resources activate qualitatively different modes of processing: while money is processed analytically, time is processed more affectively. Importantly, this distinction then influences the stability of consumer preferences. An initial set of three experiments demonstrates that, compared with a control condition free of the consideration of either resource, money consideration generates significantly more violations of transitivity in product choice, while time consideration has no such impact. The next three experiments use multiple approaches to demonstrate the role of different processing modes associated with money versus time consideration in this result. Finally, two additional experiments test ways in which the cognitive noise associated with the analytical processing that money consideration triggers could be reduced, resulting in more consistent preferences.

Considerable attention has been given to the notion that there exists a set of human-like characteristics associated with brands, referred to as brand personality. Here we combine newly available machine learning techniques with functional neuroimaging data to characterize the set of processes that give rise to these associations. We show that brand personality traits can be captured by the weighted activity across a widely distributed set of brain regions previously implicated in reasoning, imagery, and affective processing. That is, as opposed to being constructed via reflective processes, brand personality traits appear to exist a priori inside the minds of consumers, such that we were able to predict what brand a person is thinking about based solely on the relationship between brand personality associations and brain activity. These findings represent an important advance in the application of neuroscientific methods to consumer research, moving from work focused on cataloguing brain regions associated with marketing stimuli to testing and refining mental constructs central to theories of consumer behavior.

Choice-based conjoint is a popular technique for characterizing consumers’ choices. Three eye-tracking studies explore decision processes in conjoint choices that take less time and become more accurate with practice. These studies reveal two simplification processes that are associated with greater speed and reliability. Alternative focus gradually shifts attention toward options that represent promising choices, whereas attribute focus directs attention to important attributes that are most likely to alter or confirm a decision. Alternative and attribute focus increase in intensity with practice. In terms of biases, the authors detect a small but consistent focus on positive aspects of the item chosen and negative aspects of the items not chosen. They also show that incidental exposures arising from the first-examined alternative or from alternatives in a central horizontal location increase attention but have a much more modest and often insignificant impact on conjoint choices. Overall, conjoint choice is found to be a process that is (1) largely formed by goal-driven values that respondents bring to the task and (2) relatively free of distorting effects from task layout or random exposures.