Marketing Papers

Wharton's Marketing professors - the largest, most cited, and most published marketing faculty in the world - specialize in translating their state-of-the-art research into practical tools that managers can use to make better decisions.

Snack-food giant Frito-Lay, for example, needed to know if the billions it spent each year on advertising was working. Marriott wanted to launch a new chain of residence hotels, but wasn't sure how the market would react to the idea. Shell Oil wanted to redefine product offerings based on customers' perceptions and needs.These are just a handful of the corporations that have improved performance, launched new products, and refined their pricing and merchandising tactics using the market research tools created by the Wharton Marketing Department.

 

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 427
  • Publication
    Selecting Competitive Tactics: Try a Strategy Map
    (1987) Olivia, Terrence A; Day, Diana L; DeSarbo, Wayne S
    When developing strategy, a manager considers how various tactics will affect short-term performance and broad strategic direction. The skilled manager keeps those factors in mind and, simultaneously, gauges what the competition is up to. The authors describe a mapping technique that will help managers to do just that. Not only does the technique provide an accessible measure of relative competitive standing, but it also allows managers to simulate tactical changes and analyze their probably impact on business performance.
  • Publication
    Consumer Research and the Evaluation of Information Disclosure Requirements: The Case of Truth in Lending
    (1974-06-01) Day, George S; Brandt, William K
    This article evaluates the impact of Truth in Lending (TIL) disclosures on consumer search and credit usage behavior, and how the effects vary by market segment. Consumer behavior concepts were used to guide the development of a comprehensive model of the consumer credit decision process, which specified the intervening effects of TIL and the situational constraints which tended to limit the use of TIL information.
  • Publication
    Mixed Pricing in Online Marketplaces
    (2016-06-01) Seim, Katja; Sinkinson, Michael
    A rich theory literature predicts mixed strategies in posted prices due to standard price discrimination, search frictions, and various other rationales. While typically interpreted as implying occasional sales or price dispersion, online marketplaces enable a firm to truly use randomization as a tool in pricing, and so such behavior should be expected to arise in online settings. We investigate a case of mixed pricing across a large subset of products on a major e-commerce website. We first test for randomizing behavior, and then construct a model of price discrimination that would generate randomization as optimal behavior. We estimate the model and use it to assess pricing effects of a proposed merger in the industry.
  • Publication
    The Effect of Advertising on Brand Awareness and Perceived Quality: An Empirical Investigation using Panel Data
    (2009-06-01) Clark, C. R; Doraszelski, Ulrich; Draganska, Michaela
    We use a panel data set that combines annual brand-level advertising expenditures for over three hundred brands with measures of brand awareness and perceived quality from a large-scale consumer survey to study the effect of advertising. Advertising is modeled as a dynamic investment in a brand’s stocks of awareness and perceived quality and we ask how such an investment changes brand awareness and quality perceptions. Our panel data allow us to control for unobserved heterogeneity across brands and to identify the effect of advertising from the time-series variation within brands. They also allow us to account for the endogeneity of advertising through recently developed dynamic panel data estimation techniques. We find that advertising has consistently a significant positive effect on brand awareness but no significant effect on perceived quality.
  • Publication
    Does Ease Mediate the Ease-of-Retrieval Effect? A Meta-Analysis
    (2018-03-01) Weingarten, Evan; Hutchinson, J. W
    A wealth of literature suggests individuals use feelings in addition to facts as sources of information for judgment. This paper focuses on a manipulation in which participants list either a few or many examples of a given type, and then make a judgment. Instead of using the number of arguments or evidence strength, participants are hypothesized to use the subjective ease of generating examples as the primary input to judgment. This result is commonly called the ease-of-retrieval effect, and the feeling of ease is typically assumed to mediate the effect. We use meta-analytic methods across 142 papers, 263 studies, and 582 effect sizes to assess the robustness of the ease-of-retrieval effect, and whether or not the effect is mediated by subjective ease. On average, the standard few/many manipulation exhibits a medium-sized effect. In experimental conditions designed to replicate the standard effect, about one third to one half of the total effect is mediated by subjective ease. This supports the standard explanation, but suggests that other mediators are present. Further, we find evidence of publication bias that reduces the standard effect by up to one-third. We also find that (1) moderator manipulations that differ from the standard manipulation lead to smaller, often reversed effects that are not as strongly mediated as ease, (2) several manipulations of theory-based moderators (e.g., polarized attitudes, misattribution) yield strong theory-consistent effects, (2) method-based moderators have little or no effects on the results, and (4) the mediation results are robust with respect to assumptions about error structure.
  • Publication
    Creative Obfuscation
    (1982-03-01) Armstrong, J. Scott
    A rational and popular viewpoint is that the function of scientific writing is to communicate knowledge. A study of prominent journals, however, suggests that clear communication is not appreciated within the reading-writing-refereeing community. If clarity is a goal for a journal, the editor must take action.
  • Publication
    Counting Every Thought: Implicit Measures of Cognitive Responses to Advertising
    (2008-06-01) Huang, Yanliu; Hutchinson, J. W
    Our research explores new implicit measures of cognitive responses to advertisements that focus on detecting the effects of specific thoughts. We first demonstrate that consumers' thoughts about persuasive messages can be assessed by both a thought recognition task and a belief verification task. We also show that performance on these tasks (i.e., jointly observed responses, reaction times, and confidence ratings) can be modeled as Poisson counting processes. Finally, we illustrate the effectiveness of these new measures in predicting consumers' product attitudes and that these measures can outperform traditional thought listing when people are unwilling or unable to report certain thoughts.
  • Publication
    The Effect of Accuracy Motivation on Anchoring and Adjustment: Do People Adjust from Provided Anchors?
    (2010-12-01) Simmons, Joseph P; LeBoeuf, Robyn A; Nelson, Leif D
    Increasing accuracy motivation (e.g., by providing monetary incentives for accuracy) often fails to increase adjustment away from provided anchors, a result that has led researchers to conclude that people do not effortfully adjust away from such anchors. We challenge this conclusion. First, we show that people are typically uncertain about which way to adjust from provided anchors and that this uncertainty often causes people to believe that they have initially adjusted too far away from such anchors (Studies 1a and 1b). Then, we show that although accuracy motivation fails to increase the gap between anchors and final estimates when people are uncertain about the direction of adjustment, accuracy motivation does increase anchor–estimate gaps when people are certain about the direction of adjustment, and that this is true regardless of whether the anchors are provided or self-generated (Studies 2, 3a, 3b, and 5). These results suggest that people do effortfully adjust away from provided anchors but that uncertainty about the direction of adjustment makes that adjustment harder to detect than previously assumed. This conclusion has important theoretical implications, suggesting that currently emphasized distinctions between anchor types (self-generated vs. provided) are not fundamental and that ostensibly competing theories of anchoring (selective accessibility and anchoring-and-adjustment) are complementary.
  • Publication
    An Empirical Test of the Theory of Sales: Do Household Storage Constraints Affect Consumer and Store Behavior?
    (2006-06-01) Bell, David R; Hilber, Christian A. L
    We revisit and test Salop and Stiglitz (1982) Theory of Sales. Equilibrium comparative static predictions are that greater consumer storage constraints lead to: (1) higher average prices, (2) fewer promotions, and (3) shallower promotions. In equilibrium, price dispersion is nonlinear in storage constraints, first increasing then decreasing. Empirical estimates of storage constraints are developed for approximately 1,000 households using the American Housing Survey (1989), United States Census (1990), and Stanford Market Basket Database (1991–1993). We find consumers with greater storage constraints shop more often and purchase smaller quantities per visit; moreover, the comparative static predictions are supported and evidence consistent with the equilibrium dispersion prediction is observed. Estimated quantitative effects are economically important.
  • Publication
    Who Drives Divergence? Identity-Signaling, Outgroup Dissimilarity, and the Abandonment of Cultural Tastes
    (2008-09-01) Berger, Jonah A; Heath, Chip
    People often diverge from members of other social groups: They select cultural tastes (e.g., possessions, attitudes, or behaviors) that distinguish them from outsiders and abandon tastes when outsiders adopt them. But while divergence is pervasive, most research on the propagation of culture is based on conformity. Consequently, it is less useful in explaining why people might abandon tastes when others adopt them. The 7 studies described in this article showed that people diverge to avoid signaling undesired identities. A field study, for example, found that undergraduates stopped wearing a particular wristband when members of the “geeky” academically focused dormitory next door started wearing them. Consistent with an identity-signaling perspective, the studies further showed that people often diverge from dissimilar outgroups to avoid the costs of misidentification. Implications for social influence, identity signaling, and the popularity and diffusion of culture are discussed.