Conference Sessions - Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of ...

3 - Cross-cultural Differences in Brand Engagement
Antonieta Reyes, The Florida State University, 4120K University
Center, Building C, Tallahassee, FL, 32306-2651, United States of
America, ar07@fsu.edu, Felipe Korzenny
The purpose of this study was to examine brand engagement in self concept (BESC)
among people of different cultural groups in the US. We used Sprott, Czellar, &
Spangenberg’s BESC scale to examine if and how consumers from different US
cultural groups incorporate brands into their self-concepts. Prior research efforts
looking at the relationships between culture and brands has been mostly dedicated to
brand loyalty. Brand loyalty, however, has to do with specific brand relationships
while BESC examines the a more generalized and abstract relationship with brands.
This study is particularly salient because it used substantive national online samples
of non-Hispanic Whites, Asians, Hispanics, and African Americans. Results revealed
that the relationship between ethnicity and BESC was statistically significant. Non-
Hispanic Whites and Hispanics who prefer Spanish showed significantly lower BESC
than all the other groups while African Americans and Asians scored highest on the
scale. These results provide evidence that cultural background has a relationship with
the degree to which consumers engage with brands. Specifically, the results indicate
important differences between Hispanics who chose to answer in Spanish and those
who chose English. These relationships suggest that brand engagement varies with
levels of acculturation as consumers become more sophisticated in their brand
appreciations. The authors derive implications for marketing and brand management
based on the trends found.
4 - What Makes a Strong B2B Brand? The Role of Tangible versus
Intangible Brand Attributes
Stefan Worm, Assistant Professor, HEC Paris, 1, Rue de la Libération,
Jouy-en-Josas, 78351, France, worm@hec.edu
Many B2B firms have started to invest systematically in building their brands to
differentiate their products more effectively from competition. However, very little is
known about successful strategies to build strong B2B brands. For example, B2B
marketers struggle to determine which type of attributes they should establish for
their brands. The existing literature advises B2B firms to emphasize intangible (non
product-related) brand attributes such as trust or reliability over tangible (i.e.
product-related) attributes. Our study questions whether it is an effective strategy to
rely on intangible attributes as points-of-difference for strong brands. Based on multiindustry
survey data, we show that B2B brand strength is more strongly driven by
tangible as opposed to intangible brand attributes. We also find a positive interaction
between both types of attributes, indicating that intangible attributes become more
effective when complemented by salient tangible attributes. B2B Marketers are today
often concerned about the diminishing technical differentiation of the products in
their industry and thus turn to brand building. Our study also indicates that it is more
important to build intangible brand attributes when product differentiation decreases.
Tangible brand attributes however, remain similarly important regardless of the level
of product differentiation.
■ TB13
Champions Center III
Quantifying the Profit Impact of Marketing II
Cluster: Special Sessions
Invited Session
Chair: Xueming Luo, Eunice & James L. West Distinguished Professor of
Marketing, The University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX,
United States of America, luoxm@uta.edu
1 - An Econometric Model of Firms’ Participation Decisions Across
CSR Activities
Nitin Mehta, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada,
Nmehta@Rotman.Utoronto.Ca, Vikas Mittal, Christopher Groening
We outline a model of firms’ decisions to participate in different sets of activities
related to corporate social responsibility (CSR). Specifically, we investigate how firms
allocate their resources amongst different sets of activities across three broad areas of
CSR: environment, community and employees. To do so, we first propose a two stage
econometric model of firm’s decisions. In the first stage, the firm decides on the
allocation of its resources across the different broad areas of CSR. In the second stage,
the firm decides on how it should allocate its area specific resources amongst the
different activities within that CSR area. We estimate our model on the KLD data set
that covers the yearly participation decisions of around 1000 firms over 10 years
amongst different sets of activities across three different areas of CSR. The questions
that we address are: (a) To what extent does a firm’s decision to participate in each
CSR activity depend on the firm’s characteristics (such as its financial performance
indicators, size, R&D and advertising intensities, impact of external shareholders) and
the characteristics of the industry that the firm belongs to (such as the extent of
unionization in the industry, the extent of competition in the industry)? (b) To what
extent does a firm’s decision to participate simultaneously in any two activities stems
from heterogeneity and from complementarity (i.e., the synergies that the firm would
enjoy by participating in the two activities simultaneously)? (c) To what extent does a
firm’s decision to participate in a CSR activity result from compensatory behavior,
whereby the firm tries to compensate its prior poor track record in a CSR area by
participating in CSR activities in that area?
MARKETING SCIENCE CONFERENCE – 2011 TB14
17
2 - The Case Stock Market Rewards for Customer and Competitor
Orientations: of Initial Public Offerings
Alok R. Saboo, Pennsylvania State University, PA, United States of
America, arsaboo@psu.edu, Rajdeep Grewal
Recognizing that initial public offerings (IPOs) represent the debut of private firms on
the public stage, we investigate the role of pre-IPO customer and competitor
orientations (CCOs) for the IPO performance of the firm. Building on signaling
theory, we propose that these orientations influence investors’ sentiments towards an
IPO. We test our framework using data collected from Computer Aided Text Analysis,
expert coders, and secondary sources for a sample of 543 firms across 43 industries
going public between 2000 and 2004. Results from a Bayesian shrinkage model,
which accounts for industry-specific effects and uses latent instrumental variables
(LIV) to account for endogeneity of CCOs in the IPO context, show that these
orientations positively influence IPO performance. Further, these influences are
moderated by IPO specific variables and the facets of the organizational task and
institutional environments, such that (1) underwriter reputation and venture funding
positively moderate the effects of CCOs; (2) technological and market turbulence
positively moderate and institutional complexity negatively moderates the effect of
customer orientation; and (3) technological turbulence, competitive intensity, and
institutional complexity positively moderate the effect of competitor orientation.
Finally, we demonstrate that accounting for endogeneity using latent instrumental
variables substantially improves the predictive validity of our model relative to
alternate model specifications.
3 - The Impact of Marketing Strategy on Corporate Bankruptcy
Niket Jindal, University of Texas at Austin, McCombs School of
Business, Austin, TX, United States of America,
niket.jindal@phd.mccombs.utexas.edu, Leigh McAlister
After controlling for predictors found in the bankruptcy literature, we ask whether a
firm’s marketing strategy has an impact on its bankruptcy risk. We represent
marketing strategy conventionally, by advertising and R&D intensity, and also
propose a new metric indicating whether the firm discloses advertising and R&D
expenditures. The disclosure metric allows us to expand our sample from just those
firms that disclose advertising and R&D expenditures to consider all firms, removing a
source of sample selection bias. We hypothesize that creditors are more likely to
renegotiate credit terms with firms that have a strong emphasis on advertising or
R&D (due to the associated cash flow benefits), thereby reducing the risk of these
firms filing for bankruptcy. For those firms that do go into bankruptcy, the ones
emphasizing advertising build assets that may lose a significant amount of value in
liquidation due to a lack of a strong secondary market for brands. We hypothesize
that these firms are more likely to reorganize and emerge from bankruptcy (versus
liquidate). Analysis of all large publicly traded firms in the U.S. from 1980 to 2006
confirms our hypotheses.
■ TB14
Champions Center VI
Dynamic Pricing Issues
Contributed Session
Chair: Jonathan Zhang, Assistant Professor of Marketing, University of
Washington, 547 Paccar Hall Box 353226, Seattle, WA, 98195,
United States of America, zaozao@uw.edu
1 - Online Content Pricing
Anita Rao, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business,
518 Memorial Way, Stanford, CA, 94305, United States of America,
anitarao@stanford.edu
The internet has changed the way we consume and access content – movies, books,
videos and music. High bandwidth, high-speed data streaming and Digital Rights
Management (DRM) together have made it possible for owners to sell their content
through the internet. The pricing of digital content is a challenging problem which
may vary widely based on the type of content and customer heterogeneity arising
from 1) consumers who want to consume the content once versus repeatedly, 2)
consumers who value consuming the content sooner rather than later and 3) varying
degrees of price sensitivity. The goal of this paper is to provide a research framework
to guide optimal purchase and rental pricing in the digital world. To illustrate factors
affecting the relative purchase and rental prices, this paper explicitly considers movies
because of the historical prevalence of both options. Currently digitally downloadable
movies are priced rigidly resulting in insufficient price variation making it hard to
recover underlying consumer preferences. We resort to an experimental design where
consumers are asked to trade-off between Buying Now, Renting Now and Postponing
their decision in choice tasks where the current and future purchase and rental
prices, as well as the time the future prices come into effect, are varied. This enables
us to identify the demand parameters governing consumer’s preferences which in
conjunction with a dynamic equilibrium framework are used to compute the optimal
prices to be charged over time for both the purchase and rental options.