November 2009

Name-Letter Branding
Most people would scoff at the idea that their names can influence their choices, especially when dealing with major decisions such as selecting a career, a home, or even a partner. However, Miguel Brendl finds that your liking for the letters of your name, which is really driven by your liking for yourself, might spill over to objects and influence your choices.

Miguel Brendl

Amitava Chattopadhyay

Brett W Pelham

Mauricio Carvallo

October 2009

The Art of Persuasion
What types of messages are most persuasive? For example, would you be more likely to buy a TiVo if an ad described it as offering you freedom or if it explained how you could replay sports events?

Angela Y. Lee

Punam Anand Keller

Brian Sternthal

October 2009

Colored by the Company You Keep
The Aston Martin sports car has been repeatedly featured in James Bond movies. This use is predicated on the belief that positive associations with a context transfer to the target brand. Brian Sternthal tells us that marketers should pay close attention to managing not only their brands but also their brands’ environment.

Myungwoo Nam

Brian Sternthal

September 2009

Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Alexander Chernev has spent his career studying consumer behavior. In a recent study he found that a consumer’s personal goals, particularly their concern for safety and security, strongly influence how likely they are to switch to something new or stay with what they know.

Alexander Chernev

August 2009

Rational Retail Pricing
If there is one thing you would assume from basic marketing principles, it is that retailers should adapt prices to changing demand. Vincent Nijs notes, however, that if the cost of adapting prices exceeds the benefits, they won’t.

Shuba Srinivasan

Koen Pauwels

Vincent Nijs

August 2009

Super-Premium Ice Cream
When regulators evaluate proposed mergers and acquisitions, they use sophisticated econometric models. Current models consider price but not product variety. Michael Mazzeo and colleagues provide insights into conditions that result in merged companies providing greater product variety.

Michael J. Mazzeo

Michaela Draganska

Katja Seim

July 2009

$1,000 Cash Back
Auto manufacturers often turn to rebates to stimulate sales. The two most commonly used subsidies are payments made directly to customers and payments made directly to car dealers. Which one works better? Meghan Busse and Florian Zettelmeyer help sort out the answer.

Meghan Busse

Jorge Silva-Risso

Florian Zettelmeyer

June 2009

Counterfeit Competition
Strong intellectual property rights (IPRs) are generally considered necessary to encourage innovation and protect the price of authentic products. However, research by Yi Qian (Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management) shows that under some circumstances the quality and prices of authentic goods can actually increase with the market entry of counterfeit products.

Yi Qian

May 2009

What’s in a Frame Anyway?
We have all been taught not to judge by appearances because our conclusions might be wrong. However, it seems we cannot help relying on appearances to draw inferences and form judgments.

Derek D. Rucker

Richard E. Petty

Pablo Briñol

May 2009

Too Conscious to Decide?
For centuries, humans have been thinking about thinking. In the early 1600s, Rene Descartes famously asserted cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” In the late seventeenth century, John Locke was among the first to write about consciousness.

Ap Dijksterhuis

Maarten Bos

Loran Nordgren

Rick van Baaren

May 2009

People are Talking
Talk may be cheap, but listening to what people are saying about your product can be a valuable method of improving corporate performance. According to recent research, there is a measurable connection between what is being said about a product in online posts and real-time customer behavior.

Shyam Gopinath

Jacquelyn Thomas

Lakshman Krishnamurthi

April 2009

Walking the Walk
When Intel’s CEO announced that “every idea and technical solution should be focused on meeting customers’ needs from the outset,” he was proposing a radical shift from an organization focused on microprocessor design to a company whose culture would prioritize understanding and meeting specific customer needs (Edwards, 2005). As more firms make the effort to become customer-focused, it is important to comprehend not only what a market orientation is, but also how such a transformation occurs.

Gary F. Gebhardt

Gregory Carpenter

John F Sherry Jr.

March 2009

Culture and Commitment
Imagine two advertisements for a personal digital assistant (PDA) brand. The first highlights “self-focused” or individualist product benefits, such as enhanced productivity and organization. The second focuses instead on “collectivist” or group benefits, such as connecting with friends and family.

Nidhi Agrawal

Durairaj Maheswaran

February 2009

A (Sales)Taxing Proposition
It has long been said that no things in life are more certain than death and taxes. If anything could challenge these certainties, it might be the Internet – regarding taxes at least. While its technical capabilities and reach expand rapidly, the Internet leaves in its wake many complex, unresolved legal and economic issues.

Eric T Anderson

Nathan M Fong

Duncan I Simester

Catherine E Tucker

December 2008

Discounted Diapers and Stockpiles of Soup
What did Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco all have in common? Accounting abuses on a grand scale and massive financial deception from the very highest levels of management. As investors lost billions of dollars, the earnings management game with its fuzzy math and earnings magic came under fire, and stronger, sweeping legislation was enacted to reform American business practices.

Craig J. Chapman

Thomas J. Steenburgh

December 2008

Don’t Interrupt Me Now
Imagine that you are highly absorbed in reading a magazine story and you find a print advertisement between the pages: will the experience of being absorbed in the reading influence how much you like the advertised product?

Jing Wang

Bobby J. Calder

November 2008

Jack of All Trades or Master of One?
Does an iPod play music better than an iPhone? Does a standalone printer make higher quality printouts than an all-in-one printer/fax/copy machine? Does a laundry detergent promising great cleaning power remove stains better than a laundry detergent that promises both great cleaning power and enhanced protection against fading?

Alexander Chernev

October 2008

Brand Scandal Spillover
Many of us remember the 1993 Jack-in-the-Box scandal involving tainted hamburger meat: An outbreak of E. coli food poisoning left more than 700 people ill and four dead (New York Times, 1993). In the wake of the scandal, sales at Jack-in-the-Box plummeted. Although this outcome is not surprising, it is less obvious how the scandal affected competitors such as McDonald's and Burger King.

Michelle L. Roehm

Alice M. Tybout

August 2008

Own-Brand and Cross-Brand Retail Pass-Through
Trade promotions drive the marketing strategies of packaged goods manufacturers. Roughly 60 percent of the marketing budget of major packaged goods manufacturers goes to offering wholesale discounts to retail partners. Not surprisingly then, manufacturers are concerned with how much of their promotional pricing gets passed through to the end-users of their products. Discrepancies between manufacturer and retailer estimates of pass-through often occur. Retailers claim to pass-through $7.5 billion more in trade promotions than manufacturers believe they do. Recent research published in Marketing Science explores this gap and offers insights into retailer behavior with regard to these promotions.

David A. Besanko

Jean-Pierre Dubé

Sachin Gupta

August 2008

The Outlet Mall
They average over 200,000 square feet, with some up to five times that large. We drive past them all the time, their bright lights beckoning from just off our highways. And even though about 40 percent of Americans visit at least one of them in a given year—sometimes on increasingly popular "bus tours" that leave from city centers—they are hardly unique to the United States, with a growing presence in Europe, Japan, and even the Middle East, where the Dubai Outlet Mall (at 1 million square feet) opened in August of 2007, housing Tommy Hilfiger, Guess, and Esprit stores among many others.

Anne T. Coughlan

David A. Soberman

July 2008

Emotion and Consumer Behavior
When imagining a vacation, which resort do individuals prefer: a quiet retreat to relax at or an active destination to explore? Derek Rucker (Kellogg School of Management, marketing department) and Richard Petty (Ohio State University, psychology department) examined the influence of specific emotions on consumer choices and the implications of those influences for persuasion.

Derek D. Rucker

Richard E. Petty

June 2008

Patent Protection and Innovation in Pharma
Viagra doesn't grow on trees. Neither does Advil, Lipitor, or any of the myriad other drugs that make their way to market. Those biochemical breakthroughs are rooted in human innovations, not magic. Like most other human endeavors, innovation is thought to be encouraged by some pushing and prodding.

Yi Qian

May 2008

How Many Reasons Do You Need to Like BMWs?
If you were asked to come up with one reason to drive a BMW, what would it be? What if you were asked for ten reasons? Now imagine your opinion of the BMW after searching your mind for reasons to drive it; would your evaluation be more favorable after coming up with one reason or ten?

Alice M. Tybout

Brian Sternthal

Georgios A. Bakamitsos

Prashant Malaviya

Se-Bum Park

February 2008

Predicting Customer Lifetime Value
"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." While Nobel Laureate physicist Niels Bohr probably had subatomic, quantum mechanical phenomena in mind when he made that statement, the same could be said for customer behaviors. Or so thought Robert Blattberg, Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, and Edward Malthouse, Associate Professor of Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, in their Journal of Interactive Marketing paper describing the surprising uncertainty inherent in differentially marketing to customers based upon their past performance.

Edward Malthouse

Robert C. Blattberg

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December 2007

Healthy Choices
Which tactic would motivate you to obey instructions for taking a prescribed medicine: fear of harmful health consequences of not taking the drug or confidence in the eventual health benefits bestowed by the drug?

Angela Y. Lee

Jennifer L. Aaker

November 2007

Discriminating Prices for the Discriminating Consumer
Retailers typically engage in some form of price discrimination to increase profitability. Romana Khan and Dipak Jain compared the impact on retailer profitability of two price discrimination mechanisms: quantity discounts based on package size and store-level pricing or micromarketing. The authors used store-level sales data to estimate demand, and employed the results in conjunction with a retailer pricing model to simulate the effects of various pricing strategies. They found that profits were greatest when quantity discounts based on package size were combined with micromarketing.

Romana J. Khan

Dipak Jain

August 2007

Trust Required Here
Buying a used car is always a difficult experience, in large part because potential buyers have trouble trusting sellers. Trust is an elusive but important component in market transactions. New work by Kent Grayson, a marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Management, and his colleagues focuses on the pension industry in the United Kingdom and Taiwan, and shows that a buyer requires two types of trust: trust in the particular seller (narrow-scope trust) and trust in the broader social context (the market) in which the transaction takes place (broad-scope trust).

Kent Grayson

Devon Johnson

Der-Fa Chen

May 2007

Wal-Mart Supercenter versus the Traditional Supermarket
What can your local grocer do to keep you from shopping at Wal-Mart? As Wal-Mart supercenters set up shop near traditional supermarket chains, you have more choices for where to buy groceries. Should you stick with the local chain where you have shopped for years or go to Wal-Mart, where the groceries are cheaper than anywhere else? Professors Karsten Hansen (Kellogg School of Management), Robert Blattberg (Kellogg School of Management), and Vishal Singh (New York University; graduate of Kellogg’s doctoral Marketing program) set out to determine the impact of the arrival of a Wal-Mart on local customers’ grocery shopping habits. More specifically, they investigated what types of customers are most likely to switch to Wal-Mart.

Robert C. Blattberg

Karsten Hansen

Vishal P. Singh

May 2007

Advertising Alignment
At a time when many categories are populated by parity brands, marketing executives and advertising agencies find it increasingly difficult to win market share and consumer loyalty even when they have strong positioning. There is good news, however, for the savvy marketer. According to research by Brian Sternthal, professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management and his colleague Prashant Malaviya (INSEAD), by understanding how consumers make purchase decisions, companies can present information on their products and services in a way that increases advertising effectiveness.

Brian Sternthal

Prashant Malaviya

April 2007

Unsure What to Order?
A study by Kellogg Associate Professor of Marketing Alexander Chernev in the September Journal of Consumer Research finds that when a person is unsure what to choose, pricing all items identically can help ease the decision-making process. The strategy, known as "parity pricing," may increase the likelihood that the diner will order dessert at all.

Alexander Chernev

April 2007

Mixed Messages
Each morning we wake to our favorite music blaring from the alarm clock and grab a cup of coffee. At lunch we search the crowd for friendly faces to chat with while we enjoy a type of sandwich we've eaten many times before, perhaps since childhood. And after a long day, we turn in on worn sheets that feel deliciously comfortable after dozens of washings.

Angela Y. Lee

Aparna Labroo

April 2007

Learning Curve
There are those who argue that intelligence, as reflected in test scores, is fixed and immutable. No need for additional schooling, they say; if a student performs poorly on standardized tests, not much can help. Kellogg School Professor Karsten Hansen begs to differ. In an award-winning paper published recently in the Journal of Econometrics, Hansen found evidence that an additional year of schooling can indeed boost test scores by up to 2 to 4 percent.

Karsten Hansen

James J. Heckman

Kathleen Mullen

April 2007

Is the price right?
A brand manager launches an aggressive price promotion with the goal of boosting profits and sales. Could his plan increase demand for the entire product category as well? It may, but not for long, concludes Kellogg School Assistant Professor of Marketing Vincent Nijs in an award-winning paper published in Marketing Science.

Vincent Nijs

Marnik G. Dekimpe

Jan-Benedict E.M. Steenkamp

Dominique M. Hanssens

April 2007

Seeking Pleasure? Or Avoiding Pain?
Will your customers respond more strongly to advertising that promises fun, happiness and prosperity? Or will an ad stressing the avoidance of illness or hardship be a better sell?

Jennifer L. Aaker

Angela Y. Lee