Publications (Selection)
Cause-Related Marketing as Sales Promotion
Journal of Marketing Research
This study presents the first field investigation of the sales impact of cause-related marketing promotions (CMPs) in retail settings. Whereas prior work primarily studies CMPs in simplified experimental settings, actual FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) markets are considerably more complex; ergo, consumers are unlikely to consider and evaluate all brands and CMPs in detail. [more]
The Effectiveness of Cause-Related Marketing: A Meta-Analysis on Consumer Responses
Journal of Marketing Research
Cause-related marketing (CM), which links corporate donations to consumer purchases, has ongoing momentum in marketing. As the magnitude and direction of consumers’ response to CM are inconclusive, this meta-analysis synthesizes evidence on main and moderator effects from 237 studies. On average, the authors find a moderate effect for attitudinal response (d =.458) and a weak effect for behavioral response (d =.283; both ps < .001), both with high underlying heterogeneity. [more]
Frontiers: Supporting Content Marketing with Natural Language Generation
Marketing Science
Advances in natural language generation (NLG) have facilitated technologies such as digital voice assistants and chatbots. In this research, we demonstrate how NLG can support content marketing by using it to draft content for the landing page of a website in search engine optimization (SEO). Traditional SEO projects rely on hand-crafted content that is both time consuming and costly to produce. [more]
More than a Feeling: Accuracy and Application of Sentiment Analysis
International Journal of Research in Marketing
Sentiment is fundamental to human communication. Countless marketing applications mine opinions from social media communication, news articles, customer feedback, or corporate communication. Various sentiment analysis methods are available and new ones have recently been proposed. Lexicons can relate individual words and expressions to sentiment scores. [more]
The Power of Brand Selfies
Journal of Marketing Research
Smartphones have made it nearly effortless to share images of branded experiences. This research classifies social media brand imagery and studies user response. Aside from packshots (standalone product images), two types of brand-related selfie images appear online: consumer selfies (featuring brands and consumers’ faces) and an emerging phenomenon the authors term “brand selfies” (invisible consumers holding a branded product). [more]
Leveraging Brand Equity for Effective Visual Product Design
Journal of Marketing Research
For many consumer goods, the visual appearance is a vital determinant of market success. Although there is an emerging literature on how objective design characteristics drive consumer preferences, this literature has not yet taken into account that product design happens in the context of a brand’s equity. This research addresses the question of how to leverage brand equity when designing the visual appearance of a product. [more]
Consideration of ethical attributes along the consumer decision-making journey
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
Information about ethical strengths and weaknesses of individual products (e.g., cause-related marketing, corporate social responsibility records) is increasingly available in the marketplace. However, market shares of ethical brands are still low, even though prior research indicates that ethical attributes influence brand choice. [more]
Comparing Automated Text Classification Methods
International Journal of Research in Marketing
Online social media drive the growth of unstructured text data. Many marketing applications require structuring this data at scales non-accessible to human coding, e.g., to detect communication shifts in sentiment or other researcher-defined content categories. Several methods have been proposed to automatically classify unstructured text. [more]
Building a Social Network for Success
Journal of Marketing Research
This article proposes a framework for studying how a brand, firm, or individual can use networking activities to manage a social network and drive its success. Using data from ego networks of music artists, the article models how artists can enhance their social networking presence and stimulate relationships between fans to achieve long-term benefits in terms of music plays. [more]
A Novel Approach for Predicting and Understanding Consumers' Sense of Design Similarity
Journal of Product Innovation Management
Product designers continuously emphasize how important yet difficult it is to create new products with designs similar enough for brand recognition, yet dissimilar enough for a unique positioning. Advancing the understanding of perceived design similarity would greatly help to systematically manage this balance. Design literature typically assesses how much a new design deviates from the status quo based on consumers’ holistic similarity perceptions. [more]
Charts and demand: Empirical generalizations on social influence
International Journal of Research in Marketing
Social influence on consumer behavior has long been a subject of academic research in various scientific fields. According to research by Salganik, Dodds, and Watts (2006), music demand is a function of social influence between consumers. Market concentration tends to increase when information on demand becomes publicly available. In addition, stochastic agglomeration caused by social influence decreases the predictability of market success. [more]
The Impact of Brand Equity on Customer Acquisition, Retention, and Profit Margin
Journal of Marketing
The authors investigate the relationships between brand equity and customer acquisition, retention, and profit margin, the key components of customer lifetime value (CLV). They examine a unique database from the U.S. automobile market that combines ten years of acquisition rate, retention rate, and customer profitability data with measures of brand equity from Young & Rubicam's Brand Asset Valuator (BAV) over the same period. [more]
Order in Product Customization Decisions: Evidence from Field Experiments
Journal of Political Economy
Differentiated product models are predicated on the belief that a product’s utility can be derived from the summation of utilities for its individual attributes. In one framed field experiment and two natural field experiments, we test this assumption by experimentally manipulating the order of attribute presentation in the product customization process of custom‐made suits and automobiles. [more]
Nudge Your Customers Toward Better Choices
Havard Business Review
When car rental agencies include insurance unless you specifically decline it, or software vendors recommend that you click “next” for a quick install, they’re choosing default options for you—covertly or overtly guiding your choices. Well-designed product or service defaults benefit both company and consumer by simplifying decision making, enhancing customer satisfaction, reducing risk, and driving profitable purchases. [more]
Choice Goal Attainment and Decision and Consumption Satisfaction
Journal of Marketing Research
Several individual, social-setting, and choice-set factors have been shown to be related to satisfaction. This article argues that these factors operate through a set of choice goals. Using panel data on purchasers of consumer electronics, the authors examine how five goals (justifiability, confidence, anticipated regret, evaluation costs, and final negative affect) drive decision and consumption satisfaction, which in turn determine loyalty, product recommendations, and the amount and valence of word of mouth. [more]
Our research has been published in leading international and national journals. You can find an overview of Mark Heitmann's publications Publikationen.