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We discuss the findings and empirical strategy in "Spilling the Beans on Political Consumerism: Do Social Media Boycotts and Buycotts Translate to Real Sales Impact?" We discuss a fascinating new case study of the boycott and buycott of Goya products in 2020. The authors use detailed consumer-level shopping panel data to document two surprising and striking findings. First, social media calls to boycott had almost no effects, especially among the core Goya consumer group: democratic-leaning Latinos. Second, the authors document an unintended consequence: Goya's supporters reacted by initiating a call for a "buycott." The boycott and buycott combination ultimately increased Goya sales, especially among nontraditional Republican-leaning buyers, albeit only for a few weeks. We hope this paper will stimulate more work to determine which aspects of these findings generalizes to other instances of political consumerism. In our discussion, we offer thoughts on some of the potentially exceptional circumstances of the Goya case study and some directions for deeper testing of the underlying mechanisms driving the consumer responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cable news channels—and Fox News in particular—affected the extent to which viewers' complied with experts' social distancing guidelines early on in the COVID-19 pandemic. To what extent do mass media outlets influence viewers' trust in scientific evidence and compliance with behavior recommended by scientific experts? Exploiting the U.S. lockdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, we analyze a large longitudinal database that combines daily stay-at-home behavior from approximately 8 million mobile phones and local viewership of cable news networks. Early in the pandemic, several of Fox News' hosts downplayed the severity of the pandemic and the risks associated with the transmission of the virus. A combination of regression analysis and a natural experiment finds that a 10% increase in viewership of Fox News in a zip code causes a 0.76-percentage-point reduction in compliance with stay-at-home behavior. The results imply a media persuasion rate that is larger than typical advertising persuasion rates on consumer behavior. Similar analyses using viewership of MSNBC and CNN, which supported lockdown measures, were inconclusive but suggested a smaller, positive effect on compliance with social distancing regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on whether banner advertising affects purchasing patterns on the Internet. Using a behavioral database that consists of customer purchases at a Web site along with individual advertising exposure, the authors measure the impact of banner advertising on current customers' probabilities of repurchase, while accounting for duration dependence. The authors model the probability of a current customer making a purchase in any given week (since the last purchase) with a survival model that uses a flexible, piecewise exponential hazard function. The advertising covariates are purely advertising variables and advertising/individual browsing variables. The model is cast in a hierarchical Bayesian framework, which enables the authors to obtain individual advertising response parameters. The results show that the number of exposures, number of Web sites, and number of pages all have a positive effect on repeat purchase probabilities, whereas the number of unique creatives has a negative effect. Returns from targeting are the highest for the number of advertising exposures. The findings also add to the general advertising literature by showing that advertising affects the purchase behavior of current (versus new) customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We document evidence of a persistent "early entry" advantage for brands in 34 consumer packaged goods industries across the 50 largest U.S. cities. Current market shares are higher in markets closest to a brand's historic city of origin than in those farthest. For six industries, we know the order of entry among the top brands in each of the markets. We find an early entry effect on a brand's current market share and perceived quality across U.S. cities. The magnitude of this effect typically drives the rank order of market shares and perceived quality levels across cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the role of potential weekly brand-specific characteristics that influence consumer choices, but are unobserved or unmeasurable by the researcher. We use an empirical approach, based on the estimation methods used for standard random coefficients logit models, to account for the presence of such unobserved attributes. Using household scanner panel data, we find evidence that ignoring such time-varying latent (to the researcher) characteristics can lead to two types of problems. First, consistent with previous literature, we find that these unobserved characteristics may lead to biased estimates of the mean price response parameters. This argument is based on a form of price endogeneity. If marketing managers set prices based on consumer willingness to pay, then the observed prices will likely be correlated with the latent (to the researcher) brand characteristics. We resolve this problem by using an instrumental variables procedure. Our findings suggest that simply ignoring these attributes may also lead to larger estimates of the variance in the heterogeneity distribution of preferences and price sensitivities across households. This could overstate the benefits from marketing activities such as household-level targeting. We resolve the problem by using weekly brand intercepts, embedded in a random coefficients brand choice model, to control for weekly brand-specific characteristics, while accounting for household heterogeneity. Overall, our results extend the finding on the endogeneity bias from the mean of the heterogeneity distribution (i.e., the price effect) to include the variance of that distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For several of the largest supermarket product categories, such as carbonated soft drinks, canned soups, ready-to-eat cereals, and cookies, consumers regularly purchase assortments of products. Within the category, consumers often purchase multiple products and multiple units of each alternative selected on a given trip. This multiple discreteness violates the single-unit purchase assumption of multinomial logit and probit models. The misspecification of such demand models in categories exhibiting multiple discreteness would produce incorrect measures of consumer response to marketing mix variables. In studying product strategy, these models would lead to misleading managerial conclusions. We use an alternative microeconomic model of demand for categories that exhibit the multiple discreteness problem. Recognizing the separation between the time of purchase and the time of consumption, we model consumers purchasing bundles of goods in anticipation of a stream of consumption occasions before the next trip. We apply the model to a panel of household purchases for carbonated soft drinks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]