Kersi D. Antia

The Severity of Contract Enforcement in Interfirm Channel Relationships

Little is known about how channel members react to violations of explicit contracts. The authors develop and test an integrative conceptual framework that focuses on the severity of the enforcement response in channel relationships. The empirical results provide evidence of discerning enforcement practices by channel members, reflecting channel system, network, and dyadic concerns.

What Will the Future Bring? Dominance,Technology Expectations, and Radical Innovation

Are dominant firms laggards or leaders at innovation? The answers to this question are conflicting and controversial. In an attempt to resolve conflicting answers to this question, the authors argue that dominance is a multifaceted construct in which individual facets result in differing (and countervailing) propensities to innovate. To identify the overall effects of dominance, it is necessary to consider the effects of these facets taken together. The authors also study a hitherto ignored yet important driver of innovation, technology expectations, and show that managers have widely divergent expectations of the same new technology. Furthermore, even when their expectations are the same, managers of dominant firms display investment behavior at odds with their counterparts at nondominant firms. The authors use a triangulation of research methods and combine insights from lab studies with those from field interviews, archival data, and a survey of bricks-and-mortar banks’ responses to Internet banking.

An Empathy-Helping Perspective on Consumers' Responses to Fund-Raising Appeals

The research examines viewers’ actual responses to four televised fund‐raising drives by a public television station over a 2‐year period. The 584 pledge breaks we studied contain 4,868 individual appeals that were decomposed into two underlying dimensions based on the empathy‐helping hypothesis: the appeal beneficiary (self versus other) and emotional valence (positive versus negative). We find that the most effective fund‐raising appeals communicate the benefits to others rather than to the self and evoke negative rather than positive emotions. Appeals that emphasize benefits to the self significantly reduce the number of calls to the station, particularly when they have a positive emotional valence.

Managing Marketing Channel Multiplicity

Advances in information technology and changing customer needs for channel service outputs have dramatically affected the routes to markets in many industries. The authors propose that these changes have led to significant alterations in how customers interact with firms and consequently to a phenomenon that we dub ‘‘channel multiplicity.’’ Channel multiplicity is characterized by the customer’s reliance on multiple sources of information from independent (and often disparate) channel organizations and increasing demand for a seamless experience throughout the buying process. The authors identify the new market operating realities driving channel multiplicity and provide an overview of the consequences for channel design and channel management: a broadened view of products and services, channel leadership challenges, alterations in channel structure, and an expanded view of distribution intensity. The authors also identify issues triggered by these developments, which calls for further research in this field.

Conflict management and outcomes in franchise relationships: : The role of regulation.

Franchise relationships are prone to conflict. To safeguard the rights of individual franchisees, several states have legislated greater franchisor disclosure (registration law) ex ante and/or franchisor “termination for good cause” (relationship law) ex post. The impact of regulatory oversight on franchisor–franchisee conflict, however, remains unclear. Relying on agency theory arguments, the authors first assess the influence of the regulatory context, both by itself and in combination with the franchise ownership structure, on the incidence of litigated conflict. Conditional on litigation, they also predict the impact of franchise regulation on both the parties’ litigation initiation and resolution choices and the resulting outcomes. The authors test the hypotheses using a unique multisource archival database of 411 instances of litigation across 75 franchise systems observed over 17 years. The results indicate that the regulatory context, by itself as well as in combination with the franchise ownership structure, significantly shapes parties’ conflict management choices. The authors also find evidence of a trade-off between prevailing in the particular conflict and achieving franchise system growth objectives.

The Impact of User-Generated Content On Product Innovation

Our research investigates the impact of user-generated content (UGC) on product innovation. Prior research has focused on the role of UGC as a form of consumer-to-consumer communication that enhances product promotion. Our research focuses on the role of UGC as a form of consumer-to-developer communication that facilitates product innovation. Specifically, we examine the impact of two categories of UGC (i.e., contributions that reflect user ideas and contributions that contain user-generated solutions) on two innovation outcomes (product improvement and market response). We apply this categorization to a longitudinal sample of nearly 5,000 open source software projects and jointly model the impact of idea-centric and solution-centric contributions on these innovation metrics. In contrast to commonly held thought, our results suggest that the impact of UGC is not strictly positive, but varies according to both the type of UGC as well as the metric of product innovation. Collectively, our research provides a broadened conceptualization of UGC and suggests that user contributions may both help and hinder product innovation.The recent rise in user-generated content (UGC) is dramatically reshaping the marketing landscape (Marketing Science Institute 2008). An increasing number of knowledgeable and connected consumers are no longer content with merely choosing and using a company’s products; they also want to contribute to the development and promotion of these offerings (O’Hern and Rindfleisch 2010; von Hippel 2005). These contributions have fueled the rise of new ventures such as Jones Soda, Threadless, and YouTube, and are being creatively leveraged by a growing collection of established firms such as Dell, Intuit, and Procter & Gamble (Chafkin 2008; Cook 2008; Huston and Sakkab 2006). These changes in marketing practice also challenge marketing thought, as the rise of user contributions disrupts established paradigms regarding the roles of firms and consumers (Vargo and Lusch 2004).In recent years, a growing number of scholars have begun to investigate the impact of UGC on various marketing outcomes (Chevalier and Mayzlin 2006; Godes and Mayzlin 2004; Li and Hitt 2008; Mayzlin 2006; Moe and Trusov 2011). Although this emerging research provides important contributions to our understanding of UGC, it is characterized by a singular focus on consumer-to-consumer communications, and suggests that the power of UGC lies in its ability to draw attention to a product and promote it via word of mouth. Thus, much of the extant UGC research has focused on contributions that are evaluative in nature, such as product ratings and reviews (e.g., Amazon.com, Yelp.com). However, emerging research in the user innovation domain suggests that user contributions can also be creative in nature, ranging from requests for specific product enhancements (e.g., Dell IdeaStorm) to actual product modifications (e.g., The Sims and Firefox). These latter forms of UGC serve as a means of consumer-to-developer communication, and provide a mechanism for consumers to contribute ideas and solutions that may directly influence product innovation. Although a growing body of research suggests that consumer contributions enhance the innovation process of many firms, this work is seldom cited in the UGC literature (see Piller and Ihl 2009 for a review).Our research seeks to address this gap and contribute to the emerging UGC literature by assessing the impact of a wider array of UGC activity on product innovation. Given our broadened perspective and focus on product innovation, we define UGC as original contributions by a product’s users aimed at fellow users and/or product developers. These contributions provide product developers with either information regarding how a product performs or how it can be improved (i.e., idea-centric UGC), or information containing actual solutions to product-related problems (i.e., solution-centric UGC). Although marketing’s existing UGC literature predominantly focuses on idea-centric UGC in the form of ratings and reviews, we consider both types of UGC and suggest that these two categories of contributions vary in their impact on product innovation. Our definition and conceptualization enriches the extant UGC research by incorporating insights from related research in the domain of user innovation (e.g., Franke and Shah 2003; Luthje et al. 2005; Thomke and von Hippel 2002; von Hippel 2005). This conceptualization serves as a point of distinction from prior UGC research in marketing, which generally views user contributions as a form of word of mouth communication rather than as a creative means of product innovation.Using open source software (OSS) as our empirical context, we test our conceptualization by jointly examining the impact of two different categories of UGC (idea-centric vs. solutioncentric) on two different innovation metrics (product improvement vs. market response) across a longitudinal sample of 4,978 OSS projects. Our analysis reveals both positive and negative effects of UGC on innovation performance and indicates that the type of UGC that impacts product improvement is different from the type of UGC that impacts market response. Thus, our results suggest that the effects of UGC are more nuanced than previously recognized. Our research contributes to both marketing theory and practice. We enhance marketing theory by presenting an expanded conceptualization of UGC that reflects the multiple ways in which users can participate in developing and promoting new products. We enhance marketing practice by offering managerially relevant insights regarding how to utilize UGC to enhance both internal (i.e., product improvement) and external (i.e., market response) innovation metrics.

The Effects of Advertised Quality Emphasis and Objective Quality on Sales

Given that consumers value quality, and advertising content informs consumers’ beliefs about quality, it is not surprising that high-quality brands emphasize quality in their advertising content. What is less obvious is whether firms with lower-quality brands should also follow suit and emphasize quality in their advertising to signal a higher quality. We examine this issue and study the effectiveness of quality-based advertising messages. Our field study relates brands’ monthly sales to their advertised quality claims across 1,876 print ads in national magazines and Consumer Reports–based product quality ratings over more than two decades. Contrary to the generally held yet erroneous belief in the efficacy of low-quality products emphasizing quality in their advertising, we demonstrate that (1) it is not beneficial for a low-quality firm to emphasize quality in its advertising, and (2) it is effective for a high-quality firm to do so. An analysis of parameter values from a published category-agnostic simulation and an experiment that examines consumers’ responses to quality claims in a second product category yields convergent insights.

Clustering, Knowledge Sharing, and Intrabrand Competition: A Multiyear Analysis of an Evolving Franchise System

As franchise systems expand, the clustering and resulting proximity of same-brand outlets often become contentious issues. The increased interactions among outlets may facilitate knowledge sharing, even while inducing intrabrand competition. Prior research has considered each possibility—knowledge sharing or intrabrand competition—in isolation, resulting in conflicting recommendations to the central question of whether multiple same-brand outlets should be close to or distant from one another. In this study, the authors take the perspective of the focal outlet and show that the opportunity to share knowledge afforded by clustering-based proximity may or may not be realized, depending on the motivation and ability of the proximal outlets to share knowledge, the focal outlets ability to absorb knowledge, and the governance context. An analysis of more than 8,000 observations on the 988 outlets of a U.S.-based automotive service franchise system from 1977 to 2012, and corresponding outlet-level sales information from 2004 to 2012, provides support for the authors’ hypotheses.

Franchisor–Franchisee Bankruptcy and the Efficacy of Franchisee Governance

Franchisors’ long-term viability is tied to the ongoing operations of their franchisees. To ensure the ongoing performance of franchisees, franchisors deploy multiple governance mechanisms. This study assesses how governance mechanisms deployed to enhance franchisee ability (via selection and socialization) and motivation (via incentives and monitoring) impact franchisee bankruptcy. The authors examine the individual and joint effects of deploying governance mechanisms that share the same underlying objective, namely, to enhance franchisee ability and motivation. They also assess how motivation-inducing mechanisms may serve to counter the motivation-dampening effect of an increased royalty rate. Relying on data from multiple archival sources, the authors identify all bankruptcy filings by franchisees and their franchisors across 1,115 franchise systems over a 13-year observation window. Their findings document a positive and significant relationship between franchisee and franchisor bankruptcy. They also find main and interaction effects of the ability- and motivation-influencing governance mechanisms on the likelihood of franchisee bankruptcy, and the existence of significant bankruptcy spillovers among franchisees within the same franchise system. They discuss implications for franchise theory and management.