Stefano Puntoni

Assessing Marketing Performance: Reasons for Metrics Selection

In recent years both practitioners and academics have shown an increasing interest in the assessment of marketing performance. This paper explores the metrics that firms select and some reasons for those choices. Our data are drawn from two UK studies. The first reports practitioner usage by the main metrics categories (consumer behaviour and intermediate, trade customer, competitor, accounting and innovativeness). The second considers which individual metrics are seen as the most important and whether that differs by sector. The role of brand equity in performance assessment and top management orientations are key considerations. We found consistency between orientation and metrics. Within these categories we identified 19 metrics that could be regarded as primary and could therefore serve as a short-list for initial selection. However, the sector importantly moderates that selection, not least because competitive benchmarking requires similar metrics to be available. Control, orientation and institutional theories appeared to influence metrics selection and the absence of agency theory is probably due to the research method of this paper. We concluded with some propositions formally to test the basis of metrics selection.

Gender Identity Salience and Perceived Vulnerability to Breast Cancer

Breast cancer communications that make womens gender identity salient can trigger defense mechanisms and thereby interfere with key objectives of breast cancer campaigns. In a series of experiments, the authors demonstrate that increased gender identity salience lowered womens perceived vulnerability to breast cancer (Experiments 1a, 3a, and 3b), reduced their donations to ovarian cancer research (Experiment 1b), made breast cancer advertisements more difficult to process (Experiment 2a), and decreased ad memory (Experiment 2b). These results are contrary to the predictions of several prominent theoretical perspectives and a convenience sample of practitioners. The reduction in perceived vulnerability to breast cancer following gender identity primes can be eliminated by self-affirmation (Experiment 3a) and fear voicing (Experiment 3b), corroborating the hypothesis that these effects are driven by unconscious defense mechanisms.

The Anchor Contraction Effect in International Marketing Research

In an increasingly globalized marketplace, it is common for marketing researchers to collect data from respondents who are not native speakers of the language in which the questions are formulated. Examples include online customer ratings and internal marketing initiatives in multinational corporations. This raises the issue of whether providing responses on rating scales in a persons native versus second language exerts a systematic influence on the responses obtained. This article documents the anchor contraction effect (ACE), the systematic tendency to report more intense emotions when answering questions using rating scales in a nonnative language than in the native language. Nine studies (1) establish ACE, test the underlying process, and rule out alternative explanations; (2) examine the generalizability of ACE across a range of situations, measures, and response scale formats; and (3) explore managerially relevant and easily implementable corrective techniques.

Two Birds and One Stone

Current social trends leading to greater consumer diversity require that advertisers pay increasing attention to minority groups within society. This paper answers recent calls for research into the effects of purposeful polysemy, or strategic ambiguity, in minority targeting. The results of a quasi-experiment with gay and heterosexual male respondents in the context of gay window advertising demonstrate not only significant positive target market effects of covert minority targeting (i.e., ambiguous ad cues), but also the existence of negative non-target market effects. Emotional responses fully mediate these effects. Our results further demonstrate the importance of individual differences and product category by suggesting, for example, that gay men who are open about their sexual orientation can be targeted using gay window ads when the product category is congruent with male stereotypes and with mainstream ads when the product category is incongruent with male stereotypes.

Customer empowerment in the digital age

The Internet and advances in digital technologies fundamentally are transforming marketing. Armed with an abundance of information and opportunities, consumers no longer accept the role of passive recipients of marketing communication. This is turning traditional communication approaches upside down

Productivity Metrics and Consumers’ Misunderstanding of Time Savings

The marketplace is replete with productivity metrics that put units of output in the numerator and one unit of time in the denominator (e.g., megabits per second [Mbps] to measure download speed). In this article, three studies examine how productivity metrics influence consumer decision making. Many consumers have incorrect intuitions about the impact of productivity increases on time savings: they do not sufficiently realize that productivity increases at the high end of the productivity range (e.g., from 40 to 50 Mbps) imply smaller time savings than productivity increases at the low end of the productivity range (e.g., from 10 to 20 Mbps). Consequently, the availability of productivity metrics increases willingness to pay for products and services that offer higher productivity levels. This tendency is smaller when consumers receive additional information about time savings through product experience or through metrics that are linearly related to time savings. Consumers’ intuitions about time savings are also more accurate when they estimate time savings than when they rank them. Estimates are based less on absolute than on proportional changes in productivity (and proportional changes correspond more with actual time savings).

Advertising-Induced Embarrassment

Consumer embarrassment is a concern for many advertisers. Yet little is known about ad-induced embarrassment. The authors investigate when and why consumers experience embarrassment as a result of exposure to socially sensitive advertisements. The theory distinguishes between viewing potentially embarrassing ads together with an audience that shares the social identity targeted by the ad and viewing the same ads together with an audience that does not share the targeted social identity. Four studies provide support for the theory, demonstrating that advertising targeting and social context jointly influence feelings of embarrassment and advertising effectiveness. These findings have important theoretical and practical implications for advertisers.

Fooled by Heteroscedastic Randomness: Local Consistency Breeds Extremity in Price-Based Quality Inferences

In some product categories, low-priced brands are consistently of low quality, but high-priced brands can be anything from terrible to excellent. In other product categories, high-priced brands are consistently of high quality, but quality of low-priced brands varies widely. Three experiments demonstrate that such heteroscedasticity leads to more extreme price-based quality predictions. This finding suggests that quality inferences do not only stem from what consumers have learned about the average level of quality at different price points through exemplar memory or rule abstraction. Instead, quality predictions are also based on learning about the covariation between price and quality. That is, consumers inappropriately conflate the conditional mean of quality with the predictability of quality. We discuss implications for theories of quantitative cue learning and selective information processing, for pricing strategies and luxury branding, and for our understanding of the emergence and persistence of erroneous beliefs and stereotypes beyond the consumer realm.

Bang for the Buck: Gain-Loss Ratio as a Driver of Judgment and Choice

Prominent decision-making theories propose that individuals (should) evaluate alternatives by combining gains and losses in an additive way. Instead, we suggest that individuals seek to maximize the rate of exchange between positive and negative outcomes and thus combine gains and losses in a multiplicative way. Sensitivity to gain-loss ratio provides an alternative account for several existing findings and implies a number of novel predictions. It implies greater sensitivity to losses and risk aversion when expected value is positive, but greater sensitivity to gains and risk seeking when expected value is negative. It also implies more extreme preferences when expected value is positive than when expected value is negative. These predictions are independent of decreasing marginal sensitivity, loss aversion, and probability weighting—three key properties of prospect theory. Five new experiments and reanalyses of two recently published studies support these predictions. This paper was accepted by Yuval Ro...