Consumer Behavior

American manufacturers often employ specialized agencies to create and produce advertising campaigns. This paper focuses on a critical juncture in the creation of American advertising: the meeting between the manufacturer (client) and the advertising agency, where advertising ideas are presented, discussed, and selected. Although the participants enter these meetings with the common goal of reaching agreement on the ideas that will be advanced to the next step in the creative development process, the attendees have additional, sometimes conflicting, professional and personal objectives.

This paper uses an analytical model to examine when it makes sense to provide incentives to innovators to adopt a new product. The model allows for separate segments of innovators and imitators, each of which follows a Bass-type diffusion process. Interestingly "seeding" the market is optimal for a limited range of situations and these do not appear to include those where there is a downturn in sales (chasm) as sales move from the first to the second segment.

We characterize supply chain settings in which perfect coordination can be achieved with simple wholesale pricing schemes: either retailer-specific constant unit wholesale prices or retailer-specific volume discount schemes. We confine ourselves to two-echelon supply chains with a single supplier servicing a network of retailers who compete with each other by selecting sales quantities.

Information processing research published in the Journal of Consumer Research has produced theoretical advances in our understanding of consumer behavior. This article highlights two themes that have emerged in consumer research over the past 15 years. These are the interplay between motivation and cognition and the impact of implicit processes on consumer behavior. We examine these themes in three core areas of information processing research—memory, affect, and persuasion.

New product development is integral to marketing. There are questions, however, regarding the extent to which new products are good and for whom they are good. While benefits may be obvious for manufacturers, sellers, and users of any particular product, stakeholders beyond the transaction and direct usage of said product may receive no benefits and perhaps may be harmed by new products.

Event sponsors often do not receive proper credit for their efforts. This issue was examined in a field study involving over 300 baseball fans attending minor league games during the summer season. Signal detection analyses reveal that, even among such sports fans, the ability to correctly discriminate actual official sponsors of the home team from matched foils, although above chance, was rather poor. Consistent with recent laboratory findings, sponsor identification responses were further found to be heavily influenced by the mere plausibility of the brand as a potential sponsor.

We study dating behavior using data from a Speed Dating experiment where we generate random matching of subjects and create random variation in the number of potential partners. Our design allows us to directly observe individual decisions rather than just final matches. Women put greater weight on the intelligence and the race of partner, while men respond more to physical attractiveness. Moreover, men do not value women's intelligence or ambition when it exceeds their own. Also, we find that women exhibit a preference for men who grew up in affluent neighborhoods.

Raghunathan and Pham (1999) observed that, although of the same valence, states of anxiety and sadness have distinct effects on decision making. Results from two new experiments confirm that anxiety triggers a preference for options that are more rewarding and comforting. Our results also indicate that these effects are driven by an affect-as-information process, and are most pervasive when the source of anxiety or sadness is not salient.