Pitch Perfect
Leveraging Creativity in Charity Marketing: The Impact of Engaging in Creative Activities on Subsequent Donation Behavior
Lidan Xu, Ravi Mehta & Darren Dahl
Journal of Marketing, forthcoming
Abstract:
Charities are constantly looking for new and more effective ways to engage potential donors in order to secure the resources needed to deliver services. The current work demonstrates that creative activities are one way for marketers to meet this challenge. Field and lab studies find that engaging potential donors in creative activities positively influences their donation behaviors (i.e., the likelihood of donation and the monetary amount donated). Importantly, the observed effects are shown to be context independent: they hold even when potential donors engage in creative activities unrelated to the focal cause of the charity (or the charitable organization itself). The findings suggest that engaging in a creative activity enhances the felt autonomy of the participant, thus inducing a positive affective state, which in turn leads to higher donation behaviors. Positive affect is demonstrated to enhance donation behaviors due to perceptions of donation impact and a desire for mood maintenance. However, the identified effects emerge only when one engages in a creative activity - not when the activity is noncreative, or when only the concept of creativity itself is made salient.
Down a Rabbit Hole: How Prior Media Consumption Shapes Subsequent Media Consumption
Kaitlin Woolley & Marissa Sharif
Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Consumers often become "stuck in a rabbit hole" when consuming media. They may watch several YouTube videos in the same category or view several artistic images on Instagram on the same theme, finding it difficult to stop. What contributes to this behavior, causing consumers to choose to consume additional media on a similar (vs. different) topic to what they just experienced? The authors examine a novel antecedent: the consecutive consumption of multiple similar media. After viewing multiple similar media consecutively, more consumers choose to view additional similar media over dissimilar media or complete a dissimilar activity entirely, even when the prior consumption pattern is externally induced. The rabbit hole effect occurs due to increased accessibility of the shared category - when a category is more accessible, people feel immersed in that category and anticipate that future options within that category will be more enjoyable. The authors identify three characteristics of media consumption that contribute to the rabbit hole effect by increasing category accessibility: similarity, repetition, and consecutiveness of prior media consumption. This research contributes to literature on technology, choice, and variety-seeking and offers implications for increasing (vs. slowing) similar consumption.
Emotional Expressions and Brand Status
Jeffrey Lee
Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This project investigates emotionality by brands on social media. First, a field data set of over 200,000 text and images posts by brands across two major platforms is analyzed. Using recent automated text analysis (Study 1a) and computer vision methods (Studies 1b and 1c), the author provides initial documentation of a negative relationship between brand emotionality and status. Exploring this relationship further, in Studies 2, 3, and 4, the author finds that brands can leverage this association, reducing emotionality in brand communications to increase perceived brand status. This strategy is effective because reduced emotionality is associated with high-status communication norms, which evoke high-status reference groups. This finding is moderated by the status context of the brand (Study 2) and the product type (Study 4).
Do Backer Affiliations Help or Hurt Crowdfunding Success?
Kelly Herd, Girish Mallapragada & Vishal Narayan
Journal of Marketing, forthcoming
Abstract:
Crowdfunding has emerged as a mechanism to raise funds for entrepreneurial ideas. On crowdfunding platforms, backers (i.e., individuals who fund ideas) jointly fund the same idea, leading to affiliations, or overlaps, within the community. The authors find that while an increase in the total number of backers may positively affect funding behavior, the resulting affiliations affect funding negatively. They reason that when affiliated others fund a new idea, individuals may feel less of a need to fund, a process known as "vicarious moral licensing." Drawing on data collected from 2,021 ideas on a prominent crowdfunding platform, the authors show that prior affiliation among backers negatively affects an idea's funding amount and eventual funding success. Creator engagement (i.e., idea description and updates) and backer engagement (i.e., Facebook shares) moderate this negative effect. The effect of affiliation is robust across several instrumental variables, model specifications, measures of affiliation, and multiple crowdfunding outcomes. Results from three experiments, a survey, and interviews with backers support the negative effect of affiliation and show that it can be explained by vicarious moral licensing. The authors develop actionable insights for creators to mitigate the negative effects of affiliation with the language used in idea descriptions and updates.
Variety Effects in Mobile Advertising
Omid Rafieian & Hema Yoganarasimhan
Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Users are often exposed to a sequence of short-lived marketing interventions (e.g., ads) within each usage session in mobile apps. This study examines how an increase in the variety of ads shown in a session affects a user's response to the next ad. The authors leverage the quasi-experimental variation in ad assignment in their data and propose an empirical framework that accounts for different types confounding to isolate the effects of a unit increase in variety. Across a series of models, the authors consistently show that an increase in ad variety in a session results in a higher response rate to the next ad: holding all else fixed, a unit increase in variety of the prior sequence of ads can increase the click-through rate on the next ad by approximately 13%. The authors then explore the underlying mechanism and document empirical evidence for an attention-based account. The paper offers important managerial implications since it identifies a source of interdependence across ad exposures that is often ignored in the design of advertising auctions. Further, the attention-based mechanism suggests that platforms can incorporate real-time attention measures to help advertisers with targeting dynamics.
Frequency versus Intensity: How Thinking of a Frequent Consumption Indulgence as Social versus Solitary affects Preferences for How to Cut Back
Peggy Liu
Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many consumers engage in frequent consumption indulgences. Because such indulgences accumulate resource costs (e.g., money, calories), consumers are often prompted or need to cut back, posing questions for how to design cut-back programs with consumer appeal. This research distinguishes between frequent indulgences that consumers think of as social (vs. solitary), demonstrating that thinking of an indulgence as social (vs. solitary) decreases preferences to cut "frequency" (how often the indulgence occasion occurs) and increases preferences to cut "intensity" (choosing a within-category substitute that involves lower resource expenditure). These effects are explained by differentiating between enjoyment from the product itself versus enjoyment from aspects outside the product. Thinking of an indulgence as social (vs. solitary) heightens anticipated enjoyment particularly for aspects outside of the product, decreasing interest in cutting the number of occasions (cutting frequency) and increasing interest in cutting back on the product itself via a within-category substitute (cutting intensity). This divergence in cut-back preferences for social (vs. solitary) experiences is thus eliminated: 1) when consumers think of social experiences with distant (vs. close) others, which involve lower enjoyment outside of the product, or 2) when solitary experiences primarily involve heightened enjoyment for aspects outside of the product.