The authors address the questions of whether and how corporate social responsibility (CSR) relates to firm performance and, in so doing, identify four mechanisms pertaining to this relationship: (1 ) ...slack resources lead to CSR (i. e., slack resources mechanism) (2) CSR improves performance (i. e., good management mechanism), (3) CSR makes amends for past corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) (i.e., penance mechanism), and (4) CSR insures against subsequent CSI (i.e., insurance mechanism). Using an integrative approach, the authors incorporate the four mechanisms in their empirical model specification. Specifically, to model the interplay among CSR, CSI, and firm performance and to test the four mechanisms simultaneously, they propose a structural panel vector autoregression specification. In support of the good management mechanism, results from an unbalanced panel data set of more than 4,500 firms and up to 19 years suggest that firms that engage in CSR are likely to benefit financially from their CSR investments. Moreover, the authors do not find support for the slack resources or the insurance mechanism. In contrast, and in support of the penance mechanism, often firms' CSR seems to trail their CSI. However, the results also suggest that the penance mechanism is ineffective in offsetting negative performance effects due to CSI.
Marketing academics and practitioners alike remain unconvinced about the chief marketing officer's (CMO's) performance implications. Whereas some studies propose that firms benefit financially from ...having a CMO in the C-suite, other studies conclude that the CMO has little or no effect on firm performance. Accordingly, there have been strong calls for additional academic research regarding the CMO's performance implications. In response to these calls, the authors employ model specifications with varying identifying assumptions (i.e., rich data models, unobserved effects models, instrumental variable models, and panel internal instruments models) and use data from up to 155 publicly traded firms over a 12-year period (2000-2011) to find that firms can indeed expect to benefit financially from having a CMO at the strategy table. Specifically, their findings suggest that the performance (measured in terms of Tobin's q) of the sample firms that employ a CMO is, on average, approximately 15% greater than that of the sample firms that do not employ a CMO. This result is robust to the type of model specification used. Marketing academics and practitioners should find the results intriguing given the existing uncertainty surrounding the CMO's performance implications. The study also contributes to the methodology literature by collating diverse empirical model specifications that can be used to model causal effects with observational data into a coherent and comprehensive framework.
The use of celebrity endorsements varies across countries; does their effectiveness similarly vary across cultures? The authors propose that power distance beliefs (PDB), a cultural orientation ...related to the extent to which people expect and accept differences in power, moderate the effects of celebrity endorsements. A positive effect of celebrity endorsers on evaluations of advertising should be more potent with greater PDB; source expertise and trustworthiness likely underlie this effect. To test the hypotheses, the authors use moderated mediation analyses, with corrections for measurement error and endogeneity of the mediators (source expertise and trustworthiness). The results of three studies, using both manipulated and measured PDB for respondents in different countries and with a variety of endorsers, demonstrate that PDB determine the effectiveness of celebrity endorsements on attitudes toward the advertisement and the brand. In support of the moderated mediation model, perceptions of source expertise and trust mediate the effect of celebrity endorsements, conditional on PDB. The results hold for nondurables but do not generalize to durable products.
Although scholars have established that customer satisfaction affects different dimensions of firm financial performance, a managerially important but overlooked aspect is its effect on a firm’s ...future cost of selling (COS), that is, expenditures associated with persuading customers and providing convenience to them. Accordingly, this study presents the first empirical and theoretical examination of the impact of customer satisfaction on future COS. The authors propose that while higher customer satisfaction can lower future COS, the degree to which a firm realizes this benefit depends on its strategy and operating environment. Analyzing almost two decades of data from 128 firms, the authors find that customer satisfaction has a statistically and economically significant negative effect on future COS. While the negative effect of customer satisfaction on future COS is weaker for firms with higher capital intensity and financial leverage, this effect is stronger for more diversified firms and for firms operating in industries with higher growth and labor intensity. The authors also find that these effects may vary across two components of COS, cost of persuasion and convenience.
Noting the proliferation of product recalls and extensive use of lobbying in some critical product markets (e.g., automobiles, medical equipment), the authors examine the relationship between ...lobbying and product recalls. Lobbying does not alter product quality, so an efficiency perspective would suggest no relationship. However, a legitimacy-based institutional theory perspective and associated regulation models suggest that lobbying reduces voluntary firm-initiated and mandatory regulator-initiated recalls. To provide insights into these questions, the current study explores nine years of multisource data from the automotive industry, related to recalls and lobbying. The results, obtained with an instrumental variable approach, support dual impacts of lobbying for reducing both voluntary and mandatory recalls. Defect severity and media coverage moderate the effects, and the data support full indirect moderation, such that the interaction between media coverage and lobbying mediates the interaction between defect severity and lobbying. In terms of effect sizes, approximately $404,367 ($1.66 million) more in lobbying expenditures is associated with one fewer voluntary (mandatory) recall, assuming a typical average recall of 235,638 vehicles. This study highlights lobbying as an important (marketing) tool that automotive companies use to manage their regulatory environment, with deep implications for policy making, research, and practice.
Marketers frequently create social media content (i.e., firm-generated content; FGC) to ignite interest in new movies. Thus, there is a clear need to understand the magnitude and heterogeneity of the ...effect of FGC on movie demand and associated user-generated content (UGC). The authors empirically examine the complex interactions among FGC, UGC, and sales using social media (tweet) data that are normally available to firms. They investigate two potential mechanisms by which FGC may drive box office revenues: (1) a direct mechanism, such that users who see FGC directly drive revenue, and (2) an indirect “ripple effect,” by which FGC increases movie-related UGC, which then drives consumption. By analyzing 145,502 firm-generated and 5.9 million user-generated Twitter posts associated with 159 movies, the authors find a positive and significant effect of FGC on movie sales, which UGC fully mediates, which supports the indirect ripple effect reasoning. Impressions of FGC by followers of firm accounts, as opposed to nonfollowers of firm accounts, mainly drive the effect of FGC on UGC. In addition, FGC by movie accounts is more effective than that by actors and studios. Firms’ regular posts with a movie-specific hashtag are more effective than replies, retweets, and posts without the hashtag. The finding of the ripple effect suggests that movie executives should focus on creating FGC that sparks conversations among followers when new movies are released.
The Journal of Marketing Research Today Grewal, Rajdeep; Gupta, Sachin; Hamilton, Rebecca
Journal of marketing research,
12/2020, Letnik:
57, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The authors study the nature of articles published in the Journal of Marketing Research (JMR) during the seven-year period 2013–2019. Consistent with the broad positioning of JMR, they find ...substantial diversity in domains, topics, methods, and sources of data among the published articles. They observe the emergence of new substantive topics, such as social media, social networks, and prosocial behavior, which reinforce the continued relevance of JMR. Notably, they observe increasing convergence across articles in the behavioral, quantitative, and strategy domains, reflecting more shared substantive topics of interest and common use of methods and sources of data. This trend bodes well for JMR, given its historical position as a diverse journal in the field.
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