Getting Branded
The Fateful First Consumer Review
Sungsik Park, Woochoel Shin & Jinhong Xie
Marketing Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper uncovers the striking power of a product’s first consumer review. Our analytical model suggests that two key metrics of online consumer reviews, valence and volume, are not independent, but instead evolve interdependently. This interdependence forms a mechanism to transfer a (dis)advantage from a product’s first review to both a long-lasting (dis)advantage in future word-of-mouth (WOM) valence and an increasing (dis)advantage in future WOM volume. As a result, a single consumer review can significantly influence the fate of a given product. These theoretical predictions, although seemingly unlikely, are supported by our empirical investigations. For example, more than 30% of vacuum cleaner models offered by both Amazon.com and BestBuy.com receive first reviews of opposite valence on the two platforms. Those with a negative first review subsequently suffer a loss in both valence and volume vis-à-vis their counterparts with a positive first review, even after 36 months. More strikingly, the first-review effect on WOM volume increases over time. Our findings reveal a crucial weakness in the user-generated information mechanism. As a consumption-based information source, it creates an information-availability bias such that when a product receives a negative first review, it not only suffers low initial sales, but also loses the opportunity to correct the possible negative bias via subsequent reviews. These findings have substantial implications for online sellers, e-commerce platform providers, and consumers.
Is Nestlé a Lady? The Feminine Brand Name Advantage
Ruth Pogacar et al.
Journal of Marketing, forthcoming
Abstract:
A brand name’s linguistic characteristics convey brand qualities independent of the name’s denotative meaning. For instance, name length, sounds, and stress can signal masculine or feminine associations. This research examines the effects of such gender associations on three important brand outcomes: attitudes, choice, and performance. Across six studies using both observational analyses of real brands and experimental manipulations of invented brands the authors show that linguistically feminine names increase perceived warmth, which improves brand outcomes. Feminine brand names enhance attitudes and choice share – both hypothetically and consequentially – and are associated with better brand performance. The authors establish boundary conditions, showing that the feminine brand name advantage is attenuated when the typical user is male and when products are utilitarian.
Revising the Canon: How Andy Warhol Became the Most Important American Modern Artist
David Galenson
University of Chicago Working Paper, February 2021
Abstract:
Quantitative analysis of narratives of art history published since 2000 reveals that scholars and critics now judge that Andy Warhol has surpassed Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns as the most important modern American painter. Auction prices suggest that collectors share this opinion. Disaggregated analysis of the published narratives by decade reveals that Warhol first gained clear critical recognition as the leading Pop artist in the 1990s, and then as the most important American artist overall in the 2000s. This rise in Warhol’s status appears initially to have been a result of his enormous influence on Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and others in the cohort that transformed the New York art world in the 1980s, and subsequently of his persisting influence on leading artists around the world who have emerged since the 1990s, including Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, and Ai Weiwei. Warhol’s many radical conceptual innovations, that transformed both the appearance of art and the behavior of artists, made him not only the most important American artist, but the most important Western artist overall of the second half of the twentieth century.
Attitudes Based on Feelings: Fixed or Fleeting?
Matthew Rocklage & Andrew Luttrell
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Researchers and practitioners want to create opinions that stick. Yet whereas some opinions stay fixed, others are as fleeting as the time it takes to report them. In seven longitudinal studies with more than 20,000 individuals, we found that attitudes based more on emotion are relatively fixed. Whether participants evaluated brand-new Christmas gifts or one of 40 brands, the more emotional their opinion, the less it changed over time, particularly if it was positive. In a word-of-mouth linguistic analysis of 75,000 real-world online reviews, we found that the more emotional consumers are in their first review, the more that attitude persists when they express it again even years later. Finally, more emotion-evoking persuasive messages create attitudes that decay less over time, further establishing emotion’s causal effect. These effects persist above and beyond other attitude-strength attributes. Interestingly, we also found that lay individuals generally fail to appreciate the relation between emotionality and attitude stability.
Mickey D’s Has More Street Cred Than McDonald’s: Consumer Brand Nickname Use Signals Information Authenticity
Zhe Zhang & Vanessa Patrick
Journal of Marketing, forthcoming
Abstract:
Consumers often observe how other consumers interact with brands to inform their own brand judgments. This research demonstrates that brand relationship quality-indicating cues, such as brand nicknames (e.g., Mickey D’s for McDonald’s and Wally World for Walmart), enhance perceived information authenticity in online communication. An analysis of historical Twitter data followed by six experiments (using both real and fictitious brands across different online platforms, e.g., online reviews and social media posts) show that brand nickname use in user-generated content signals a writer’s relationship quality with the target brand from the reader’s perspective, which the authors term inferred brand attachment (IBA). The authors demonstrate that IBA boosts perceived information authenticity and leads to positive downstream consequences, such as purchase willingness and information sharing. The authors also find that this effect is attenuated when brand nicknames are used in firm-generated content. How consumers’ relationships with brands are portrayed and perceived in a social context (e.g., via brand nickname use) serves as a novel context to examine user-generated content and provides valuable managerial insight regarding how to leverage consumers’ brand attachment cues in brand strategy and online information management.
Uncertainty Evokes Consumers’ Preference for Brands Incongruent with their Global–Local Citizenship Identity
Sharon Ng, Ali Faraji-Rad & Rajeev Batra
Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research demonstrates that under states of certainty, consumers with a relatively stronger global (local) identity prefer global (local) brands, whereas under states of uncertainty, consumers with a relatively stronger global (local) identity prefer local (global) brands. This effect occurs because uncertainty (certainty) activates a divergent (convergent) thinking style, which results in a preference for options that are more distant from (closer to) the identity to which consumers associate more strongly. The effect holds both when individuals’ global–local citizenship identity is measured and when it is manipulated. The research further establishes an important boundary condition for the effect. The effect holds in the citizenship identity context because people normally associate themselves with both local and global citizenship identities, and situational or dispositional factors only influence the degree to which they associate with each identity. The effect does not surface when individuals construe their local–global citizenship identities as interfering, meaning they conceive that holding one identity conflicts with holding the other.