Brands and word of mouth (WOM) are cornerstones of the marketing field, and yet their relationship has received relatively little attention. This study aims to enhance understanding of brand characteristics as antecedents of WOM by executing a comprehensive empirical analysis. For this purpose, the authors constructed a unique data set on online and offline WOM and characteristics for more than 600 of the most talked-about U.S. brands. To guide this empirical analysis, they present a theoretical framework arguing that consumers spread WOM on brands as a result of social, emotional, and functional drivers. Using these drivers, the authors identify a set of 13 brand characteristics that stimulate WOM, including three (level of differentiation, excitement, and complexity) that have not been studied to date as WOM antecedents. The authors find that whereas the social and functional drivers are the most important for online WOM, the emotional driver is the most important for offline WOM. These results provide an insightful perspective on WOM and have meaningful managerial implications for brand management and investment in WOM campaigns.

We study three ways firms can communicate about their brands—paid media (advertising), earned media (word of mouth and online social media), and owned media (brand websites and other owned content)—and the roles these media types play in reminding (i.e., activating memory), informing (i.e., learning their tastes for the brand), or enhancing enjoyment (e.g., gaining additional utility from socializing about the brand). We do this for a new TV show setting using a data set that contains reported viewing, exposures, expectations, and experiences. We present descriptive analyses and results from a new structural model, which indicate that earned media is more impactful than paid and owned media per exposure. However, paid media has far more exposures, so for a given percentage increase, paid media’s influence dominates earned and owned media. Earned media operate primarily through enhancing enjoyment, whereas paid media operate through reminding and owned media through reminding, but discourage live viewing. We find that media exposures help consumers learn about how well they will like the program. However, this learning can either increase or decrease the expected liking, and in our data the average audience effects are negligible. Overall, we find that earned and paid media play a central role in developing and maintaining entertainment brands.

Brands stand at the core of marketing. They are central to positioning, marketing communications, word of mouth, customer relationships, and firm profits. Brands have been studied from multiple perspectives using a variety of measures and scales. We offer a data set that contains 136 different measures of the brand characteristics for almost 700 of the top U.S. national brands across 16 categories measured by 2010. These measures cover a broad range of characteristics including brand personality, satisfaction, age, attributes related to Rogers' innovation scheme such as complexity, and the four brand equity pillars of Young and Rubicam's BrandAsset Valuator. The data were collected from a combination of sources including an original survey on 4,769 subjects. In addition, we provide quarterly data on the variables available from the BrandAsset Valuator for two and a half years between 2008 and 2010. These data can be used as a building block in research that aims to explore the antecedents of brand perceptions or connect brand characteristics with market and financial outcomes. This paper describes the data and some relevant research questions. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2014.0861 .

In this article, the authors provide a dynamic framework for understanding the relationship between marketing and financial performance. They suggest that firms market to financial markets as well as to consumption markets and that some mixture provides superior long-term performance. The authors discuss the potential pitfalls of overemphasizing one market to the detriment of another and then provide a theoretical model of the factors that influence the extent of marketing to financial markets. This is followed by a discussion of implications for theory, practice, and future research.

We study the targeting of political advertising by presidential candidates on television. Targeting strategies for television differ from targeting strategies for direct mail advertising or get out the vote efforts because candidates cannot target voters individually. Instead, candidates must target television programs with viewers most similar to the desired target voters. Thus, for targeted advertising to have value, the audiences for television programs must differ in meaningful ways and advertising must be effective. We develop and estimate a model of targeted advertising. We study whether television shows segment potential voters sufficiently to allow for effective targeting and we consider the effect of television advertising-whether it persuades individuals to vote for a particular candidate or mobilizes them to vote in general. Our results suggest the function of television advertising is primarily to persuade. Moreover, we find that there is sufficient variation in the distribution of viewer characteristics across television programs to allow for effective targeting. The most effective targeting strategies therefore involve both parties adopting similar strategies of advertising primarily on programs with audiences containing many swing voters. Actual candidate behavior is largely consistent with this strategy indicating that candidates seem to accurately believe that the function of television advertising is to persuade voters. Nonetheless, we are able to uncover specific ways in which candidates could improve their advertising by identifying particularly effective shows and by quantifying the tradeoff between cost and effectiveness.