Brand and Product Management

Our faces are said to be windows into the soul. But can they also reflect who we are as consumers? Can facial images predict brand preferences? To answer these questions, we analyze a unique dataset of over 100,000 single-face Twitter profile pictures linked with brand followership data for 444 brands across categories and brand personality metrics. Using advanced machine learning for automated face analysis, we demonstrate that consumers’ social media profile faces can reveal their preferences between rival brands (study 1).

Major life transitions, such as pregnancy and childbirth, reshape lifestyles and purchasing priorities, yet causal evidence on how consumers reallocate spending across product categories remains limited. We quantify the effects of first-time parenthood by linking a large-scale transactional panel to verified birth records. To identify causal effects, we implement a difference-in-differences design augmented with causal forests, enabling flexible comparisons between households entering parenthood and carefully matched controls. We uncover a pronounced and dynamic behavioral trajectory.

Firms increasingly rely on A/B testing to evaluate marketing strategies, yet most experiments are analyzed in isolation, limiting insight into why effectiveness varies and how repeated exposure shapes outcomes. We develop a hierarchical Bayesian framework that jointly analyzes randomized marketing interventions to decompose treatment effect heterogeneity into three components: customer responsiveness, campaign design, and contextual timing.

Organizations emphasize specific production practices to deal with authenticity pressures, but the practices that signal authenticity to audiences must be continually adapted when production environments are unstable. Changes in the environment can make production practices suddenly infeasible, compelling organizations to perform in different ways the highly visible practices that audiences have come to associate with authenticity.

Salespeople frequently face the dynamic screening decision of whether to persist in a conversation or abandon it to pursue the next lead. Yet, little is known about how these decisions are made, whether they are efficient, or how to improve them. We study these decisions in the context of high-volume outbound sales where leads are ample, but time is scarce and failure is common.

A large portion of life as a consumer is spent mind-wandering from one off-task, spontaneous, and imaginative thought to the next. Psychology research has thoroughly documented the various characteristics of mind-wandering, showing that this default state of mind occupies much of our waking life and shapes outcomes ranging from goal pursuit and decision-making to present-moment experience. However, consumer research has largely overlooked mind-wandering as a phenomenon and mechanism that shapes consumption.

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.

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.

Non-informational cues, such as facial expressions, can significantly influence judgments and interpersonal impressions. While past research has explored how smiling affects business outcomes in offline or in-store contexts, relatively less is known about how smiling influences consumer choice in e-commerce settings even when there is no face-to-face interaction.