In the past decade, there has been a tremendous increase in the use of neurophysiological methods to better understand marketing phenomena among academics and practitioners. However, the value of these methods in predicting advertising success remains underresearched. Using a unique experimental protocol to assess responses to 30-second television ads, the authors capture many measures of advertising effectiveness across six commonly used methods (traditional self-reports, implicit measures, eye tracking, biometrics, electroencephalography, and functional magnetic resonance imaging). These measures have been shown to reliably tap into higher-level constructs commonly used in advertising research: attention, affect, memory, and desirability. Using time-series data on sales and gross rating points, the authors attempt to relate individual-level response to television ads in the lab to the ads’ aggregate, market-level elasticities. The authors show that functional magnetic resonance imaging measures explain the most variance in advertising elasticities beyond the baseline traditional measures. Notably, activity in the ventral striatum is the strongest predictor of real-world, market-level response to advertising. The authors discuss the findings and their significant implications for theory, research, and practice.

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In this paper, we develop an exemplar-based model of the emergence and evolution of proto-categories—new groupings of products that are only weakly entrenched but have the potential to become widely institutionalized—and examine how different positioning strategies of new entrants vis-à-vis the exemplar of a proto-category affect entrant performance. Empirically, we study the U.S. console video game industry where proto-categories frequently emerge and evolve around exemplary hit games. Analyzing a proprietary database of 6,544 games comprising 78 such proto-categories, we find that, in the early stages of proto-category emergence, conformity with the exemplar’s features is positively associated with new entrants’ sales. As a proto-category evolves, a moderate level of differentiation becomes important for enhancing sales. We also find that this temporal dynamic is driven by the changing competitive intensity in the proto-category and strongly mediated by critics’ reviews. Moreover, the mediating effect of critics’ reviews on entrant sales becomes increasingly salient with the evolution of a proto-category. Finally, we show that accounting for the influence of emerging prototypes does not diminish the explanatory power of the exemplar model we propose. We conclude the paper by discussing the implications of our findings for research on categorization and optimal distinctiveness.

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How can organizations spanning institutionalized categories mitigate against the possibility of reduced attention by audiences? While there has been a good deal of research on the illegitimacy discount of category spanning, scant attention has been paid to how organizations might strategically address this potential problem. In this paper, we explore how the strategic naming of products might enhance audience attention despite the liabilities associated with category spanning. Drawing on a sample of films released in the United States market between 1982 and 2007, we analyze different naming strategies and show that names that simply signal familiarity are not potent enough to offset the illegitimacy discount, while names imbued with known reputations serve as a symbolic device that enhances audience attention to genre-spanning films.

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We develop a structural model of detailing and prescribing decisions under an environment where detailing helps physicians obtain the current information sets about drug qualities. Our model assumes that a representative opinion leader is responsible for updating the prior belief about the quality of drugs via patients' experiences, and manufacturers use detailing as a means to build/maintain the measure of physicians who are informed of the current information sets. We estimate our model using data on sales, prices, and detailing minutes at the product level for ACE-inhibitor with diuretic in Canada. We quantify the marginal impact of detailing on current demand at different points in time, and demonstrate how it depends on the measure of well-informed physicians and the information sets. Furthermore, we conduct a policy experiment to examine how a public awareness campaign, which encourages physicians/patients to report their drug experiences, would affect managerial incentives to detail.

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