Marketing Publications

Consumers' minimum time investments in meaningful consumption.

Erik William Jeffries — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 22:33:27 +0000

Consumers' minimum time investments in meaningful consumption. Erik William J… Tue, 12/10/2024 - 15:33

Consumer well-being involves not only the pursuit of pleasure, but also the pursuit of meaning. However, little is known about how people perceive the costs and benefits of meaning- versus pleasure-oriented experiences. We find that compared to pleasure-oriented experiences, people expect meaning-oriented experiences to be more satisfying after meeting a minimum time investment (i.e., the perceived minimum amount of time needed to derive benefits from consumption; study 1). As a consequence, people choose to prolong their exposure to meaningful (vs. pleasurable) experiences following interruptions (study 2). We discuss the implications of minimum time investments for firms' relationships with consumers and marketing communication design.

Carter, Erin Percival; Williams, Lawrence E.; Light, Nicholas. Consumers' minimum time investments in meaningful consumption. Marketing Letters. Dec2024, Vol. 35 Issue 4, p561-573.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11002-023-09709-z

Traditional

White

Keep It Simple? Consumer Perceptions of Brand Simplicity and Risk.

Erik William Jeffries — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 20:12:39 +0000

Keep It Simple? Consumer Perceptions of Brand Simplicity and Risk. Erik William J… Tue, 12/10/2024 - 13:12

Evoking simplicity in marketing communications has become popular among marketing practitioners, but little is known about its effects on consumers and firms. The current work focuses on consumers' perceptions of the simplicity or complexity of brands and a previously overlooked consequence of those perceptions. Results from six experiments and analysis of a proprietary customer satisfaction dataset from Consumer Reports (N = 147,600) show that when consumers think brands are simple, they judge them to be less likely to experience product or service failures. Although these lower risk judgments could be positive for brands, they can also lead consumers to punish simpler brands more in the event of failures. Results also suggest that consumers' simplicity/complexity perceptions reflect the dimensionality of their mental representations of brands, and the relationship between simplicity and lower risk is attenuated when additional brand dimensionality is framed in terms of redundancy. The findings cast doubt on the degree to which evoking simplicity is a uniformly positive marketing strategy and encourage practitioners to more thoughtfully consider simplicity's implications for consumer and firm welfare.

Light, Nicholas; Fernbach, Philip M. Keep It Simple? Consumer Perceptions of Brand Simplicity and Risk. Journal of Marketing Research (JMR). Dec2024, Vol. 61 Issue 6, p1152-1170.

Read the Full Article Here.

Traditional

White

Pre-Registered Interim Analysis Designs (PRIADs): Increasing the Cost-Effectiveness of Hypothesis Testing.

Erik William Jeffries — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 20:08:40 +0000

Pre-Registered Interim Analysis Designs (PRIADs): Increasing the Cost-Effectiveness of Hypothesis Testing. Erik William J… Tue, 12/10/2024 - 13:08

The difficulty of determining how many observations to collect is a source of inefficiency in consumer behavior research. Group sequential designs, which allow researchers to perform interim analyses while data collection is ongoing, could offer a remedy. However, they are scarcely used in consumer behavior research, probably owing to low awareness, perceived complexity, or concerns about the validity of this approach. This article offers a tutorial on group sequential designs and introduces Pre-Registered Interim Analysis Designs (PRIADs): A practical five-step procedure to facilitate the adoption of these designs in marketing. We show that group sequential designs can be easily adopted by marketing researchers, and introduce a companion app to help researchers implement them. We demonstrate multiple benefits of PRIADs for researchers engaged in confirmatory hypothesis testing: They facilitate sample size decisions, allow researchers to achieve a desired level of statistical power with a smaller number of observations, and help conduct more efficient pilot studies. We validate this cost-saving potential through a comprehensive re-analysis of 212 studies published in the Journal of Consumer Research , which shows that using PRIADs would have reduced participant costs by 20–29%. We conclude with a discussion of limitations and possible alternatives to PRIADs.

André, Quentin; Reinholtz, Nicholas. Pre-Registered Interim Analysis Designs (PRIADs): Increasing the Cost-Effectiveness of Hypothesis Testing. Journal of Consumer Research. Dec2024, Vol. 51 Issue 4, p845-865.

Read the Full Article

Traditional

White

Probabilistic Outcomes Are Valued Less in Expectation, Even Conditional on Their Realization

Erik William Jeffries — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 01:39:12 +0000

Probabilistic Outcomes Are Valued Less in Expectation, Even Conditional on Their Realization Erik William J… Sun, 11/10/2024 - 18:39

Most theories of decision making under risk assume that payoffs and probabilities are separable. In the context of a lottery, the subjective value of a prospective outcome (the payoff) is assumed to be independent of the likelihood that the outcome will occur (the probability). In violation of this assumption, we present eight experiments showing that people anticipate less utility from uncertain outcomes than from certain outcomes, even conditional on their realization. The devaluation of uncertain outcomes is observed across different measures of utility (willingness to spend money or time; choice between different options), different populations (student and online samples), and different manipulations of uncertainty. We show that this result does not simply reflect a misunderstanding of the instructions or people's aversion toward a "weird" transaction with unexplained features. We highlight the implications of this phenomenon for empirical investigations of risk preferences and conclude with a discussion of the psychological mechanisms that might drive the devaluation of probabilistic outcomes.

Paolacci, Gabriele; André, Quentin. Probabilistic Outcomes Are Valued Less in Expectation, Even Conditional on Their Realization. Management Science. Nov2024, Vol. 70 Issue 11, p7524-7536.

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2021.02284

Traditional

White

Financial Education Effects on Financial Behavior and Well-Being: The Mediating Roles of Improved Objective and Subjective Financial Knowledge and Parallels in Physical Health.

Erik William Jeffries — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 21:30:39 +0000

Financial Education Effects on Financial Behavior and Well-Being: The Mediating Roles of Improved Objective and Subjective Financial Knowledge and Parallels in Physical Health. Erik William J… Thu, 10/10/2024 - 15:30

How does financial education lead to improved financial behavior and higher financial well-being? An influential Consumer Financial Protection Bureau model introduced in 2015 proposes that the goal of financial education is to improve financial well-being and that financial education does so by increasing financial knowledge, which improves financial behavior, which improves financial well-being. In this study, the authors test links in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau model, examining the differential roles of objective and subjective knowledge. They also test whether an analogous model might capture effects of physical health education on physical health knowledge, behavior, and well-being. They report a quasi-experiment comparing changes in financial and physical health knowledge, behavior, and well-being at two time points in a semester for students enrolled in a personal finance class, a personal health class, or neither. This study reports the first causal estimates of flow from financial education to financial knowledge to financial behaviors to a validated measure of subjective financial well-being. Financial education caused large changes in both objective and subjective knowledge. Yet only subjective knowledge mediated the large effects of financial education on changes in downstream behaviors. The authors find weaker but similar results for physical health. The findings suggest that financial education efforts should be refocused to foster subjective knowledge and improved behavior.

Netemeyer, Richard G.; Lynch Jr., John G.; Lichtenstein, Donald R.; Dobolyi, David. Financial Education Effects on Financial Behavior and Well-Being: The Mediating Roles of Improved Objective and Subjective Financial Knowledge and Parallels in Physical Health. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing. Oct2024, Vol. 43 Issue 4, p254-275.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/07439156241228197

Traditional

White

Cut me some slack! How perceptions of financial slack influence pain of payment

Erik William Jeffries — Fri, 10 May 2024 22:35:47 +0000

Cut me some slack! How perceptions of financial slack influence pain of payment Erik William J… Fri, 05/10/2024 - 16:35

Consumers often experience pain of payment, a tug of negative affect that holds back their spending. While the literature has long viewed pain of payment as self‐regulatory in nature, it has left the dynamics of self‐regulation that lead to the pain of paying largely unaddressed. In self‐regulation, affect arises when people move away from a goal they hold. Thus, understanding the specific goals that people consider when making a payment can help us better predict when pain of payment will arise. We propose that people have a goal to maintain financial slack, and that violating this goal contributes to pain of payment. Thus, people experience more pain of payment when the goal to maintain financial slack is stronger or when it is particularly salient that a purchase entails losing financial slack. Critically, subjective changes in financial slack are not equivalent to objective changes in wealth, altering pain of payment for economically equivalent trades. This research contributes to the existing literature by identifying a novel antecedent to the pain of payment. It additionally expands our understanding of people's preferences between payment systems. Finally, it offers guidance to practitioners who wish to minimize pain of payment among their consumers.

Pomerance, Justin; Reinholtz, Nicholas. Cut me some slack! How perceptions of financial slack influence pain of payment. Psychology & Marketing. May2024, Vol. 41 Issue 5, p1100-1114.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/mar.21970

Traditional

White

Statistical Significance" and Statistical Reporting: Moving Beyond Binary

Erik William Jeffries — Fri, 10 May 2024 21:25:08 +0000

Statistical Significance" and Statistical Reporting: Moving Beyond Binary Erik William J… Fri, 05/10/2024 - 15:25

Null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) is the default approach to statistical analysis and reporting in marketing and the biomedical and social sciences more broadly. Despite its default role, NHST has long been criticized by both statisticians and applied researchers, including those within marketing. Therefore, the authors propose a major transition in statistical analysis and reporting. Specifically, they propose moving beyond binary: abandoning NHST as the default approach to statistical analysis and reporting. To facilitate this, they briefly review some of the principal problems associated with NHST. They next discuss some principles that they believe should underlie statistical analysis and reporting. They then use these principles to motivate some guidelines for statistical analysis and reporting. They next provide some examples that illustrate statistical analysis and reporting that adheres to their principles and guidelines. They conclude with a brief discussion.

McShane, Blakeley B.; Bradlow, Eric T.; Lynch Jr., John G.; Meyer, Robert J. "Statistical Significance" and Statistical Reporting: Moving Beyond Binary. Journal of Marketing. May2024, Vol. 88 Issue 3, p1-19.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00222429231216910

Traditional

White

Conspiracy Theory as Individual and Group Behavior: Observations from the Flat Earth International Conference

Erik William Jeffries — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 22:38:40 +0000

Conspiracy Theory as Individual and Group Behavior: Observations from the Flat Earth International Conference Erik William J… Wed, 04/10/2024 - 16:38

Conspiratorial thinking has been with humanity for a long time but has recently grown as a source of societal concern and as a subject of research in the cognitive and social sciences. We propose a three‐tiered framework for the study of conspiracy theories: (1) cognitive processes, (2) the individual, and (3) social processes and communities of knowledge. At the level of cognitive processes, we identify explanatory coherence and faulty belief updating as critical ideas. At the level of the community of knowledge, we explore how conspiracy communities facilitate false belief by promoting a contagious sense of understanding, and how community norms catalyze the biased assimilation of evidence. We review recent research on conspiracy theories and explain how conspiratorial thinking emerges from the interaction of individual and group processes. As a case study, we describe observations the first author made while attending the Flat Earth International Conference, a meeting of conspiracy theorists who believe the Earth is flat. Rather than treating conspiracy belief as pathological, we take the perspective that is an extreme outcome of common cognitive processes. We propose a three‐tiered framework for the study of conspiracy theories: (1) cognitive processes, (2) the individual, and (3) social processes and communities of knowledge. We review recent research on conspiracy theories and explain how conspiratorial thinking emerges from the interaction of individual and group processes. As a case study, we describe observations the first author made while attending the Flat Earth International Conference, a meeting of conspiracy theorists who believe the Earth is flat.

Fernbach, Philip M.; Bogard, Jonathan E. Conspiracy Theory as Individual and Group Behavior: Observations from the Flat Earth International Conference. Topics in Cognitive Science. Apr2024, Vol. 16 Issue 2, p187-205.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tops.12662

Traditional

White

Lay economic reasoning: An integrative review and call to action

Erik William Jeffries — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 01:30:38 +0000

Lay economic reasoning: An integrative review and call to action Erik William J… Wed, 01/10/2024 - 18:30

Consumer psychology refers to how people think and act within an economic role in market exchange. However, we know little about how consumers actually perceive these roles, or how they understand markets and economic activity more broadly. That is, we lack an understanding of the economic reasoning of non‐expert consumers, how it departs from formal economic reasoning, and why. The current paper is intended to address this gap. We provide an integrative review of research on lay economic reasoning that consistently reveals how differently lay consumers and economists think about markets. We propose a unifying mental model to explain these divergences. Suggest why it is reinforced by what lay consumers observe (and do not observe) through firsthand marketplace experience, and note its potential evolutionary basis. We then highlight how understanding lay economic reasoning can not only help explain a wide array of marketplace phenomena, but also provide a novel lens to help advance, generate, and better integrate theory across many active literatures within consumer psychology. Without markets, there are no consumers and there is no marketing. We therefore call for consumer psychologists to take ownership of the study of lay economic reasoning and make markets more central to marketing scholarship.

Bhattacharjee, Amit; Dana, Jason. Lay economic reasoning: An integrative review and call to action. Consumer Psychology Review. Jan2024, Vol. 7 Issue 1, p3-39.

https://myscp.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/arcp.1096

Traditional

White

Extreme Opponents of Genetically Modified Foods Know the Least But Think They Know the Most

Anonymous — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 20:29:14 +0000

Extreme Opponents of Genetically Modified Foods Know the Least But Think They Know the Most Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/29/2020 - 14:29

There is widespread agreement among scientists that geneti-cally modified foods are safe to consume and have the potential to provide substantial benefits to humankind3. However, many people still harbour concerns about them or oppose their use4,5. In a nationally representative sample of US adults, we find that as extremity of opposition to and con-cern about genetically modified foods increases, objective knowledge about science and genetics decreases, but per-ceived understanding of genetically modified foods increases. Extreme opponents know the least, but think they know the most. Moreover, the relationship between self-assessed and objective knowledge shifts from positive to negative at high levels of opposition. Similar results were obtained in a paral-lel study with representative samples from the United States, France and Germany, and in a study testing attitudes about a medical application of genetic engineering technology (gene therapy). This pattern did not emerge, however, for attitudes and beliefs about climate change.

Marketing: Fernbach, P. M., Light, N., Scott, S. E., Inbar, Y., & Rozin, P. (2019). Extreme opponents of genetically modified foods know the least but think they know the most. Nature Human Behaviour

Read Full Article Here.

Fernbach, P. M., Light, N., Scott, S. E., Inbar, Y., & Rozin, P. (2019).

Traditional

White

Marketing Publications

Consumers' minimum time investments in meaningful consumption.

Related Articles

Keep It Simple? Consumer Perceptions of Brand Simplicity and Risk.

Related Articles

Pre-Registered Interim Analysis Designs (PRIADs): Increasing the Cost-Effectiveness of Hypothesis Testing.

Related Articles

Probabilistic Outcomes Are Valued Less in Expectation, Even Conditional on Their Realization

Related Articles

Financial Education Effects on Financial Behavior and Well-Being: The Mediating Roles of Improved Objective and Subjective Financial Knowledge and Parallels in Physical Health.

Related Articles

Cut me some slack! How perceptions of financial slack influence pain of payment

Related Articles

Statistical Significance" and Statistical Reporting: Moving Beyond Binary

Related Articles

Conspiracy Theory as Individual and Group Behavior: Observations from the Flat Earth International Conference

Related Articles

Lay economic reasoning: An integrative review and call to action

Related Articles

Extreme Opponents of Genetically Modified Foods Know the Least But Think They Know the Most