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This paper details how marketing scholars can address important marketing issues. It starts by clearly distinguishing importance from relevance and, on that basis, discerns four types of research projects: (1) thought leadership; (2) science leadership; (3) applied science; and (4) puzzling science. It proposes to funnel more resources from applied and puzzling science to thought leadership and to sustain science leadership. To do so, it offers a research funnel (awareness-consideration-choice-execution) and how ability and motivation throughout the funnel guide a scholar towards more important research. It offers three key takeaways on how to achieve more important research: (1) socialize with practice; (2) embrace residual ambiguity; and (3) do not get bored or boring from hyperspecialization.

Grounded in sociological agency theory, the authors study the role of the faculty research incentive system in the academic research conducted at business schools and business school health. The authors surveyed 234 marketing professors and completed 22 interviews with 14 (associate) deans and 8 external institution stakeholders. They find that research quantity contributes to the research health of the school, but not to other aspects of business school health. r-quality of research (i.e., rigor) contributes more strongly to the research health of the school than research quantity. q-quality (i.e., practical importance) of research does not contribute to the research health of the school but contributes positively to teaching health and several other dimensions of business school health. Faculty research incentives are misaligned: (1) when monitoring research faculty, the number of publications receives too much weight, while creativity, literacy, relevance, and awards receive too little weight; and (2) on average, faculty feels that they are insufficiently compensated for their research, while (associate) deans feel they are compensated too much for their research. These incentive misalignments are largest in schools that perform the worst on research (r- and q-) quality. The authors explore how business schools and faculty can remedy these misalignments.

This article examines the effects of collective layoff announcements on sales and marketing-mix elasticities, accounting for supply-side constraints. The authors study 205 announcements in the automotive industry using a difference-in-differences model. They find that, following collective layoff announcements, layoff firms experience adverse changes in sales, advertising elasticity, and price elasticity. They explore the moderating role of announcement characteristics on these changes and find that collective layoff announcements by domestic firms and announcements that do not mention a decline in demand as a motive are more likely to be followed by adverse marketing-mix elasticity changes. On average, sales for the layoff firm in the layoff country are 8.7% lower following a collective layoff announcement than their predicted levels absent the announcement. Similarly, advertising elasticity is 9.8% lower and price elasticity is 19.2% higher than absent the announcement. Conversely, layoff firms typically decrease advertising spending in the country where collective layoffs have occurred, yet they do not change prices. These findings are relevant to

Prior research has heavily debated the value of academic research of faculty to the business schools that employ them. We study, conceptually and empirically (by surveying faculty and interviewing (associate) deans), the role of the faculty research incentive system in business school health. We find that higher research health is congruent with higher teaching quality, stronger resource support, and stronger external stakeholder support. R-quality of research (i.e., rigor) contributes more strongly to research health than research quantity, while q-quality of research (i.e., relevance) contributes positively to teaching quality and external stakeholder support. We also find that research task incentives are misaligned: (1) in faculty evaluations, the number of publications receives too much weight, while creativity, literacy, practical relevance, and awards receive too little weight; and (2) the faculty feels that they are insufficiently compensated, while (associate) deans feel faculty is compensated too much for its research. These incentive misalignments are largest in schools that perform the worst on research and business school health overall. We explore improvements that business schools and faculty can introduce.

Academic research in marketing is of key importance to the health of business schools. However, there has been considerable debate in recent years whether academic research in marketing, and business in general, delivers enough on this promise. Our goal is to add a coherent and novel faculty management perspective to this debate. We identify three limiters in the faculty management system that restrict the impact academic research in marketing may have on business school health: (1) the imperfect metrics used to evaluate marketing academics that focus primarily on quantity, (2) the weak professional alignment between marketing academics and professionals relevant to marketing, and (3) the incentives for marketing academics that have started to emphasize extrinsic rewards such as bonuses for publications. In response to these limiters, we offer three improvements for increasing the impact marketing can have on business school health. These include: (1) supplementing the quantitative metrics with a qualitative assessment of the work, (2) socializing marketing academics into the practice of marketing, and (3) strengthening intrinsic rewards and reducing extrinsic rewards.

Non-premium brands occasionally emulate their premium counterparts by using ads that emphasize premium characteristics such as superior performance and exclusivity. We define this practice as “advertising up” and develop hypotheses about its short- and long-term impact on advertising elasticity and brand equity respectively. We test the hypotheses in two large-scale empirical studies using a comprehensive dataset from the automotive industry that includes, among others, the content of 2317 television ads broadcast over a period of 45 months. The results indicate that advertising up increases (decreases) short-term advertising elasticity for non-premium products with a low (high) market share. The results also show that an intensive use of advertising up over time leads to long-term improvements (reductions) in brand equity for expensive (cheap) non-premium products. Furthermore, an inconsistent use of advertising up leads to reductions in brand equity. The results imply that managers of non-premium products with a low market share can use advertising up to increase advertising effectiveness in the short run. However, advertising up will only generate long-term improvements in brand equity for expensive non-premium products. Finally, to avoid long-term reductions in brand equity, advertising up should be consistently used over time.

The authors introduce a new method, prospective meta-analysis in marketing (PMM), to estimate consumer response to online advertising on a large and adaptive scale. They illustrate their approach in a field study in the U.S., China and the Netherlands, covering equivalent ad content on social media, online video, display banner, and search engines. The authors tested a conceptual framework based on attention and engagement using a technological solution that allow them to observe participants browsing and clicking activity in depth from their own residences, offices, or places of choice to use the tested media platforms, e.g., Facebook, Weibo, Google, Baidu and others. The authors show how consumers respond differently to the same ad depending on how distant they are from purchase, and uncover which channels are most appropriate to which user at different stages of the funnel. They also show how engagement and attention strengthen consumer response to advertising. The authors show how PMM produces exploratory findings, confirmatory findings, and replications by systematically organizing the incremental exploration of complex phenomena with cycles of discovery and validation.

We aim to investigate the impact of marketing science articles and tools on the practice of marketing. This impact may be direct (e.g., an academic article may be adapted to solve a practical problem) or indirect (e.g., its contents may be incorporated into practitioners' tools, which then influence marketing decision making). We use the term "marketing science value chain" to describe these diffusion steps, and survey marketing managers, marketing science intermediaries (practicing marketing analysts), and marketing academics to calibrate the value chain.In our sample, we find that (1) the impact of marketing science is perceived to be largest on decisions such as the management of brands, pricing, new products, product portfolios, and customer/market selection, and (2) tools such as segmentation, survey-based choice models, marketing mix models, and pre-test market models have the largest impact on marketing decisions. Exemplary papers from 1982 to 2003 that achieved dual - academic and practice - impact are Guadagni and Little (1983) and Green and Srinivasan (1990). Overall, our results are encouraging. First, we find that the impact of marketing science has been largest on marketing decision areas that are important to practice. Second, we find moderate alignment between academic impact and practice impact. Third, we identify antecedents of practice impact among dual impact marketing science papers. Fourth, we discover more recent trends and initiatives in the period 2004-2012, such as the increased importance of big data and the rise of digital and mobile communication, using the marketing science value chain as an organizing framework.

The number of citations a paper receives is the most commonly used measure of scientific impact. In this paper, we study not only the number but also the type of citations that 659 marketing articles generated. We discern five citation types: application, affirmation, negation, review and perfunctory mention (i.e., citing an article only indirectly without really using it). Prior literature in scientometrics recognizes that the former three types, on average, signal a higher level of scientific indebtedness than the latter two types. In our sample, these three types of citation represent only 15% of all citations. We also find different determinants of citation behavior across citation types. Across the 49 determinants we included, only 13 have the same effect across all citation types, of which only 5 are statistically significant across all citation types. For instance, we find a significant inverted U-effect of challenging commonly held beliefs on citations counts, but only for three of the citation types: affirmation, review and perfunctory mention. Our results encourage scientific stakeholders to move beyond mere citation counts to assess a paper’s or a scholar’s scientific contribution, as well as to devote greater attention to the citation process itself.

Customers often receive expert advice related to their health, finances, taxes or legal procedures, to name just a few. A noble stance taken by some is that experts should empower customers to make their own decisions. In this article, we distinguish informational from decisional empowerment and study whether empowerment leads customers to adhere more or less to expert advice. We empirically test our model using a unique dataset involving 11,735 respondents in 17 countries on four continents. In the context of consumer adherence to doctors’ therapy advice (patient non-adherence to doctor advice may cost about $564 billion globally to the pharmaceutical industry every year), we find that decisional empowerment lowers adherence to expert advice. The effect of informational empowerment varies predictably across cultures and is only universally beneficial when initiated by the customer. These findings have important implications for professional service providers.

Prior research comes to different conclusions as to what country characteristics drive diffusion patterns. One prime difficulty that may partially explain this divergence between studies is the sparseness of the data, in terms of the periodicity as well as the number of products and countries, in combination with the large number of potentially influential country characteristics. In face of such sparse data, scholars have used nested models, bivariate models and factor models to explore the role of country covariates. This paper uses Bayesian Lasso and Bayesian Elastic Net variable selection procedures as powerful approaches to identify the most important drivers of differences in Bass diffusion parameters across countries. We find that socio-economic and demographic country covariates (most pronouncedly so, economic wealth and education) have the strongest effect on all diffusion metrics we study. Our findings are a call for marketing scientists to devote greater attention to country covariate selection in international diffusion models, as well as to variable selection in marketing models at large. Keywords Variable selection; Shrinkage; Bayesian Lasso; Bayesian Elastic Net; International diffusion; Bass model

Patients increasingly request their physicians to prescribe specific brands of pharmaceutical drugs. A popular belief is that requests are triggered by direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA). We examine the relationship between DTCA, patient requests, and prescriptions for statins. We find that although the effect of requests on prescriptions is significantly positive, the mean effect of DTCA on patient requests is negative, yet very small. More interestingly, both effects show substantial heterogeneity across physicians, which we uncover using a hierarchical Bayes estimation procedure. We find that specialists receive more requests than primary care physicians but translate them less into prescriptions. In addition, we find that the sociodemographic profile of the area a physician practices in moderates the effects of DTCA on requests and of requests on prescriptions. For instance, physicians from areas with a higher proportion of minorities (i.e., blacks and Hispanics) receive more requests that are less triggered by DTCA and are accomodated less frequently than physicians from areas with a lower proportion of minorities. Our results challenge managers to revisit the role of DTCA in stimulating patient requests. At the same time, they may trigger public policy concerns regarding physicians' accommodation of patient requests and the inequalities they may induce.

Cell-derived membrane vesicles that are released in body fluids are emerging as potential non-invasive biomarkers for diseases like cancer. Techniques capable of measuring the size and concentration of such membrane vesicles directly in body fluids are urgently needed. Here we report on a microfluidic chip with integrated light sheet illumination, and demonstrate accurate fluorescence Single Particle Tracking measurements of the size and concentration of membrane vesicles in cell culture medium and in interstitial fluid collected from primary human breast tumours.

Prior international segmentation studies have been static in that they have identified segments that remain stable over time. This paper shows that country segments in new product growth are intrinsically dynamic. We propose a semiparametric hidden Markov model to dynamically segment countries based on the observed penetration pattern of new product categories. This methodology allows countries to switch between segments over the life cycle of the new product, with time-varying transition probabilities. Our approach is based on penalized splines and can thus be flexibly applied to any nonstationary phenomenon, beyond the new product growth context. For the penetration of six new product categories in 79 countries, we recover the dynamic membership of each country to segments over the life cycle. Our findings reveal substantial dynamics in international market segmentation, especially at the beginning of the product life. Finally, we exploit the dynamic segments to predict the national penetration patterns of a new product before its launch and show that our forecasts outperform forecasts derived from alternate parametric and/or static methods. Our results should encourage multinational corporations to adopt dynamic segmentation methods rather than static methods.

Experimental and survey-based research suggests that consumers often rely on their intuition and cognitive shortcuts to make decisions. Intuition and cognitive shortcuts can lead to suboptimal decisions and, especially in high-stakes decisions, to legitimate welfare concerns. In this paper, we propose an extension of a Bayesian learning model that allows us to quantify the impact of salience-the fact that some pieces of information are easier to retrieve from memory than others-on physician learning. We show, using data on actual prescriptions for real patients, that physicians' belief formation is strongly influenced by salience effects. Feedback from switching patients-the ones the physician decided to switch to a clinically equivalent treatment-receives considerably more weight than feedback from other patients. In the category we study, salience effects slowed down physicians' speed of learning and the adoption of a new treatment, which raises welfare concerns. For managers, our findings suggest that firms that are able to eliminate, or at least reduce, salience effects to a greater extent than their competitors can speed up the adoption of new treatments. We explore the implications of these results and suggest alternative applications of our model that are relevant for policy makers and managers.

Research on the launch of new products in the international realm is scarce. The present paper is the first to document how launch window (difference in months between the first worldwide launch and the subsequent launch in a specific country) and launch price are interrelated and how regulation influences both launch window and launch price. The research context is the global - 50 countries worldwide - launch of 58 new ethical drugs across 29 therapeutic areas. We show that the fastest launch occurs when the launch price is moderately high and the highest launch price occurs at a launch window of 85 months. We find that the health regulator acts strategically in that the extent to which it delays the launch of a new drug increases with the price of the new drug. We also find that regulation overall increases the launch window, except for patent protection. Surprisingly, regulation does not directly impact launch price. The descriptive information on average launch window and launch price and the interconnection between launch window and launch price allows managers in ethical drug companies to build more informed decisions for international market entry. This study also provides public policy analysts with more quantitative evidence regarding launch window and launch price on a broad sample of countries and categories.

The academic literature on the growth acceleration of new products presents a paradox. On the one hand, the diffusion literature concludes that more recently introduced products show faster diffusion than older ones. On the other hand, technology generation literature argues that growth rate, at least as measured by diffusion parameters, remains constant across generations. We resolve this apparent paradox by testing whether growth acceleration occurs across technology generations while controlling for the passing of time. We check acceleration across 39 distinct technology generations in 12 product markets. The results show that intergeneration acceleration occurs in time to takeoff but not with respect to diffusion parameters (i.e., p and q). We show that takeoff acceleration is mostly driven by technology vintage (i.e., the passage of time) rather than generational shifts. Thus, time is a factor that accelerates early growth, but generational shifts do not. This result also holds when controlling for the effects of market vintage when the market is either business-to-business or business-to-consumer as well as when the technology is process-or product-based.

This article examines the global spill-over of foreign product introductions and takeoffs on a focal country’s time-to-takeoff, using a novel data set of penetration data for 8 high tech products across 55 countries. It shows how foreign clout, the susceptibility to foreign influences, and inter-country distances affect global spill-over patterns. The authors find that foreign takeoffs, but not foreign introductions, accelerate a focal country’s time-to-takeoff. The larger the country, the higher its economic wealth, and the more it exports, the more clout it has in the global spill-over process. In contrast, the poorer the country, the more tourists it receives and the higher its population density, the more susceptible it is to global spill-over effects. Cross-country spill-over effects are stronger the closer the countries are to one another, both geographically and economically, but not necessarily in terms of culture. The model the authors develop also quantifies the spill-over between each country-pair, allowing it to be asymmetric.

Prior marketing literature has overlooked the role of regulatory regimes in explaining international sales growth of new products. This paper addresses this gap in the context of new pharmaceuticals (15 new molecules in 34 countries) and sheds light on the effect regulatory regimes have on new drug sales across the globe. Based on a time-varying coefficient model, we find that differences in regulation substantially contribute to cross-country variation in sales. One of the regulatory constraints investigated, i.e. manufacturer price controls, has a positive effect on drug sales. The other forms of regulation such as restrictions of physician prescription budgets and the prohibition of direct-to-consumer advertising tend to hurt sales. The effect of manufacturer price controls is similar for newly launched and mature drugs. In contrast, regulations on physician prescription budget and direct-to-consumer advertising have a differential effect for newly launched and mature drugs. While the former hurts mature drugs more, the latter has a larger effect on newly launched drugs. In addition to these regulatory effects, w

Systems are composed of complementary products (e.g., video game systems are composed of the video game console and video games). Prior literature on indirect network effects argues that, in system markets, sales of the primary product (often referred to as "hardware") largely depend on the availability of complementary products (often referred to as "software"). Mathematical and empirical analyses have almost exclusively operationalized software availability as software quantity. However, while not substantiated with empirical evidence, case illustrations show that certain “superstar” software titles of very high quality (e.g., Super Mario 64) may have had disproportionately large effects on hardware unit sales (e.g., Nintendo N64 console sales). In the context of the U.S. home video game console market, we show that the introduction of a superstar increases video game console sales on average by 14%, over a period of 5 months. Software type does not consistently alter this effect. Our findings imply that scholars who study the relationship between software availability and hardware sales, need to account for superstar returns, and their decaying effect over time, over and above a mere software quantity effect. Hardware firms should maintain a steady flow of superstar introductions, as the positive effect of a superstar only lasts for 5 months, and make, if need be, side-payments to software firms, as superstars dramatically increase hardware sales. Obtaining exclusivity over superstars, by hardware firms, does not provide an extra boost to their own sales, but it does take away an opportunity for competing systems to increase their sales.

Decision-making by physicians on patients’ treatment has come under increased public scrutiny. In fact, there is a fair amount of debate on the effects of marketing actions of pharmaceutical firms toward physicians and their impact on physician prescription behavior. While some scholars find a strong and positive influence of marketing actions, some find only moderate effects, and others even find negative effects. Debate is also mounting on the role of other influencers (such as patient requests) in physician decision-making, both on prescriptions and sample-dispensing. The authors argue that one factor that may tip the balance in this debate is the role of drug characteristics, such as a drug’s effectiveness and a drug’s side effects. Using a unique data set, they show that marketing efforts – operationalized as detailing and symposium meetings of firms to physicians – and patient requests do affect physician decision-making differentially across brands. Moreover they find that the responsiveness of physicians’ decision-making to marketing efforts and patient requests depends upon the drug’s effectiveness and side effects. The paper presents clear guidelines for public policy and managerial practice and envisions that the study of the role of drug characteristics – such as effectiveness and side effects – may lead to valuable insights in this surging public debate.

Why do some articles become building blocks for future scholars, while many others remain unnoticed? We aim to answer this question by contrasting, synthesizing and simultaneously testing three scientometric perspectives – universalism, social constructivism and presentation – on the influence of article and author characteristics on article citations. To do so, we study all articles published in a sample of five major journals in marketing from 1990 to 2002 that are central to the discipline. We count the number of citations each of these articles has received and regress this count on an extensive set of characteristics of the article (i.e. article quality, article domain, title length, the use of attention grabbers and expositional clarity), and the author (i.e. author visibility and author personal promotion). We find that the number of citations an article in the marketing discipline receives, depends upon “what one says” (quality and domain), on “who says it” (author visibility and personal promotion) and not so much on “how one says it” (title length, the use of attention grabbers, and expositional clarity). Our insights contribute to the marketing literature and are relevant to scientific stakeholders, such as the management of scientific journals and individual academic scholars, as they strive to maximize citations. They are also relevant to marketing practitioners. They inform practitioners on characteristics of the academic journals in marketing and their relevance to decisions they face. On the other hand, they also raise challenges towards making our journals accessible and relevant to marketing practitioners: (1) authors visible to academics are not necessarily visible to practitioners; (2) the readability of an article may hurt academic credibility and impact, while it may be instrumental in influencing practitioners; (3) it remains questionable whether articles that academics assess to be of high quality are also managerially relevant.