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Erick Mas

Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Kelley School of Business-Indiana University 

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Synopsis: Minimalist marketing aesthetics (e.g., stylized brand logos; reductive packaging design) are popular—but are they universally beneficial? This research shows that equally attractive aesthetically minimalist (vs. complex) packaging design leads consumers to expect products to be superior on utilitarian dimensions (as perhaps intended by the marketer), but inferior on hedonic dimensions (as perhaps unintended by the marketer). This pattern is driven by minimalist aesthetics communicating that the product is more focused on fewer purposes (thereby boosting expected performance) but concurrently appearing less stimulating due to its limited sensory features (thereby hampering expected pleasure). Accordingly, when marketers emphasize utilitarian (vs. hedonic) product benefits, displaying a product featuring minimalist (vs. complex) packaging design enhances ad liking. Likewise, when consumers hold utilitarian (vs. hedonic) purchase goals, minimalist (vs. complex) packaging design boosts choice. The insights from this research help expand existing theoretical understandings of minimalist aesthetics as well as consumers’ intuitions about antecedents of product efficacy, and they caution marketers to think carefully about when to use minimalist aesthetics for their brands and products. Sometimes, less really is less.

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Fred Selnes 

Professor of Marketing at BI Norwegian Business School 

How Marketing Should be Taught? 

Synopsis: The title of my talk is “What is marketing management?” with the follow-up question “How should marketing management be taught at a business school?”. My starting point is that how marketing management is described in textbooksis not how marketing management is practiced nor how most people outside the marketing departments in business schools think of marketing. This is very different from other fields like finance, strategy, logistics, and accounting where we find a stronger link between theory and practice. A lot has been written in our journals describing the diminishing power and influence of marketing in top management and in the board rooms but without any good solution to what we as a field in a business school need to do. I believe the STP and marketing-mix approach to marketing management is making marketing management tactical and not strategic, and that we rather should think of marketing management as how organizations should better connect their resources to customers to grow the (future) value of the customer portfolio. Our work on CPLV illustrates the some of links between strategic marketing decisions and the mechanism of creating customer portfolio growth.  And our work on developing more valuable relationships through brand relationship adaptation illustrates how we can start to think of managing heterogeneity and the dynamics of customer needs. I will also illustrate how the CPLV approach can be presented in marketing textbooks. I hope my talk will inspire academics in marketing to critically reflect on how we should teach marketing management and to build a stronger bridge between theoretical research and practice in our field.

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Jared Watson 

Assistant Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business 

Popular by What Measure? How Less (vs. More) Social Popularity Labels Influence News Media Consumption

Synopsis: People primarily consume news for information or entertainment. However, given the abundance of content available at any given moment, consumers may have difficulty deciding what articles will best satisfy these goals. To aid this decision, news outlets commonly highlight the most popular content using different labels (e.g., “most read” and “most shared”). This research demonstrates that these popularity labels can differ in their social basis and signal different levels of information versus entertainment value, which shapes consumers’ news preferences and decisions. Specifically, labels reflecting less (vs. more) social behavior (e.g., “most read” vs. “most shared”) convey higher information value but lower entertainment value. Thus, when consumers have information motives, they prefer less social popularity labels, a stronger signal of information value. Conversely, activating entertainment motives generates a preference for more social labels, a stronger signal of entertainment value. Additionally, we examine the moderating role of factors under the control of news outlets—endorsement source (i.e., readers vs. editors) and featured list position (i.e., top or bottom of page). We examine the effects of popularity labels on news consumption in two field experiments and seven lab studies (including two in the web appendix) and discuss the managerial and theoretical implications. 

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Anocha Aribarg 

Professor of Marketing at Michigan Ross School of Business 

Quantifying the Heterogeneous Impact of FDA Changes to the Nutrition Facts Label

Synopsis: The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) updated the Nutrition Facts label on the back of packaged food in 2016 to reflect new scientific information, including information about the link between diet and chronic diseases, such as obesity and heart disease. The objective of the update is to help consumers make more informed food choice decisions. In particular, the FDA requires all manufacturers with annual sales of $10 million or more to update the nutrition information on their labels by January 1, 2020, and those manufacturers with annual sales less than $10 million to do so by January 1, 2021. The mandate involves changes to several different components on the label, the most significant of which include enlarging the font size presenting calories per serving, including an item for “added sugar”, removing the item “calories from fat”, and adjusting serving sizes to better reflect actual consumption. Considering the substantial costs incurred by product manufacturers to implement the new label, it is important to understand the consequences of this new FDA regulation. Therefore, in this paper we first quantify the impact of the Nutrition Facts label change on consumer food consumption using a large-scale panel of retail sales at the week and UPC level and a comprehensive database that records label changes for different UPCs from 2016 - 2022. We investigate the prevalence of unintended consequences occurring as a result of some components of the change. We also quantify how the effects of the label change vary across product categories. Second, exploiting data that combines individual-level household purchases with longitudinal survey data on self-reported health conditions, we analyze the heterogeneous effects of the label change across households. Specifically, we address the question of whether the label change nudges unhealthy consumers to improve their food consumption. Finally, extant previous research has investigated the effectiveness of various components and styles of food labels. We compare our results to those reported from field and lab experiments performed in more restrictive situations.