Allen M. Weiss

Marketing in Technology-Intensive Markets: Toward a Conceptual Framework

Markets in which technology assumes a central role are becoming driving forces of the economy. The authors label these “technology-intensive” (TI) markets. Despite their importance, however, there ...

Listening to Strangers: Whose Responses are Valuable, How Valuable Are They, and Why?

Marketing managers and consumers who use the Web as a source of information often use input from strangers to make decisions or gain knowledge. The authors propose that in such contexts, the information providers current and past behaviors, relative to those of other information providers, influence who the information seeker believes provides a valuable response and how valuable he or she judges the providers information to be. The authors track information queries, information provider responses, and objective valuation of these responses by information seekers in a Web forum, in which responses to information queries come from multiple information providers with whom the information seeker has not met face-to-face and has had no prior interaction. Among other results, the authors show that a providers response speed, the extent to which the providers previous responses within the focal domain have been positively evaluated by others, and the breadth of the providers previous responses across different domains of knowledge affect objective judgments of information value. Importantly, these effects are moderated by the information seekers goal orientation. The information providers experience in responding to questions in different domains of knowledge increases judgments of information value for information seekers with a decision-making orientation, whereas the information providers reputation for providing valuable contributions within the focal domain increases judgments of information value for information seekers with a learning orientation.

Assessing When Increased Media Weight of Real-World Advertisements Helps Sales

A prevailing view is that increased media weight for frequently purchased brands in mature product categories usually does not lead to increases in sales. However, the role of advertising executional cues and viewer responses on media weight-induced sales has not yet been examined. The authors find that whether weight helps or has no sales impact depends on the creative characteristics of the advertisements and the responses they evoke in viewers. Study 1 showed that real-world advertisements for frequently purchased brands in mature categories were likely to create greater media weight-induced sales when they used affectively based executional cues. Study 2 found that greater media weight was related to the sales impact of advertisements that evoked positive feelings and failed to evoke negative feelings in viewers. The authors develop hypotheses related to these results within the context of prior work on consumer persuasion (including the elaboration likelihood model), memory processes, and advertising wearout.

No es como mí: Relational demography and conflict in a Mexican production facility

In recent years management scholars have conducted an array of studies on relational demography. Most of this research, however, has taken place in the USA. Also, few of these prior investigations have looked at the role of moderators. In an effort to begin addressing those gaps, this study assessed the relationship between individual demographic dissimilarity and conflict in a Central Mexican workplace; additionally, it examined the moderating role of supervisor facilitation. Data from 190 Mexican workers revealed that in this study, as in comparable US studies, conflict had a two-dimensional structure consisting of task conflict and emotional conflict. Associations between relational demography and conflict, however, were not identical to those previously found in the USA. Individual dissimilarity in age was positively associated with emotional conflict, while individual dissimilarity in tenure was negatively associated with both task and emotional conflict. Supervisor facilitation moderated the relationships between tenure dissimilarity and conflict. These results suggest that greater attention to demography effects, as well as moderators of those effects, in Mexico is warranted.

Perceptual Dimensions Differentiate Emotions

ABSTRACT Individuals often describe objects in their world in terms of perceptual dimensions that span a variety of modalities; the visual (e.g., brightness: dark–bright), the auditory (e.g., loudness: quiet–loud), the gustatory (e.g., taste: sour–sweet), the tactile (e.g., hardness: soft vs. hard) and the kinaesthetic (e.g., speed: slow–fast). We ask whether individuals use perceptual dimensions to differentiate emotions from one another. Participants in two studies (one where respondents reported on abstract emotion concepts and a second where they reported on specific emotion episodes) rated the extent to which features anchoring 29 perceptual dimensions (e.g., temperature, texture and taste) are associated with 8 emotions (anger, fear, sadness, guilt, contentment, gratitude, pride and excitement). Results revealed that in both studies perceptual dimensions differentiate positive from negative emotions and high arousal from low arousal emotions. They also differentiate among emotions that are similar in arousal and valence (e.g., high arousal negative emotions such as anger and fear). Specific features that anchor particular perceptual dimensions (e.g., hot vs. cold) are also differentially associated with emotions.