Praveen Aggarwal

Strategic brand alliances: implications of ingredient branding for national and private label brands

Current research on brand alliances has focused primarily on alliances between two known, national brands. However, there is significant benefit to both parties in an alliance between a national brand and a private brand. Such alliances are gaining importance in the industry but have not been studied by marketers. The basic question explored in this study is whether using a national brand ingredient can benefit a private brand without hurting the national brand. First, a theoretical framework to explain how consumers may react to such an alliance is presented. Next, an experiment was conducted which showed that a private brand with a name brand ingredient was evaluated more positively. However, the evaluation of the national brand was not diminished by this association. Implications and future research directions are discussed.

Salesperson empathy and listening: Impact on relationship outcomes

This study fills an important gap in the literature by developing a conceptual model that links salesperson empathy and listening skills to three outcome variables. Responses from a mail survey of 162 buyers from a variety of business organizations were used to test this model using structural equation modeling. The model has an excellent fit (X2 = 1.511, GFI = 0.99, AGFI = 0.94), and indicates a strong positive relationship between empathy and the following: salesperson listening, trust in the salesperson, and satisfaction with the salesperson. Also, listening is positively related to buyer’s trust in and satisfaction with the salesperson, but not with future interaction expectations. Trust in and satisfaction with the salesperson were positively related to future interaction expectations.

Barriers to the adoption of really‐new products and the role of surrogate buyers

This paper examines adoption of really‐new products (RNPs) from a consumer perspective. The unique characteristics of RNPs which differentiate them from other innovative products are examined in relation to the role which these characteristics play in creating barriers to adoption of RNPs. These characteristics in turn affect different stages of the adoption process. Surrogate buyers, acting as agents used by adopters to provide guidance, direction, and/or advice related to marketplace activities, can significantly impact consumer adoption and commercial success of RNPs by minimizing or overcoming barriers related to the stages of the adoption process and characteristics of RNPs.

The Wretched Refuse of a Teeming Shore? A Critical Examination of the Quality of Undergraduate Marketing Students

What is the quality of students attracted to the marketing major relative to other business majors? Although some anecdotal evidence suggests that undergraduate marketing students are less quantitatively oriented, there has been no comprehensive assessment of the overall quality of marketing students relative to other business students. Using a variety of secondary data analyses from nationwide samples, the authors assess the quality of students choosing marketing as a major. The results paint a grim picture for the marketing discipline. Marketing majors are among the poorest performing students relative to other business majors both coming in to and leaving college. Results from a broad-based sample suggest that marketing educators need to start a dialogue on exactly what set of knowledge and skills core to the discipline are being o fered students and their employers. The authors o fer some solutions and point to areas for additional research.

Using Commitments to Drive Consistency: Enhancing the Effectiveness of Cause‐related Marketing Communications

Research has consistently found that, despite a high degree of expressed concern about the environment, few individuals are willing to follow‐up this concern with behavioural actions in support of the environment, particularly when these actions require the individuals to absorb some costs. Using the theoretical framework of commitment–consistency theory, two studies were conducted in order to examine the effect of a small, active commitment to an environmental cause on consumer preference for an advertised product that supported that cause. The empirical results show strong support for the fact that persuading consumers to make an active commitment to a cause can serve as an important prerequisite for behavioural consistency (in terms of the willingness to buy a product). Further, the paper adds to the evidence on self‐perception theory as an underlying mechanism for the effectiveness of the technique. It is also found that, although commitment increases willingness to buy a product related to the cause, the effect works only when the cost associated with supporting the cause is minimal. The implications for marketing communications theory and practice are discussed.

Asymmetric price competition and store vs national brand choice

Sales and market share of store brands have been growing significantly at the expense of national brands. The decision to purchase a store brand or a national brand has been modeled in this paper. The proposed model provides an explanation for the existence of asymmetric price competition between store brands and national brands. The article proposes and empirically demonstrates the existence of a reference threshold as the key criterion underlying this choice. It also shows that the decision to buy the store/national brand is not influenced by the store brand’s price or price promotions, or the magnitude of the difference between the threshold and the national brand’s price.

Eliciting Online Customers’ Preferences: Conjoint vs Self-Explicated Attribute-Level Measurements

The growth of the Internet for shopping has led to an increasing interest in tools for assisting consumers with decision-making, efficienfly using the vast quantity of widely dispersed information. Online product recommendation agents gather information from consumers and then match these consumer preferences with their database of products to recommend the best product. Two approaches can be taken for gathering information from consumers on their preferences – conjoint-type full-profile ratings or self-explicated ratings. That is, organizations may infer consumers’ preferences for attributes and levels on the basis of their ratings of several alternative products or may simply directly ask them their evaluations of various attributes and levels. We compare these two approaches and find that, in general, they do not result in the same conclusions. In this paper we examine the differences in the approaches to making recommendations and discuss the implications of these differences. Our results show that there is a closer match between the methods for products closer to the extremes of consumer preference. Also, our study shows that a recommendation agent should offer more than one recommendation in order to match the needs of the system user.

Deal evaluation and purchase intention: the impact of aspirational and market‐based internal reference prices

While there has been much debate in the reference pricing literature on the most appropriate conceptualization of internal reference price used by consumers in evaluating deals, the question of whether consumers may use different internal reference prices at different stages of the purchase process has not been addressed. In this article, we hypothesize that consumers may use one type of internal reference price to form their deal attitude and another to determine their purchase intentions. We also show that different dimensions of internal reference price are used to determine deal attitude and purchase intention and that price uncertainty moderates the relationship between these internal reference prices and deal evaluation.

Interdependent self-construal in collectivist cultures: Effects on compliance in a cause-related marketing context

This study is a replication and extension of prior work on the effectiveness of cause-related marketing efforts. We show that compliance behavior across cultures can be different depending on the dominant self-construal paradigm prevalent in a given society. The original study had shown that people in independent self-construal societies (individualist countries such as the USA) are unwilling to follow up on their original commitment (to support rainforest protection) if compliance involves bearing the cost of such action (paying a higher price for a product where part of the price is donated to rainforest protection). This study, drawing on a sample of students at a mid-sized university in northern Poland, shows that commitment–consistency works in collectivist, interdependent self-construal societies in a different way: if the cause being supported is of a pro-social nature, people in such societies are willing to pay the higher product price to support it.

Surrogate buyers and the new product adoption process: a conceptualization and managerial framework

Models the role and impact of a relatively new intermediary, the surrogate buyers, on the new product adoption process. Existing diffusion models have ignored the impact of this intermediary who is becoming increasingly influential in many product categories/ purchase situations. Given the increasing product complexity and a plethora of product‐related information in the market, buyers are delegating the task of processing this information and making purchase decisions to surrogate buyers (such as wardrobe consultants, interior decorators). Examines the impact of such delegation on the adoption process. The inclusion of surrogate buyers not only makes the adoption process two‐staged, but also has other important managerial implications because of the unique characteristics of surrogate buyers. Develops a conceptual model to examine the impact of these characteristics on the adoption process and presents strategies to market new products successfully in situations where the surrogate buyers are the primary adopting units.