Economic conditions may significantly affect households' shopping behavior and, by extension, retailers' and manufacturers' firm performance. By explicitly distinguishing between two basic types of economic conditions—micro conditions in terms of households' personal income and macro conditions in terms of the business cycle—this study analyzes how households adjust their grocery shopping behavior. The authors observe more than 5,000 households over eight years and analyze shopping outcomes in terms of what, where, and how much they shop and spend. Results show that micro and macro conditions substantially influence shopping outcomes, but in very different ways. Microeconomic changes lead households to adjust primarily their overall purchase volume—that is, after losing income, households buy fewer products and spend less in total. In contrast, macroeconomic changes cause pronounced structural shifts in households' shopping basket allocation and spending behavior. Specifically, during contractions, households shift purchases toward private labels while also buying and consequently spending more than during expansions. During expansions, however, households increasingly purchase national brands but keep their total spending constant. The authors discuss psychological and sociological mechanisms that can explain the differential effects of micro and macro conditions on shopping behavior and develop important diagnostic and normative implications for retailers and manufacturers.

No abstract

Consumers who are uninterested in a TV ad or are annoyed by it may avoid the ad, limiting the effectiveness of not only the ad but also the remaining commercial break. Active avoidance—known as “zapping”—is potentially a major concern for both advertisers and broadcasters. In two studies, the authors investigate whether and why ad content drives or mitigates zapping and develop a conceptual framework linking multiple content factors to psychological reactions that then affect zapping. They test the content–zapping relationship by drawing on a dataset reflecting the zapping behavior of over 2,500 German television viewers combined with advertising data and content information for 1,315 spots representing 308 brands from 96 categories. The results of the first study show that ad creativity is associated with less zapping, whereas a strong information focus and a prominent or early integration of branding elements are associated with more zapping. The findings also reveal that the effects differ significantly for products with a utilitarian (vs. hedonic) consumption purpose and for search (vs. experience) goods. The results of the second study show that irritation (determined by, e.g., annoyance, feeling offended, or overwhelmed) vis-à-vis enjoyment acts as the central mechanism in explaining why ad content affects zapping.

No abstract

Going back to Huff’s seminal gravity model in the 1960’s, geospatial data has a long history in marketing research. Its applications in research and practice range from location-based mobile targeting of individual consumers to store competition analyzes and city marketing. Over the past decades, geospatial data has become more readily available than ever and has grown considerably in breadth (i.e., countries and regions covered) and depth (i.e., granularity and diversity of information covered). Nonetheless, international marketing research has not yet fully embraced the opportunities that geospatial data brings to the field. To address this shortcoming, this paper shows how geospatial data may propel international marketing research in various domains and develops future research questions for the field. In addition, it introduces OpenStreetMap (OSM) as a rich and open-source geospatial data source to the discipline. The use of geospatial data in general and OSM more specifically is illustrated through a concrete application in which the authors analyze city center composition in nine countries across three continents. In doing so, they reproducibly describe the extraction of geospatial data, constructions of metrics and operationalizations, as well as visualizations.