Journal of Marketing

Literary criticism, according to leading theorist Frank Lentricchia, involves striking texts together to see if they spark. Although many scholars have successfully struck marketing texts together, the sparks they have produced pertain primarily to marketplace phenomena rather than the academic marketing literature itself. Drawing on Bloom's “anxiety of influence” thesis, this article strikes together the published works of two prominent marketing thinkers, Theodore Levitt and Morris Holbrook. It argues that far from being positioned at opposite ends of the academic spectrum—pure versus applied—they are, in literary terms at least, precursor and ephebe, father and son, one and the same.

Market share can influence perceived quality through several different mechanisms, including signaling, creating network externalities, and inclusion as an attribute in consumers’ quality functions. The direction of this potential effect is ambiguous. Making use of data on 85 different brands across 28 product categories, the authors explore the effect market share has on consumers’ perceptions of quality and the extent to which category-wide and brand-specific factors moderate this effect.

The authors review more than 250 journal articles and books to establish what is and should be known about how advertising affects the consumer—how it works. They first deduce a taxonomy of models, discuss the theoretical principles of each class of models, and summarize their empirical findings. They then synthesize five generalizations about how advertising works and propose directions for further research. Advertising effects are classified into intermediate effects, for example, on consumer beliefs and attitudes, and behavioral effects, which relate to purchasing behavior, for example, on brand choice. The generalizations suggest that there is little support for any hierarchy, in the sense of temporal sequence, of effects. The authors propose that advertising effects should be studied in a space, with affect, cognition, and experience as the three dimensions. Advertising's positioning in this space should be determined by context, which reflects advertising's goal diversity, product category, competition, other aspects of mix, stage of product life cycle, and target market.

The authors investigate pricing strategies based on yield management systems (YMS), such as early discounting, overbooking, and limiting early sales, for capacity-constrained services. They find that YMS work best when price-insensitive customers prefer to buy later than price-sensitive consumers. The authors also identify other conditions favoring the use of YMS.

In this article, the authors investigate the effectiveness of advertising alliances (in which two brands from different product categories are featured together in an advertisement) for introducing new brands. The authors identify degree of complementarity between the featured products, type of differentiation strategy (common versus unique advertised attributes), and type of ad processing strategy (top-down or bottom-up) as important factors in determining ad effectiveness. The conceptualization captures the effects of these factors on brand awareness, brand accessibility, brand beliefs, belief accessibility, and brand attitudes. The theory was tested in an experiment using print advertisements to manipulate the three factors in conditions of high consumer involvement. The results show an interesting pattern of interactions among the factors, which has important implications for managers of new and established brands.

In this study, the authors examine the emergence of brand positioning strategies in advertising that parallel the growth of the global marketplace. A new construct, global consumer culture positioning (GCCP), is proposed, operationalized, and tested. This construct associates the brand with a widely understood and recognized set of symbols believed to constitute emerging global consumer culture. Study results support the validity of the new construct and indicate that meaningful percentages of advertisements employ GCCP, as opposed to positioning the brand as a member of a local consumer culture or a specific foreign consumer culture. Identification of GCCP as a positioning tool suggests one pathway through which certain brands come to be perceived by consumers as “global” and provides managers with strategic direction in the multinational marketplace.

In this article, the authors examine how ownership status moderates the effects of stretch direction (up or down), brand image (prestige or nonprestige), and branding strategy (subbrand name or direct) on consumer responses to price-based line stretches. An “ownership effect” is proposed whereby owners have more favorable responses than nonowners to the brand's extensions. The ownership effect occurs for upward and downward stretches of non-prestige brands and for upward stretches of prestige brands. For downward stretches of prestige brands, however, the ownership effect does not occur because of owners’ desire to maintain brand exclusivity. In this situation, a sub-branding strategy protects owners’ parent brand attitudes from dilution. A field study and two lab studies confirm the hypotheses.