Knowing Your Market
Appearance for Females, Functionality for Males? The False Lay Belief about Gender Difference in Product Preference
Xianchi Dai et al.
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
It is common that marketers design and position pretty products more to female consumers than to male consumers, suggesting they generally believe that females have a stronger preference than males for product form over function and apply this belief to their marketing practices. However, this research demonstrates that this belief is often inconsistent with actual preferences. Across seven studies and four follow-up studies, involving both hypothetical and field settings, we demonstrate that both marketers and consumers hold such a belief about gender difference and overpredict females' preference for form-superior (vs. function-superior) products relative to males. Specifically, people tend to choose form-superior (vs. function-superior) products for female (vs. male) others, but female consumers do not choose form-superior (vs. function-superior) products for themselves more than do male consumers. We further provide convergent evidence for the underlying mechanism and boundary conditions by showing that a) people's choices for others and themselves are more in line with the lay belief about gender difference when they hold a stronger belief, and b) people's choices for distant (vs. close) others are more in line with this lay belief. We further assess the effectiveness of several debiasing interventions and show that this lay belief is quite robust.
A Longitudinal Examination of the Relationship Between National-Level Per Capita Advertising Expenditure and National-Level Life Satisfaction Across 76 Countries
Michael Wiles et al.
Marketing Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Advertising theory offers competing perspectives on how advertising might affect life satisfaction. For instance, advertising may have some negative effects by increasing materialism, or it may have some positive effects by reducing marketplace uncertainty. Yet research investigating these connections remains limited. We compile a data set of per capita advertising expenditure to investigate advertising's relationship with life satisfaction within 76 countries from 2006 to 2019. We deal with several sources of endogeneity and account for other determinants of life satisfaction (e.g., gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, social support) in our analysis. Results from a within-country fixed-effect model indicate that per capita advertising expenditure is positively related to national average life satisfaction. Moderation analyses of this aggregate secondary data and two individual-level experiments provide mechanistic evidence that this occurs because of advertising's ability to reduce marketplace uncertainty. However, supplemental analyses and an additional experiment indicate that this positive relationship is attenuated through a materialism pathway in certain situations (e.g., related to cultural, income, and subjective inequality factors) and can become negative. As such, we provide the first nuanced and multifaceted view of advertising's complex relationship with life satisfaction in the marketing literature.
Divergent Versus Relevant Ads: How Creative Ads Affect Purchase Intention for New Products
Hui Jiang et al.
Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Creative ads are applied widely in new product marketing. The present research explores the impact of creative ads (divergent vs. relevant ads) on purchase intention for really new products and incrementally new products. A series of studies concludes that (1) divergent ads are more effective for promoting incrementally new products, (2) relevant ads are more effective for promoting really new products, (3) self-referencing mediates the joint effect of creative ads and product newness on purchase intention, and (4) there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between self-referencing and purchase intention for new products. Theoretically, the authors argue that a moderate amount of self-referencing is particularly desirable -- that is, there is a "Goldilocks region" that produces an optimal level of persuasion. They provide guidance to creative ad managers to help them reach the "Goldilocks region" when advertising new products.
It Looks Like "Theirs": When and Why Human Presence in the Photo Lowers Viewers' Liking and Preference for an Experience Venue
Zoe Lu, Suyeon Jung & Joann Peck
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Consumers and marketers often post photos of experiential consumption online. While prior research has studied how human presence in social media images impacts viewers' responses, the findings are mixed. The present research advances the current understanding by incorporating viewers' need for self-identity into their response model. Six studies, including an analysis of field data (14,725 Instagram photos by a top travel influencer) and five controlled experiments, find that the presence (vs. absence) of another human in the photo of an identity-relevant experience (e.g., a vacation, a wedding) can lower viewers' liking and preference for the venue (i.e., the vacation destination, the wedding venue) in the photo. This effect is mediated by viewers' feelings of others' ownership of the venue and moderated by the relevance of the experience to the viewer's self-identity as well as the distinctiveness of the human in the photo. This research is the first to investigate the impact of human presence in shared photos through the lens of psychological ownership and the identity-signaling function of ownership. The findings offer practical insights into when marketers should avoid human presence in advertisements and how to mitigate the negative impact of human presence in online photos.
A Mere Fan Effect on Home-Court Advantage
Scott Ganz & Kieran Allsop
Journal of Sports Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The existence of a home-court advantage is one of the most durable empirical patterns in all of sports. Yet, the mechanisms explaining its strength and persistence remain a mystery in large part because of well-known challenges with statistical identification. We use attendance restrictions in place during the 2020-2021 National Basketball Association regular season as an instrument in order to identify the effect of fans and crowd size on home-court advantage. We show that home teams win by 2.13 points, on average, when fans are present at games compared with 0.44 points when no fans are present. This equates to winning approximately 2.2 additional home games over the course of a regular season. In fixed effects instrumental variables regression models, we estimate that the marginal effect of an additional one thousand fans on home-court advantage is 1.7 points. We conclude that the mere presence of home fans, on its own, explains a larger share of home-court advantage than previously thought.
Is lending distance really changing? Distance dynamics and loan composition in small business lending
Robert Adams, Kenneth Brevoort & John Driscoll
Journal of Banking & Finance, November 2023
Abstract:
The increasing average distance between small businesses and their lenders has been used to argue that technological changes have allowed banks to lend at longer distances. Generally, studies assume that distance changes are uniform across loans and lenders. Our paper shows that, while average distance has increased substantially over the past two decades, banks themselves have not materially increased their lending distances. Instead, longer average distance was caused by a small number of banks that specialize in originating very small loans nationwide quadrupling their share of lending. Outside of these very small loans, small businesses remain dependent on local banks.