Recent discussions in academic literature and the business press often paint an unflattering picture of the contributions of chief marketing officers (CMOs) to the financial value of their firms. Some even suggest that CMOs, despite being the marketing leaders in firms, have little or no effect on firm performance. However, formal empirical research on the impact of CMOs on financial performance is scarce. This article presents conceptual arguments and empirical evidence about this controversial issue. The authors suggest that CMOs are far from irrelevant to the financial performance of firms. However, the impact of CMOs on financial performance is highly contingent on the managerial discretion available to them. Focusing on the role of customer power in limiting the managerial discretion available to CMOs, this study identifies individual and firm-specific conditions in which CMOs contribute more or less to firm value. Analyses of abnormal stock returns associated with the appointment of CMOs provide support for the hypothesized effects of customer power and managerial discretion.

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We provide evidence that goal priming effects are context dependent. We show that goal primes encourage prime-consistent behavior when the behavioral context is common and prime-inconsistent behavior when the behavioral context is uncommon. While the prime-consistent behavior is compatible with existing theory, the prime-inconsistent behavior poses a theoretical challenge. We argue that uncommon behavioral contexts encourage the release of a primed goal and, as a consequence, an increase in the relative activation of information inconsistent with the primed goal and prime-inconsistent behavior. (c) 2008 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Peer-to-peer (P2P) marketplaces, such as Uber, Airbnb, and Lending Club, have experienced massive growth in recent years. They now constitute a significant portion of the world's economy and provide opportunities for people to transact directly with one another. However, such growth also challenges participants to cope with information asymmetry about the quality of the offerings in the marketplace. By conducting an analysis of a P2P lending market, the authors propose and test a theory in which countersignaling provides a mechanism to attenuate information asymmetry about financial products (loans) offered on the platform. Data from a P2P lending website reveal significant, nonmonotonic relationships among the transmission of nonverifiable information, loan funding, and ex post loan quality, consistent with the proposed theory. The results provide insights for platform owners who seek to manage the level of information asymmetry in their P2P environments to create more balanced marketplaces, as well as for P2P participants interested in improving their ability to process information about the goods and services they seek to transact online.

T his research examines how prepurchase information that reduces consumer uncertainty about a product or service can affect consumer decisions to reverse an initial product purchase or service enrollment decision. One belief commonly held by retailers is that provision of greater amounts of information before the purchase reduces decision reversals. We provide theory and evidence showing conditions under which uncertaintyreducing information provided before the purchase decision can actually increase the number of decision reversals. Predictions generated from an analytical model of consumer behavior incorporating behavioral theory of reference-dependence are complemented by empirical evidence from both a controlled behavioral experiment and econometric analysis of archival data. Combined, the theory and evidence suggest that managers should be aware that their information provision decisions taken to reduce decision reversals may actually increase them.

How are price judgments influenced by the distribution of observed prices for other items in the same category? Processing goals will moderate price-judgment processes. When the processing goal is discrimination, price perceptions will be influenced by variations in range and ranks of prices in a distribution and contrast effects will be observed. For example, lowering the price of the lowest-priced product in a set will increase perceived expensiveness of higher-priced products. When the processing goal is generalization, however, price perceptions will be influenced by variations in the mean of the price distribution, in which case assimilation is observed. For example, lowering the price of the lowest-priced product in a set will decrease perceived expensiveness of higher-priced products. This latter finding is in sharp contrast to findings in the current literature on the effect of price structure on price judgments.

New brands often partner with well-known brands under the assumption that they will benefit from the awareness and positive associations that well-known brands yield. However, this associations-transfer explanation may not predict co-branding results when the expected benefits of the co-branded product are presented simultaneously with the co-branding information. In this case, the results of co-branding instead follow the predictions of adaptive-learning theory which posits that consumers may differentially associate each brand with the outcome as a result of cue interaction effects. Three experiments show that the presence of a well-known brand can weaken or strengthen the association between the less-known brand and the co-branding outcome depending on the timing of the presentation of product benefit information. When this information was presented simultaneously with co-branding information (at a delay after co-branding information), the presence of a well-known brand weakened (strengthened) the association of the less-known brand with the outcome and thereby lowered (improved) evaluation of the less-known brand.N ew brands face many obstacles including the need to generate awareness in an often crowded marketplace and to build unique brand associations that can help meaningfully differentiate the brand. To jumpstart the creation of these associations, new brands often leverage external entities (other brands, events, causes, countries, people, etc.) that already possess valued associations in the hope that these desired associations will transfer to the new brand (Keller 2003). The widely accepted explanation for why such secondary associations would transfer to the new brand is derived from associative network models of memory that

Companies often extend product lines with the goal of increasing demand for their products and responding to competitive threats. Although line extensions may lead to cannibalization and reduction of overall profit, the bulk of theoretical and empirical research has suggested that product line extensions result in a net gain of overall demand and market share. To mitigate cannibalization, the extant literature prescribes the addition of premium versions of products, or “upward line extensions,” with the intention of achieving gains not only in demand and market share but also in overall profit. In this research, the authors employ analytical and empirical methods to make the case that upward line extensions aimed at matching a competing product's attribute may lead consumers to reassess their perceptions about the brand and the attributes of products in the market in a way that erodes the advantages of the extending firm. Ultimately, this can result in a loss of demand, market share, and profit for the extending firm.