Mapping Out Marketing

Navigation Lessons from the Ivory Trenches

Ronald Hill, Catherine Lamberton, Jennifer Swartz, Ronald Paul Hill, Catherine Mary Lamberton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138082229
• eBook ISBN: 9781351622523
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

Sea-changes in society, technology, consumer expectations and our understanding of behavioral economics have caused us to rethink our understanding of the scope of knowledge required to navigate, analyze and shape consumer behavior.

You hold in your hand a field guide for this adventure. Ron Hill and Cait Lamberton have gathered together the very top professors from around the world and invited them to share the beliefs, practices and wisdom that they have developed and honed across years and contexts.

Each of these luminaries shares personal stories and deep insights about the way that not only business works, but the way we, ourselves, navigate the world. These short contributions are contained in eight "destinations" that showcase overlapping and essential topics, ranging from technology to subsistence marketplaces, followed by unique questions that are answered by the material provided. The research described has helped the field understand the central role of exchange in marketing relationships, and how product features, pricing strategies, delivery mechanism and various communication modalities create or fail to produce functioning marketplaces around the world. In addition, it reminds us all of the need to continue to learn, to grow, and to share our knowledge – in whatever corner of the marketing world we find ourselves.

DESTINATION #1

Research and technology

ENTRY #1

How do you stay on trend amidst the always-evolving world of digital marketing?

Andrew T. Stephen

L’Oréal Professor of Marketing, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

Over the last 15–20 years, the marketing landscape has undoubtedly changed. These changes began, of course, with the introduction of the internet, and then continued as the internet matured and evolved. The rise of connected mobile devices and social media, more recently, have rapidly advanced the field of marketing, particularly on the practice side. And it keeps changing, so much so that the past often is not worth following when new and interesting things are always coming out. How do marketing academics and practitioners grapple with this? How do we, as a critical business discipline, attempt to make sense of the always-new marketing landscape (and consumers’ behaviors within new, technology-enabled marketing channels)? Is it feasible to follow the past, at least somewhat, to help us understand the future?

These and related issues are considered by Lamberton and Stephen (2016) and Stephen (2016). Put simply, these review articles conclude that there is much left to understand about the digital marketing world and where it is heading. Additionally, they call for all types of marketers to embrace the uncertainty of the digital future by adopting a broader scope when it comes to research on digital behaviors, platforms, and channels.

Notwithstanding the always-changing nature of the digital landscape, we can use what we know from the past to help us understand the future because of consumer psychology. For example, Bart, Stephen, and Sarvary (2014) study mobile advertising field experiment data to work out which types of mobile ads work and why. They use theory from psychology on persuasion and information processing to make sense of their empirical findings that, perhaps surprisingly, the highest-performing mobile ads (based on increasing brand favourability and purchase intent) are those for utilitarian products that require higher-involvement in the purchase decision process. Even though mobile ads change, these findings are rooted in human psychology and shed light on how people process tiny bits of marketing information displayed on their relatively small smart-phone screens.

Another example of this approach is Chae, Stephen, Bart, and Yao (2017). This article reports a study of hundreds of seeded word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing campaigns for specific products and looks at the WOM-generating consequences of these seeding efforts. Interestingly, however, we considered both the intended consequences of generating more WOM about a campaign’s focal product among non-seed consumers, and the unintended consequences of generating more—or potentially less—WOM about (i) other products from the same brand as the focal product and (ii) other products in the same category as the focal product but from competitors. These unintended consequences are referred to as brand and category WOM spillover effects, respectively. It is important to consider unintended consequences, particularly in the relatively new and increasingly “hot” space of seeded marketing campaigns, which is otherwise known as influencer marketing. We find that seeding increases WOM about the seeded focal product (as would be expected), but decreases WOM about other products from the same brand and other products in the same category but from other brands. That is, we find negative brand and category WOM spillover effects. We explain these using psychological theories related to how people construe stimuli (in this case, products and brands) and argue that a marketer’s act of seeding a specific product with consumers can lead to lower-level construals and focused thinking, which suppresses brand- and category-related thoughts cued by the initial stimulus (the focal product). Despite the ongoing evolution of influencer marketing, these findings help marketers know what to expect based on an understanding of the underlying consumer psychology.

In summary, it is true that if one is to study the newest, cutting-edge digital marketing phenomena then they cannot realistically expect to always be following the past. However, sometimes we can rely on the fact that human psychology is changing at a much slower pace, such that we find ourselves in a situation where the more things change, the more they stay the same.

TAKEAWAYS

• Digital marketing is constantly evolving but that does not mean that everything is always new.

• We can turn to fundamentals, such as consumer psychology, to help us understand the new while building on the old.

• To advance marketing theory and practice in the context of digital channels/platforms, we should take more of a psychology-based perspective.

REFERENCES

Bart, Yakov, Andrew T. Stephen, and Miklos Sarvary (2014), “Which Products Are Best Suited to Mobile Advertising? A Field Study of Mobile Display Advertising Effects on Consumer Attitudes And Intentions,” Journal of Marketing Research, 51 (3), 270–285.

Chae, Inyoung, Andrew T. Stephen, Yakov Bart, and Dai Yao (2017), “Spillover Effects in Seeded Word-of-Mouth Marketing Campaigns,” Marketing Science, 36 (1), 89–104.

Lamberton, Cait and Andrew T. Stephen (2016), “A Thematic Exploration of Digital, Social Media, and Mobile Marketing Research’s Evolution from 2000 to 2015 and an Agenda for Future Research,” Journal of Marketing, 80 (6), 146–172.

Stephen, Andrew T. (2016), “The Role of Digital and Social Media Marketing in Consumer Behavior,” Current Opinion in Psychology, (August), 1017–1021.

ENTRY #2

What role might bioscience play in helping us deepen our understanding of—and intervention in—human behavior?

Joseph W. Alba

Distinguished Professor of Marketing, Warrington College of Business, University of Florida

Free will is the defining issue of humanity. For millennia, it has been the province of philosophy, but lay beliefs about human agency broadly penetrate social policy. The present is a rousing time to examine the intersection of agency and policy due to developments in neuroscience and genetics that offer causal models of human traits and behavior. These causal models naturally adhere to the scientific view that all causality is fundamentally physical. However, they clash with the public’s view of agency, which skews toward the non-corporeal. The research question for marketing concerns whether the popularization of bioscience will bridge the chasm between science and lay belief. The implications are profound, not just for consumer theory and our view of human nature but also for pragmatic questions surrounding personal welfare, social equality, and the macro-economy.

Consider the extensively examined consumer trait of self-control. A strong and non-corporeal view of human agency might explain the inclination to engage in self-defeating consumption as under the individual’s control and attributable to an absence of will or character. However, research shows that:

1. Self-control during childhood is a powerful predictor of adult health, wealth, and criminality.

2. Children’s self-control is influenced by the level of adversity in their environment.

3. An adverse childhood environment has neurological effects that govern adult self-control.

This research suggests a very different model of self-defeating consumption—a model that views transgressors as suffering from a debilitating physiological condition stemming from exogenous factors beyond their control.

From a consumer-policy perspective, pervasive beliefs about human agency place constraints on the ability of policy makers to enact autonomy-threatening rules. These constraints render libertarian paternalism as the least objectionable but not the most effective route to enhanced public welfare. From a social-policy perspective, research shows that childhood interventions that prevent neurological damage or ameliorate its effects provide a sizeable social return on investment. However, government intervention requires investment, investment requires public consent, and public consent is dependent on the perceived necessity of intervention versus the sufficiency of self-control, determination, and other traits that are inherent in the autonomous-person view of humanity. From the perspective of practice, acceptance of physical causation will favour interventions that alter the body rather than the spirit.

TAKEAWAYS

• Consumer research takes place almost entirely within the framework of social science. Our theories will be better informed by inclusion of a physiological perspective.

• Despite their good intentions, marketing researchers do not exert a large influence on public policy and exert almost no influence on the dissemination of findings from the natural sciences. Rigorous examination of how consumers react to scientific developments can address both failings.

• Consumers’ preferences for competing paths to self-improvement are guided by their beliefs about the causes of their deficiencies—as are competing remedies. Improved choices and market offerings depend on better understanding of those causes.

REFERENCES

Williams, L. E. and T. Andrew Poehlman (2017), “Conceptualizing Consciousness in Consumer Research,” Journal of Consumer Research, 44(2), 276–282.

Zheng, Yanmei, Stijn M. J. Van Osselaer, and Joseph W. Alba (2016), “Belief in Free Will: Implications for Public Policy,” Journal of Marketing Research, 53(December), 1050–1064.

ENTRY #3

How can we conduct research that truly furthers our understanding of diversity, rather than reinforcing old models?

Jerome D. Williams

Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, Rutgers University-Newark

For decades, consumer research on racial and ethnic minority groups had assumed homogeneity, i.e., each group represented a monolithic group. For example, the few studies on African Americans focused on samples of lower income, usually urban consumers, and then generalized those results to all African Americans. When comparisons were made with the “general” population, those samples typically were taken from white middle-class neighborhoods. It was argued that the ghetto community was the most typical setting for the black community.

Fortunately, research on multicultural consumers has advanced significantly beyond those early efforts to understand these segments, but in my opinion, not far enough. First, the number of studies is still...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Destination #1 Research and technology
• Destination #2 Target markets and consumer behavior
• Destination #3 Branding
• Destination #4 Enhancing the marketplace
• Destination #5 Customer satisfaction
• Destination #6 Consumer wellbeing
• Destination #7 Motivating change
• Destination #8 Marketing and the world at large
• Closing remarks
• Index