Marketing

The authors propose that purchasing luxury can be a unique means to engage in sustainable consumption because high-end products are particularly durable. Six studies examine the sustainability of high-end products, investigate consumer decision making when considering high-end versus ordinary goods, and identify effective marketing strategies to emphasize product durability, an important and valued dimension of sustainable consumption.

The author proposes a topic model tailored to the study of creative documents (e.g., academic papers, movie scripts), which extends Poisson factorization in two ways. First, the creativity literature emphasizes the importance of novelty in creative industries. Accordingly, this article introduces a set of residual topics that represent the portion of each document that is not explained by a combination of common topics. Second, creative documents are typically accompanied by summaries (e.g., abstracts, synopses).

We examine how choice bracketing affects expected value maximization in experience-based choice. Experience-based choices are a series of individual choices made sequentially, for which feedback follows each choice, and are thus naturally bracketed narrowly. Previous research broadly bracketed multiple experience-based choices for decision makers by aggregating the choices (such that each choice pertained to multiple individual choices) or by reducing feedback frequency.

This research highlights how gender shapes consumer payments in pay-what-you-want contexts. Four studies involving hypothetical and real payments show that men typically pay less than women in pay-what-you-want settings, due to gender differences in agentic versus communal orientation. Men approach the payment decision with an agentic orientation, and women approach it with a communal orientation. These orientations then shape payment motives and ultimately affect payment behavior.

This research provides a first investigation into how interest-free financing promotions influence consumer behavior. Five experiments demonstrate that framing an economically equivalent financing offer in a way that makes salient that it is interest-free increases consumers’ demand for credit to finance experiential, but not material goods.

This Better Marketing for a Better World special issue of the Journal of Marketing is motivated by the gap that remains between what is studied in our field and what is possible. We believe that we still know too little about marketing’s role in improving -- or harming -- our world.

Marketing is the functional area primarily responsible for driving the organic growth of a firm. In the age of digital marketing and big data, marketers are inundated with increasingly rich data from an ever-expanding array of sources. Such data may help marketers generate insights about customers and competitors. One fundamental question remains: How can marketers wrestle massive flows of existing and nascent data resources into coherent, effective growth strategies?