Marketing

Our goal in this chapter is to review for social psychologists some of the interesting research done in consumer behavior and marketing.

Three experiments investigate the emotions that arise from buying or not buying at an unintended purchase opportunity and how they color evaluations of affective advertising appeals that are viewed subsequently. We demonstrate that buying can cause happiness tempered with guilt, while not buying causes pride. Consistent with the felt affect, respondents who had bought at time 1 subsequently prefer happiness appeals to pride appeals, while those who had refrained prefer pride appeals.

This research addresses refutation of false beliefs formed on the basis of repeated exposure to advertisements. Experiment 1 explores belief in the refutation as a function of the perceptual details shared (alignment) between the claim and the refutation as manipulated by whether the original claim was direct (assertion) or indirect (implication). Experiment 2 then examines whether this effect will carry through to belief in the original claim after exposure to the refutation. Findings indicate that direct refutations of indirect claims are believed more than refutations of direct claims.

In most marketing experiments, managerial decisions are not based directly on the estimates of the parameters, but rather on functions of these estimates. For example, many managerial decisions are driven by whether or not a feature is valued more than the price the consumer will be asked to pay. In other cases, some managerial decisions are weighed more heavily than others. The standard measures used to evaluate experimental designs (e.g., A-efficiency or D-efficiency) do not accommodate these phenomena.

Polyhedral methods for choice-based conjoint analysis provide a means to adapt choice-based questions at the individual-respondent level and provide an alternative means to estimate partworths when there are relatively few questions per respondent as in a web-based questionnaire. However, these methods are deterministic and are susceptible to the propagation of response errors. They also assume, implicitly, a uniform prior on the partworths.

The relation between emotion and rationality is assessed by reviewing empirical findings from multiple disciplines. Two types of emotional phenomena are examined—incidental emotional states and integral emotional responses—and three conceptions of rationality are considered—logical, material, and ecological. Emotional states influence reasoning processes, are often misattributed to focal objects, distort beliefs in an assimilative fashion, disrupt self-control when intensely negative but do not necessarily increase risk-taking.

We propose and test a new approach for modeling consumer heterogeneity in conjoint estimation based on convex optimization and statistical machine learning. We develop methods both for metric and choice data. Like hierarchical Bayes (HB), our methods shrink individual-level partworth estimates towards a population mean. However, while HB samples from a posterior distribution that is influenced by exogenous parameters (the parameters of the second-stage priors), we minimize a convex loss function that depends only on endogenous parameters.

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This paper examines the preferences of advice seekers for human information sources. We focus on the case in which advice providers can be people with high or low technical expertise (high in technical knowledge) and/or socially connected (connected to many others). Somewhat contrary to intuition, information sources who are high on social connectivity are shown to be relatively more attractive for more innovative products. Consistent with this, a meta-analysis indicates that the correlation between knowledge and opinion leadership is indeed lower for more innovative products.