The 10 most-cited articles in Journal of Marketing, 2018

Creating effective online customer experiences through well-designed product web pages is critical to success in online retailing. How such web pages should look specifically, however, remains unclear. Previous work has only addressed a few online design elements in isolation, without accounting for the potential need to adjust experiences to reflect the characteristics of the products or brands being sold. Across 16 experiments, this research investigates how 13 unique design elements shape four dimensions of the online customer experience (informativeness, entertainment, social presence, and sensory appeal) and thus influence purchase. Product (search vs. experience) and brand (trustworthiness) characteristics exacerbate or mitigate the uncertainty inherent in online shopping, such that they moderate the influence of each experience dimension on purchases. A field experiment that manipulates real product pages on Amazon.com affirms these findings. The results thus provide managers with clear strategic guidance on how to build effective web pages.

Marketing managers and creatives alike believe that authenticity is an essential element for effective advertising. However, no common understanding of authenticity in advertising exists, and empirical knowledge about its impact on consumer behavior is limited. In this study, the authors use a comprehensive literature review and qualitative studies to identify four dimensions of authenticity in an advertising context. By examining 323 television ads across 67 brands and four years, they investigate these dimensions’ effects on the sales performance of advertised products. Because the impact of authenticity may depend on brand or product characteristics, the authors also analyze how these effects vary with brand size or across hedonic and utilitarian products. The results suggest that authenticity influences consumer behavior in a more nuanced manner than previously recognized. For instance, whereas an ad congruent with the brand’s essence has a positive effect on sales in most cases, an overly honest advertising message can actually hurt performance; the latter is true especially…

This research investigates the mechanism by which the aesthetic premium placed on produce contributes to consumers’ rejection of safe, edible, yet aesthetically unattractive, fruits and vegetables, which results in both financial loss to retailers and food waste. Further, the authors identify a novel way in which the devaluation of such produce can be reduced. Five experiments demonstrate that consumers devalue unattractive produce because of altered self-perceptions: merely imagining the consumption of unattractive produce negatively affects how consumers view themselves, lowering their willingness to pay for unattractive produce relative to equivalently safe but more attractive alternatives. This discrepancy in willingness to pay for unattractive versus attractive produce can be reduced by altering the self-diagnostic signal of consumer choices and boosting consumers’ self-esteem. An experiment in the field demonstrates the effectiveness of using easily implementable in-store messaging to boost consumers’ self-esteem in ways that increase consumers’ positive self-perceptions and,…

The increased penetration of mobile devices has a significant impact on customers’ online shopping behavior, with customers frequently switching between mobile and fixed devices on the path to purchase. By accounting for the attributes of the devices and the perceived risks related to each product category, the authors develop hypotheses regarding the relationship between device switching and conversion rates. They test the hypotheses by analyzing clickstream data from a large online retailer and apply propensity score matching to account for self-selection in device switching. They find that when customers switch from a more mobile device, such as a smartphone, to a less mobile device, such as a desktop, their conversion rate is significantly higher. This effect is larger when product category–related perceived risk is higher, when the product price is higher, and when the customer's experience with the product category and the online retailer is lower. The findings illustrate the importance of focusing on conversions across the combination of devices used by customers on their…

In an age of digitalized interactions, offerings are no longer “finished” in the traditional sense; creation of value continues by engaging actors (often consumers and their associated social networks) interacting with organizing actors (often firms and their associated organizational ecosystem) in a joint space of interactive system-environments. One can think of the Apple Watch NikePlus (AWNP) offering in which the consumer co-creates valuable experienced outcomes with a mix of applications, touchpoints, and uses, while AWNP and its organizing actors co-create environments with consumers. Actors increasingly find themselves in such a joint enactment of interactional value creation, through offerings as evolving digitalized networked arrangements of artifacts, persons, processes, and interfaces, which the authors refer to as a Digitalized Interactive Platform (DIP). This implies a broader view of value creation—one in which value is created through interactions, versus one where value is simply the exchange of a fixed offering between a firm and its customers. Offerings as DIPs…

This research examines consumers’ general in-store mobile phone use and shopping behavior. Anecdotal evidence has suggested that mobile phone use decreases point-of-purchase sales, but the results of the current study indicate instead that it can increase purchases overall. Using eye-tracking technology in both a field study and a field experiment, matched with sales receipts and survey responses, the authors show that mobile phone use (vs. nonuse) and actual mobile phone use patterns both lead to increased purchases, because consumers divert from their conventional shopping loop, spend more time in the store, and spend more time examining products and prices on shelves. Building on attention capacity theories, this study proposes and demonstrates that the underlying mechanism for these effects is distraction. This article also provides some insights into boundary conditions of the mobile phone use effect.

Content platforms (e.g., newspapers, magazines) post several stories daily on their dedicated social media pages and promote some of them using targeted content advertising (TCA). Posting stories enables content platforms to grow their social media audiences and generate digital advertising revenue from the impressions channeled through social media posts’ link clicks. However, optimal scheduling of social media posts and TCA is formidable, requiring content platforms to determine what to post; when to post; and whether, when, and how much to spend on TCA to maximize profits. Social media managers lament this complexity, and academic literature offers little guidance. Consequently, the authors draw from literature on circadian rhythms in information processing capabilities to build a novel theoretical framework on social media content scheduling and explain how scheduling attributes (i.e., time of day, content type, and TCA) affect the link clicks metric. They test their hypotheses using a model estimated on 366 days of Facebook post data from a top 50 U.S. newspaper. Subsequently,…

The use of celebrity endorsements varies across countries; does their effectiveness similarly vary across cultures? The authors propose that power distance beliefs (PDB), a cultural orientation related to the extent to which people expect and accept differences in power, moderate the effects of celebrity endorsements. A positive effect of celebrity endorsers on evaluations of advertising should be more potent with greater PDB; source expertise and trustworthiness likely underlie this effect. To test the hypotheses, the authors use moderated mediation analyses, with corrections for measurement error and endogeneity of the mediators (source expertise and trustworthiness). The results of three studies, using both manipulated and measured PDB for respondents in different countries and with a variety of endorsers, demonstrate that PDB determine the effectiveness of celebrity endorsements on attitudes toward the advertisement and the brand. In support of the moderated mediation model, perceptions of source expertise and trust mediate the effect of celebrity endorsements, conditional on…

Research on market orientation finds that market-driven firms succeed by identifying and appealing to consumer needs. Yet many technologically innovative firms achieve remarkable success by taking a market-driving approach. The ways that firms drive markets without disruptive innovation, however, remain unclear. Adopting a market-systems perspective, the authors conduct an ethnographic analysis of producers, distributors, retailers, critics, and consumers in the U.S. wine market. They find that firms drive the market by playing a status game. Firms pursue a vision and advance that vision among influencers inside and outside the industry to gain recognition. Winners of the status game influence and drive social consensus by setting benchmarks and shaping consumer preferences to the firm's advantage. High status is difficult to imitate, creating an advantage that can endure for years or decades.

Consumers have an increasingly wide variety of options available to entertain themselves. This poses a challenge for content aggregators who want to effectively promote their video content online through original trailers of movies, sitcoms, and video games. Marketers are now trying to produce much shorter video clips to promote their content on a variety of digital channels. This research is the first to propose an approach to produce such clips and to study their effectiveness, focusing on comedy movies as an application. Web-based facial-expression tracking is used to study viewers’ real-time emotional responses when watching comedy movie trailers online. These data are used to predict both viewers’ intentions to watch the movie and the movie's box office success. The authors then propose an optimization procedure for cutting scenes from trailers to produce clips and test it in an online experiment and in a field experiment. The results provide evidence that the production of short clips using the proposed methodology can be an effective tool to market movies and other online…