Johannes Hattula

Managerial Empathy Facilitates Egocentric Predictions of Consumer Preferences

Common wisdom suggests that managerial empathy (i.e., the mental process of taking a consumer perspective) helps executives separate their personal consumption preferences from those of consumers, thereby preventing egocentric preference predictions. The results of the present investigation, however, show exactly the opposite. First, the authors find that managerial empathy ironically accelerates self-reference in predictions of consumer preferences. Second, managers’ self-referential tendencies increase with empathy because taking a consumer perspective activates managers’ private consumer identity and, thus, their personal consumption preferences. Third, empathic managers’ self-referential preference predictions make them less likely to use market research results. Fourth, the findings imply that when explicitly instructed to do so, managers are capable of suppressing their private consumer identity in the process of perspective taking, which helps them reduce self-referential preference predictions. To support their conclusions, the authors present four empirical studies with 480 experienced marketing managers and show that incautiously taking the perspective of consumers causes self-referential decisions in four contexts: product development, communication management, pricing, and celebrity endorsement.

Marketing Department’s Influence and Information Dissemination Within in a Firm: Evidence for an Inverted U-Shaped Relationship

The dissemination of market intelligence across an organization is a key task of a firm’s marketing department, as recognized by marketing researchers (e.g., Maltz and Kohli 1996) and practitioners (e.g., Mohr et al. 2010). They place great emphasis on market intelligence dissemination, a main component of firm’s (internal) market orientation (e.g., Jaworski and Kohli 1993), due the strategic importance (Makadok and Barney 2001) and its positive effects on the financial performance of a firm (e.g., Kumar et al. 1998). In order to enhance intelligence dissemination throughout the firm, conventional wisdom in the market orientation literature suggests marketing department’s influence within the firm as an important driver (Verhoef and Leeflang 2009). Hereby, past research (e.g., Moorman and Rust 1999; Verhoef et al. 2011) has generally assumed a positive linear relationship between marketing influence and market intelligence dissemination, and subsequently on performance. Our research, however, questions an entirely positive linear relationship. Specifically, building on social psychological research that implies that the degree of influence affects communication behavior (e.g., Keltner et al. 2003), we suggest that high marketing influence can ironically backfire. Hence, we propose that marketing influence has an inverted U- shaped relationship with market intelligence dissemination, which in turn impacts financial firm performance.

It is Relevant, Isn’t it? On the Influence of Prior Experience on a Joint Relevance Evaluation Between Marketing Scholars and Practitioners

During the past years, there has been growing interests in the practical impact of applied science. More and more often, practitioners voice concern about the relevance of scholarly research. Therefore, researchers in various fields have called for more relevant work, for instance in strategic management (Baldridge, Floyd, and Markoczy 2004) and in human resource management (Cohen 2007). As well, the marketing literature is also replete with numerous calls for more relevance in marketing science and articles that provide recommendations for bridging the relevance gap (e.g., McAlister 2006; Reibstein, Day, and Wind 2009). Yet why is it so difficult for scholars to provide practitioners with decision-relevant advice?