Knowing the Customer
The Pet Exposure Effect: Exploring The Differential Impact of Dogs Versus Cats on Consumer Mindsets
Lei Jia, Xiaojing Yang & Yuwei Jiang
Journal of Marketing, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite the ubiquity of pets in consumers' lives, scant research has examined how exposure to them (e.g., recalling past interactions with dogs and cats, viewing ads featuring a dog or a cat as the spokescharacter) influences consumer behavior. The authors demonstrate that exposure to dogs (cats) reminds consumers of the stereotypical temperaments and behaviors of the pet species, which activates a promotion- (prevention-) focused motivational mindset among consumers. Using secondary data, Study 1 shows that people in states with a higher percentage of dog (cat) owners search more promotion- (prevention-) focused words and report a higher COVID-19 transmission rate. Using multiple products, Studies 2 and 3 demonstrate that these regulatory mindsets, when activated by pet exposure, carry over to influence downstream consumer judgments, purchase intentions, and behaviors, even in pet-unrelated consumption contexts. Study 4 show that pet stereotypicality moderates the proposed effect such that the relationship between pet exposure and regulatory orientations persists to the extent consumers are reminded of the stereotypical temperaments and behaviors of the pet species. Studies 5- 7 examine the role of regulatory fit and evince that exposure to dogs (cats) leads to more favorable responses toward advertising messages featuring promotion- (prevention-) focused appeals.
Coordinated Capacity Reductions and Public Communication in the Airline Industry
Gaurab Aryal, Federico Ciliberto & Benjamin Leyden
Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate the allegation that legacy U.S. airlines communicated via earnings calls to coordinate with other legacy airlines in offering fewer seats on competitive routes. To this end, we first use text analytics to build a novel dataset on communication among airlines about their capacity choices. Estimates from our preferred specification show that the number of offered seats is 2% lower when all legacy airlines in a market discuss the concept of "capacity discipline." We verify that this reduction materializes only when legacy airlines communicate concurrently, and that it cannot be explained by other possibilities, including that airlines are simply announcing to investors their unilateral plans to reduce capacity, and then following through on those announcements.
How Does the Adoption of Ad Blockers Affect News Consumption?
Shunyao Yan, Klaus Miller & Bernd Skiera
Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Ad blockers allow users to browse websites without viewing ads. Online news publishers that rely on advertising income tend to perceive users' adoption of ad blockers purely as a threat to revenue. Yet, this perception ignores the possibility that avoiding ads - which users presumably dislike - may affect users' online news consumption behavior in positive ways. Using 3.1 million visits from 79,856 registered users on a news website, this research finds that ad blocker adoption has robust positive effects on the quantity and variety of articles users consume. Specifically, ad blocker adoption increases the number of articles that users read by 21.5%-43.3%, and it increases the number of content categories that users consume by 13.4%-29.1%. These effects are stronger for less-experienced users. The increase in news consumption stems from increases in repeat visits to the news website, rather than in the number of page impressions per visit. These post-adoption visits tend to start from direct navigation to the news website, rather than from referral sources. The authors discuss how news publishers could benefit from these findings, including exploring revenue models that consider users' desire to avoid ads.
Michelin Is Coming to Town: Organizational Responses to Status Shocks
Saverio Dave Favaron, Giada Di Stefano & Rodolphe Durand
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
What happens in the aftermath of the introduction of a new status ranking? In this study, we exploit the unique empirical opportunity generated by the release of the first edition of the Michelin Guide for Washington, DC, in the fall of 2016. We build on prior work on rankings as insecurity-inducing devices by suggesting that newly awarded high-status actors modify their self-presentation attributes to fit with what they believe audiences expect from the elite. Our results show that, depending on their standing prior to Michelin's entry, restaurants acted upon different attributes of their self-presentation. Restaurants with high prior standing emphasized attributes that channeled authenticity and exclusivity, which may imply that their Michelin designation triggered operational changes. Actors with low prior standing, on the other hand, acted on descriptive attributes that did not necessarily imply operational changes and could be easily manipulated to signal their belonging among the elite. We contribute to research on status and conformity by disentangling the sources and types of conformity behaviors that newly awarded high-status actors deploy.
Onboarding Salespeople: Socialization Approaches
Phillip Wiseman et al.
Journal of Marketing, forthcoming
Abstract:
The effective training of salespeople is crucial to a firm's success; there is arguably no more critical type of training than a salesperson's onboarding. In this study, the authors leverage a natural field experiment in which a firm's newly hired salespeople can undergo onboarding through either a decentralized program or a centralized program to examine the relative impact of each program. Drawing on organizational socialization theory, the authors consider whether an onboarding program that incorporates both individualized and institutionalized socialization tactics (the decentralized program) can develop salespeople into higher performers by encouraging them to take a more innovative and adaptive approach to different facets of the sales role. The findings reveal that salespeople who underwent the decentralized program achieved approximately 23.5% higher sales performance than those who underwent the centralized program. The performance benefits of the decentralized program were amplified for salespeople whose managers had a narrower span of control. In addition, these performance benefits were appreciable for those salespeople transitioning from another job but negligible for those transitioning from school. A scenario-based experiment enriches the field experiment's findings by showing evidence of the theorized mechanism underlying the sales performance benefits observed: the fostering of an innovative role orientation.
Digitization, Prediction, and Market Efficiency: Evidence from Book Publishing Deals
Christian Peukert & Imke Reimers
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Digitization has given creators direct access to consumers as well as a plethora of new data for suppliers of new products to draw on. We study how this affects market efficiency in the context of book publishing. Using data on about 50,000 license deals over more than 10 years, we identify the effects of digitization from quasi-experimental variation across book types. Consistent with digitization generating additional information for predicting product appeal, we show that the size of license payments more accurately reflects a product's ex post success, and more so for publishers that invest more in data analytics. These effects cannot be fully explained by changes in bargaining power or in demand. We estimate that efficiency gains are worth between 10% and 18% of publishers' total investments in book deals. Thus, digitization can have large impacts on the allocation of resources across products of varying qualities in markets in which product appeal has traditionally been difficult to predict ex ante.