One of the most significant conveniences that distinguish online shopping from offline shopping is the filtering service. Ecommerce filters facilitate the user’s experience and make product searches more accurate and easier, leading to a higher conversion rate. The current research, however, raises questions about the universal benefits of these filtering tools. This research demonstrates that while filtering services can be beneficial for consumers who have specific goals in their minds to find their ideal products easily, they can simultaneously undermine shoppers’ enjoyment, leading to lowered intentions to purchase the selected item (to revisit the website). This backfiring effect occurs because the presence of default filtering implicitly highlights the instrumentality of shopping by directing attention to the desired features of products (i.e., outcome of shopping). By doing so, filtering services can degenerate the searching/shopping activity into a means for mere acquisition of products. As a result, this decreases the inherent joy of shopping along with shoppers’ subsequent product purchases and desire to revisit the store. Importantly, these effects only apply when consumers hold experiential/hedonic motives rather than utilitarian goals (i.e., when shoppers value the shopping “experience”). Supporting the prediction, the results of studies showed that participants in experiential shopping framing and under no time-pressure conditions showed higher willingness to buy the selected item in the absence (vs. presence) of filters. Overall, the current research points out the possible backfiring effect of the filtering services, focusing on the experiential value of shopping. Investigating the effect of filters on shopping experiences and subsequent reactions will generate actionable insights that can be immediately applied by online retailers and website developers. Furthermore, this research provides practical guidance to e-retailers on how to tailor their filtering services strategically to maximize both corporate profit and consumer experience. Theoretically, this research extends our understanding of the impact of decision aids by broadening our interests not only to consumers who solely have utilitarian shopping motives but also to shoppers with experiential motives.

Sales and marketing functions play critical roles in generating market knowledge and revenue. A firm’s success is contingent on its ability to collect market knowledge and respond to market changes. A key factor that prevents sales-marketing’s collective learning activities is power asymmetry because it directs the actors’ attentions to self-protection or self-enhancement rather than engaging in risky market learning activities and knowledge sharing. In this paper, sales-marketing collective learning is defined as the new market knowledge that sales and marketing departments create, retain, and share to achieve collective goals. To enhance sales-marketing collective market learning, this study investigates ways to reduce the negative impact of power asymmetry toward sales/marketing on firm performance. This paper proposes that power asymmetry toward sales or marketing is associated with greater firm performance when that firm has a power balancer. The moderating effects of power balancers (e.g., organizational time horizon, learning orientation, customer power, and institutional investor power) are examined using a sample of 8599 firm-year observations of 622 firms over 19 years (2001–2019). All hypotheses are supported except for the moderating role of organizational time horizon. The study thus offers several theoretical implications and actionable guidelines for senior managers. This study extends the sales-marketing interface literature by highlighting the role of sales-marketing power asymmetry in driving firm performance. This study also contributes to the upper echelons research in marketing by showing that the sales-marketing department power relationship in the top management team can influence the firm’s decisions and performance. Moreover, by introducing the notion of power balancers, this paper contributes to the organizational power and learning literature. While most prior studies adopt a dyadic power relationship (sales-marketing), this study examines a triadic power relationship: sales – power balancer – marketing.

Emojis are being increasingly used in different types of communications, including in advertising campaigns. One prominent emoji, the smiley face, has become an integral part of consumer communications. Subsequently, smiley faces have become prominent in marketing communications, advertisements, and brand logos as well. For instance, in 2016, Wal-Mart brought back its smiley icon, signifying especially low prices and deals (Neff, 2016). Within restaurants, smileys now appear within the logos of several chains such as IHOP (Stinson, 2015), Hardee’s, and Carl’s Jr. However, the most well-known example is McDonald’s. While smiley faces are visible on brand logos across a wide variety of categories, we focus on the restaurant industry because of the prominence of the McDonald’s smiley face. The present research examines the role of smiley faces in restaurant logos as a form of marketing communication. A well-designed logo should have recognizable features and induce positive affect (Henderson & Cote, 1998). Inserting a smiley face in a logo design may act as a simple way to achieve the latter. However, Fajardo et al. (2016) show that existing associations with specific logo elements (such as frames or boundaries around a logo) can influence product purchase intent. Using logos with smiley faces on advertising and communication materials may, therefore, have unexpected consequences. Building on research on associative models of memory (Suzuki, 2005), we argue that a pre-existing association and categorization with the fast-food restaurant category would negatively influence healthfulness perceptions without other information about the restaurant brand. Specifically, the more the smiley logo for McDonald’s Happy Meal is seen, the stronger the association between the smiley and McDonald’s form in consumers’ minds. Subsequently when consumers see smiley faces within other restaurant logos, they will automatically associate that brand with McDonald’s as well as other encoded characteristics of McDonald’s (e.g. unhealthy, cheap). Therefore, if a smile within a logo is closely linked to McDonald’s, we expect the presence of a smiley face in another restaurant logo will decrease both healthfulness and price perceptions of the product offerings as a result of that connection. A set of four lab experiments and a field experiment in a middle school examine how restaurant logos with smiley faces (versus no smileys) influence perceptions of healthfulness and price. We find that restaurant logos that include smileys are perceived as lower in healthfulness, which in turn leads to lower price perceptions. Additionally, this effect is triggered by an association with a fast-food restaurant category.

While advertising products with their reflections is quite common, marketing research studying their effects on product aesthetics is lacking. A unique visual property of reflections is that they are endowed with an inherent shine since they are formed by the interaction of light with an object and a reflecting medium like water (Cavanagh et al., 2008; Corballis, 2000; Fleming et al., 2003). We draw upon this property along with established literature from multiple domains including evolutionary psychology, visual art, and consumer psychology that documents an innate human attraction towards glossy visuals (Danko-McGhee, 2006; Han & Pandelaere, 2021; Henshilwood et al., 2001; Meert et al., 2014; Silvia et al., 2018) to predict their positive effect on product aesthetics. Further building on evolutionary psychology literature as well as the unique visual properties of reflections, we predict that the positive effect of reflection on product aesthetics is mediated by perceptions about the product being considered more pristine in the presence of its reflection (Burmil et al., 1999; Cavanagh et al., 2008; Meert et al., 2014; Patrick et al., 2017). To test these predictions empirically, multiple experimentally designed studies using different product categories were conducted. Findings from these studies reveal that the presence of a product’s reflection in the ad indeed enhance product attractiveness perceptions. Furthermore, in line with the proposed underlying mechanism, beliefs about the product being pristine were found to mediate the effect of product reflection on product aesthetics. In addition to its theoretical contribution towards the aesthetics literature in marketing, the managerial implications of the current work span both traditional as well as digital marketing channels. Our findings can particularly benefit digital marketers struggling to capture consumer attention through product aesthetics where it is easy to incorporate product reflection using available design tools like Photoshop without changing any aspect of the actual product design. An important contribution of our work lies in offering managers a better understanding as to why consumers consider products advertised with their reflections to be more visually attractive. Our insight on pristine product appearance as the underlying explanation for the aesthetic effects of product reflections can be used by advertisers strategically, especially for product categories where pristine attributes are important and make a good source of competitive differentiation.

As a result of constant technological changes and increased competition, selling knowledge is quickly outdated, so firms need to invest a considerable amount of money in training their salesforces (Association for Talent Development, 2020; Johnston & Marshall, 2016; Kauffeld & Lehmann-Willenbrock, 2010). The expectation is that training investments will increase employee performance and potentially lead to a competitive advantage through human capital development (Cannon-Bowers & Salas, 2001; Olson et al., 2018). Training transfer refers to “the degree to which trainees effectively apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes gained in the context to the job” (Baldwin & Ford, 1988, p. 63); it also includes a trainee’s ability to adapt to novel or changing situational demands (Ford & Weissbein, 1997). Training must be transferred successfully for a training initiative to meet its objectives; however, only a small percentage of what is learned in training is transferred to the work environment, creating a so-called transfer problem (Baldwin & Ford, 1988). Sales organizations represent an interesting context to examine training transfer because these firms rely on relatively autonomous salespeople to implement training content into their sales processes (Johnston & Marshall, 2016). Ultimately, the success of a firm’s training investments is dependent on salespeople’s decision to transfer training. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) (Ajzen, 1991) asserts that human action is guided by three beliefs: behavioral, normative, and control. The more favorable attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control, the stronger are a person’s intentions to perform the behavior under consideration. Given that training transfer is an active human approach, TPB provides a strong theoretical framework to study how salespeople form intentions to transfer training. In line with TPB’s rich history, we suggest that attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control influence a salesperson’s effort to transfer training. After collecting and analyzing training and survey data from the U.S. sales division of a multinational consumer electronics manufacturer, we found that subjective norms and self-efficacy are positively associated with training transfer intentions while attitudes are not. Moreover, we found that job involvement and experience were positively associated with training transfer intentions while tenure with the firm and job autonomy had a negative relationship with training transfer intentions. As expected, training transfer intentions were positively related to training transfer behaviors. Findings from this research suggest that training content is less relevant than are colleagues’ expectations and a salesperson’s confidence toward training transfer. Our research findings reveal the importance of vertical and horizontal norms toward training transfer. This reinforces the need for “buy-in” from multiple levels within a firm’s structure to maximize the benefits of training and the role that a salesperson’s confidence plays in enhancing training transfer.

Consumers engage in a variety of indulgent activities such as work parties, birthdays, happy hours, concerts, weekend get-a-ways, weddings, and meals with friends and family. Incidentally, they spend a large portion of their life looking forward to these types of indulgent activities. In this research we address the following research question: how would anticipating an indulgent future activity influence one’s behavior in the present? An initial survey shows that consumers expect that they will balance out anticipated indulgences by exercising self-control in the present. However, we theorize that anticipating indulgence will increase indulgent behavior in the present. That is, we predict that individuals who anticipate indulging in the future will engage in more indulgent behavior in the present than individuals who do not anticipate indulging. We predict that this is because anticipating an indulgent event leads individuals to mentally picture the event. This mental imagery of an anticipated event increases the allure of rewarding stimuli in the immediate environment. We test our prediction in a series of studies. First, we analyze secondary data from a bar/restaurant to examine consumer purchasing patterns and gain initial evidence in support of our predictions. Then, we report that results of three experimental studies that directly test our hypotheses. The findings show that anticipating indulgence leads to greater indulgence in the present than not anticipating an indulgence. Mediation evidence suggests the effects are due to mental imagery. Additionally, we show that processing information analytically attenuates the effects of anticipated indulgence on present indulgence. Our findings suggest that marketers can drive sales by promoting upcoming indulgent events for example through social media, signage, or in-store decor. Consumers should be cognizant of how anticipating an indulgence might impact their consumption behavior though. Finally, policy makers might want to design interventions to bolster self-control when indulgent events are on the horizon.

There exists a vast literature on developing and designing scale measurements use in conducting marketing and consumer behavior academic research. Yet questions continue to be raised concerning the actual quality and relevancy of many of the scales designs in capturing quality data for investigating and testing proposed relationships between constructs of interest. This special session narrows its focus on identifying and discussing a variety of fundamental, underlying scale design elements which create different problematic scaling issues, designs, and practices that negatively impact researchers’ efforts of capturing high quality and relevant data. A panel of scale measurement expert researchers’ break down the fundamental, underlying elements needed to enhance the construction of solid scale measurements. The session focuses around discussing specific questions such as: (a) What is the specific contextual defined target population of interest? (b) Is there a clear conceptual definition and understanding for each construct of interest? (c) What are the three elements making up any scale measure? (d) What are the four categorical types of raw data/information that scales can capture? (e) What are the scaling properties that can be activated in different types of scale designs? (f) What are the different categorical scale levels? (g) What are the appropriate measures of central tendencies and dispersions associated with different scale levels? (h) Does framing of the question, or scale setup, impact the selection of scale point descriptors? Other important elements may be discuss including the use of “inclusion and exclusion screening” questions, “attention” questions, and correct ordering of scale measurements in questionnaires. The session encourages audience questions and participation as a means of driving the discussion. The ensuing discussions of these fundamental scale elements should provide clearer insight and understanding of the impact of correctly applying the scaling elements to achieve (or enhance) the capturing of high quality data through the development and use of appropriate scale designs.