Marketing

Language plays a crucial role in marketing, influencing outcomes such as consumer engagement and decision-making. Although prior research has extensively analyzed the relationship between linguistic features and business outcomes, most approaches have been descriptive or predictive, limiting their value for crafting more effective content. Understanding the causal effects of specific linguistic features is essential but challenging because, in real-world settings, the focal textual feature often changes simultaneously with other confounding factors.

This paper addresses a simple theoretical question of high substantive relevance: What makes a consumption experience special in a consumer’s mind?

We aim to stimulate discussion on how innovation research within marketing can use a better world (BW) perspective to help innovation become a driver of positive change in the world. In this "Challenging the Boundaries" series paper, we hope to provide purposeful research opportunities for scholars seeking to bridge innovation research with the BW movement. We frame our discussion with four areas of innovation research in marketing that are particularly relevant to BW objectives.

Counterfeiting is a negative phenomenon, bearing undesirable consequences for both companies and consumers of the original brands. Yet some consumers, while acknowledging the immorality of counterfeiting, still have positive predispositions toward such fake products. Why? We investigate consumers’ reactions to counterfeits as a function of consumers’ subjective knowledge in the domain of fashion and luxury goods.

One of the most crucial aspects and significant levers that gaming companies possess in designing digital games is setting the level of difficulty, which essentially regulates the user’s ability to progress within the game. This aspect is particularly significant in free-to-play (F2P) games, where the paid version often aims to enhance the player’s experience and to facilitate faster progression.

Language is a uniquely human trait at the core of human interactions. The language people use often reflects their personality, intentions and state of mind. With the integration of the Internet and social media into everyday life, much of human communication is documented as written text. These online forms of communication (for example, blogs, reviews, social media posts and emails) provide a window into human behaviour and therefore present abundant research opportunities for behavioural science.

Firms often rely on randomized experiments to estimate customer-level treatment effects for targeting policies. Standard “test-then-learn” approaches typically sample customers uniformly to optimize estimation accuracy but ignore economic objectives, leading to statistically sound yet suboptimal targeting policies. We propose a policy-aware sampling strategy—that directly incorporates the firm’s profit-maximizing objective into the selection of which customers to sample in the experiment.