Marketing

When Inflicting Pain on Others Pays Off

ilseu — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 20:03:28 +0000

When Inflicting Pain on Others Pays Off ilseu Fri, 06/21/2024 - 13:03 More News David Danelski (david.danelski@ucr.edu) | UCR News) June 20, 2024

Oh, the joy of inflicting pain upon others. The Germans have a word for it: Schadenfreude, meaning “malicious pleasure.” And tapping into its sentiment properly can, ironically, do a lot of good by raising money for charity.

Professor of Marketing Thomas Kramer

In a groundbreaking paper published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, UC Riverside School of Business marketing professor and associate dean Thomas Kramer and co-authors articulate and quantify the appeal of Schadenfreude (pronounced Sha-den-froid-e) through the lens of marketing psychology.

Through a series of behavioral scenario studies, their paper provides insights for the highly competitive charitable fundraising industry, which gathers some $485 billion in the United States annually.

Firstly, those organizing fundraisers appealing to Schadenfreude shouldn’t get too carried away. Schadenfreude is about inflicting mild misfortune that falls comfortably short of sadism on those seen as deserving of the misfortune. We’re talking about pies thrown into faces and plunges into water tanks – not anything too painful or damaging.

In fact, when participants of Kramer’s studies imagined celebrities they disliked getting shocked with a taser gun, the fundraising potential wasn’t as strong as seeing the same celebrities receive the milder misfortune of getting drenched with a bucket of ice water.

“If a disliked person gets more than their just desserts, and they’re severely punished, you no longer feel happy about that punishment, and donations go down,” explained Kramer, who applies his expertise in behavioral psychology to marketing science.

Former BET executive Stephen Hill sits above a dunk tank for a fundraiser. (Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images for City of Hope)

Kramer’s other key findings include:

• To maximize donations, the donor can inflict or observe the mild misfortune, and those who inflict donate roughly the same as those who watch.

• The donors also must have disdain for the person receiving the misfortune, which elicits pleasure when they see that person get their punishment.

The study was conducted by having hundreds of participants at the University of Florida and those recruited through a crowdsourcing service called Amazon Mechanical Turk imagine various Schadenfreude scenarios.

In one example, they rated levels of dislike and deservingness of the person receiving the misfortune and how much they would donate (between zero and $10) to throw a pie into that person’s face. Higher levels of deservingness resulted in higher payments. In another scenario, more mild misfortune paid better than severe misfortune..

The paper’s title is “The Ironic Impact of Schadenfreude: When the Joy of Inflicting Pain Leads to Increased Prosocial Behavior.” Its co-authors are Yael Zemack-Rugar of University of Central Florida, Orlando, and Laura Boman of Kennesaw State University, Georgia.

Tags

Research News

UCR News

Thomas Kramer

Marketing

Repetitive Questions in Studies Yield Bad Data

ilseu — Fri, 28 Jan 2022 21:56:59 +0000

Repetitive Questions in Studies Yield Bad Data ilseu Fri, 01/28/2022 - 13:56 More News Holly Ober } UCR News January 28, 2022

Surveys that ask too many of the same type of question tire respondents and return unreliable data, according to a new UC Riverside-led study.

The study found that people tire from questions that vary only slightly and tend to give similar answers to all questions as the survey progresses. Marketers, policymakers, and researchers who rely on long surveys to predict consumer or voter behavior will have more accurate data if they craft surveys designed to elicit reliable, original answers, the researchers suggest.

Ye Li, assistant professor of management

“We wanted to know, is gathering more data in surveys always better, or could asking too many questions lead to respondents providing less useful responses as they adapt to the survey,” said first author Ye Li, a UC Riverside assistant professor of management. “Could this paradoxically lead to asking more questions but getting worse results?”

While it may be tempting to assume more data is always better, the authors wondered if the decision processes respondents use to answer a series of questions might change, especially when those questions use a similar, repetitive format.

The research addressed quantitative surveys of the sort typically used in market research, economics, or public policy research that seek to understand people’s values about certain things. These surveys often ask a large number of structurally similar questions.

Researchers analyzed four experiments that asked respondents to answer questions involving choice and preference.

Respondents in the surveys adapted their decision making as they answer more repetitive, similarly structured choice questions, a process the authors call “adaptation.” This means they processed less information, learned to weigh certain attributes more heavily, or adopted mental shortcuts for combining attributes.

In one of the studies, respondents were asked about their preferences for varying configurations of laptops. They were the sort of questions marketers use to determine if customers are willing to sacrifice a bit of screen size in return for increased storage capacity, for example.

“When you’re asked questions over and over about laptop configurations that vary only slightly, the first two or three times you look at them carefully but after that maybe you just look at one attribute, such as how long the battery lasts. We use shortcuts. Using shortcuts gives you less information if you ask for too much information,” said Li.

While humans are known to adapt to their environment, most methods in behavioral research used to measure preferences have underappreciated this fact.

“In as few as six or eight questions people are already answering in such a way that you’re already worse off if you’re trying to predict real-world behavior,” said Li. “In these surveys if you keep giving people the same types of questions over and over, they start to give the same kinds of answers.”

The findings suggest some tactics that can increase the validity of data while also saving time and money. Process-tracing, a research methodology that tracks not just the quantity of observations but also their quality, can be used to diagnose adaptation, helping to identify when it is a threat to validity. Adaptation could also be reduced or delayed by repeatedly changing the format of the task or adding filler questions or breaks. Finally, the research suggests that to maximize the validity of preference measurement surveys, researchers could use an ensemble of methods, preferably using multiple means of measurement, such as questions that involve choosing between options available at different times, matching questions, and a variety of contexts.

“The tradeoff isn’t always obvious. More data isn’t always better. Be cognizant of the tradeoffs,” said Li. “When your goal is to predict the real world, that’s when it matters.”

Li was joined in the research by Antonia Krefeld-Schwalb, Eric J. Johnson, and Olivier Toubia at Columbia University; Daniel Wall at the University of Pennsylvania; and Daniel M. Bartels at the University of Chicago. The paper, “The more you ask, the less you get: When additional questions hurt external validity,” is published in the Journal of Marketing Research and is available to read.

_____________________________________

Header photo: andibreit on Pixabay

Tags

Curiosity Is Key to Understanding Consumers

ilseu — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 23:27:21 +0000

Curiosity Is Key to Understanding Consumers ilseu Tue, 08/24/2021 - 16:27 More News By Darin Estep August 25, 2021

Margaret Campbell, Ph.D., has explored and explained consumer behavior around the globe—in France, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Singapore, Germany, Canada and many points in between—and across the United States.

So, when she arrived at UCR this summer as a professor of marketing and Anderson Presidential Chair in Business Administration, it was a homecoming of sorts. Campbell and her family lived in California until 2000, when she departed UCLA to join the faculty at Leeds School of Business in Boulder, Colorado.

This fall she is sharing her perspectives on advertising and marketing with undergraduate and graduate students in the School of Business. Her expectation of students is deceptively simple: “Be curious.”

That’s vital in today’s fast-changing, consumer-driven marketplace—and a worthwhile reminder for the business side as well as the academic side of marketing, she says.

“When companies and managers get caught up in creating a cool product, sometimes they forget the reality check to make sure what they are doing is creating value for consumers,” she adds, and the same thing can happen in academics.

This was a point she emphasized during her term as an editor for the Journal of Consumer Research. She and her colleagues introduced themselves to readers with an editorial, “Our Vision for the Journal of Consumer Research: It’s All about the Consumer.”

The market-driving power of consumers extends to children, an area of recent research focus for Campbell, who examines how children learn to make healthy choices. This includes studying how their pre-existing knowledge shapes the way they view marketing, such as seeing cartoon characters on a box of cereal.

Campbell, who earned a bachelor's degree in psychology and economics and a Ph.D. in business at Stanford University, says she was drawn to UCR by its strong marketing team. She noted that the marketing program, as well as the business school and MBA program, are on upward trajectories.

Yunzeng Wang, dean of the UCR School of Business, says the respect is mutual, citing Campbell’s extensive record of publications, awards, recognitions and research.

“In the School of Business, we expect our students to understand and embrace the impact they can have on the real world,” says Wang. “Professor Campbell’s work, including her international experiences, are excellent complements to our emphasis on inclusive, global perspectives.”

Campbell says it is important to equip students with the core concepts and research tools they need to apply to the real world. But she reminds them that world is constantly changing, and they will need to keep up with it.

“Don’t just read the textbook. Seek out diverse perspectives,” Campbell says. “Whether a student or faculty member, the biggest thing is to come to class thinking about what we are discussing, and to share your own thoughts and views.”

Tags

Marketing

Margaret Campbell

Anderson Presidential Chair in Business Administration

Lonely? These Odd Rituals Can Help

ilseu — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 21:22:59 +0000

Lonely? These Odd Rituals Can Help ilseu Thu, 03/04/2021 - 13:22 More News Holly Ober March 03, 2021

If you dunk a tea bag repeatedly into your mug or open a cream-filled cookie to lick the filling, you might find coping with pandemic isolation a bit easier than others.

A UC Riverside-led study has found people who adopt unique rituals to make everyday tasks more meaningful might feel less lonely.

Thomas Kramer

“We found that something as simple as preparing tea in a certain way, as long as it’s interpreted as a ritual, can make the experience more meaningful,” said Thomas Kramer, a professor of marketing at UC Riverside’s School of Business. “This makes people feel less lonely.”

The paper, published in the Journal of Marketing Research, addressed the fact that people who experience chronic loneliness often feel their lives lack meaning. Rituals create meaning. Most rituals occur in celebratory, social, or religious group settings and draw upon and reinforce shared cultural values. But rituals are also an important part of consumer culture. These rituals do not draw from shared cultural values and might be created by marketers or individual consumers. Marketers have long known that rituals facilitate relationships with consumers and brands and between consumers themselves.

Kramer and co-authors Xuehua Wang, an associate professor of marketing at East China Normal University; and Yixia Sun, an assistant professor of marketing at Zhejiang University; sought to find out if rituals around everyday consumer products could also help people feel less lonely by imbuing use of the products with meaning.

“Nobody in marketing has ever looked at rituals with private meaning,” Kramer said. “A lot has been done on what they do, for example, promoting self-control. But no one has looked at whether or not idiosyncratic, private rituals provide meaning in the context of consumer products.”

After asking participants questions designed to assess their degree of chronic loneliness, the researchers told participants that consumers often adopt rituals around the consumption of everyday products. They asked about rituals the participants practice and asked them either to imagine or actually use the product in either the ritualistic way, such as the familiar “twist-lick-dunk” technique for eating cream-filled cookies, or engaging with the product the way they usually did.

They found that the participants who experienced the most chronic loneliness also habitually engaged in the most rituals around consumer products. Moreover, participants who completed activities the researchers designed to induce loneliness felt less lonely after completing a real or imagined act of ritualized consumption. They also indicated that they felt their life had more meaning after the action.

The findings show that consumers might engage more strongly with brands that create rituals around purchasing or using products because they find meaning and a sense of community. The authors also suggest that governments can do more to reduce widespread loneliness by promoting rituals that do not include particular product options and add meaning to lives devoid of meaning.

“Many people are trying to find structure right now because everything is so chaotic,” Kramer said. “The implications of our study are that if you feel lonely, find a ritual. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. It can help you feel less lonely by providing a sense of meaning and purpose.”

The authors note that though participants felt less lonely immediately after using the product, they did not follow up to determine how long this feeling lasted. They also note idiosyncratic consumption rituals might not be advisable for individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorders.

The paper, “Ritualistic Consumption Decreases Loneliness by Increasing Meaning,” is available.

___________________

Header photo: Emily Rudolph on Unsplash

Tags

Marketing

Thomas Kramer

UCR News

Investigations into Cruise Industry Pricing

ilseu — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 20:30:44 +0000

Investigations into Cruise Industry Pricing ilseu Tue, 01/19/2021 - 12:30 More News Laurie McLaughlin January 19, 2021

For Assistant Professor Mingyu Joo, there is an important equilibrium to attain in the pursuit of research as he explores the many facets of marketing and publishes his findings.

“As a researcher, I have learned—and still try to improve—how to provide scientifically rigorous answers to practically relevant questions in the research projects I am conducting,” says Joo, whose primary research investigates practical problems in advertising, pricing, and product design using quantitative modeling methods. “Firms’ short-term motives are often misaligned with scientific requirements of rigor and transparency. Therefore, offering an actionable guidance to firms’ managerial problems using rigorous methodology is not always straightforward.”

Mingyu Joo

That two-pronged approach—attention to both the precision and the pragmatism within his research—has earned Joo some of academia’s highest honors: In 2015, he won the John Little Award and was a finalist for the Frank Bass Award—both best-marketing paper accolades he considers lifetime achievements.

In 2019, Joo co-authored “Advertising and brand attitudes: Evidence from 575 brands over five years” published in Quantitative Marketing and Economics, which earned a 2020 Buzzell Best Paper finalist honor from the Marketing Science Institute.

Most recently, “Temporal Distance and Price Responsiveness: Empirical Investigation of the Cruise Industry,” a UC Riverside-led study co-authored by Joo, was published in Management Science in July 2020. He also currently serves as an associate editor for both Decision Sciences and Information Economics and Policy.

While he’s firmly established a reputation for his research, his life’s work is shaped by his time in the classroom, where the lively interaction daily confirms his decision to teach. “Business environments are dynamically changing these days, so our classroom discussions on the latest business issues and analyses about key factors in success—or failure—offer meaningful challenges for my students and me,” says Joo, who joined the UCR faculty in 2018 and was previously an assistant professor at The Ohio State University.

“The supportive and collegial environment of UCR School of Business has helped me perfectly balance my efforts between producing new knowledge and conveying such knowledge to the next generation,” he adds. With this goal in mind, he also organizes the Field Colloquia speaker series for Ph.D. students and faculty members featuring well-recognized scholars from across the U.S.

And, just like their professor, Joo’s students are continuously looking for new information and answers to immediate questions within the industry, which allows Joo the deep dive into the industry that he relishes: “My students always demand the latest knowledge in the field.”

Tags

Marketing

Mingyu Joo

Faculty Profile

Counterintuitive Price Response Helps Rebound

ilseu — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 16:42:01 +0000

Counterintuitive Price Response Helps Rebound ilseu Mon, 01/11/2021 - 08:42 More News Holly Ober December 08, 2020

A UC Riverside-led study on cruise pricing could help the cruise industry get back on its feet after the pandemic. The research, published in Management Science, found that customers who book early in the advance sales period are less sensitive to ticket prices, while customers who book late are more sensitive to price changes, even though there are fewer cabins left.

“Those most likely to sail (post-pandemic) are loyalists who do not necessarily move based on price discounts,” said Mingyu Joo, a UC Riverside assistant professor of marketing.

Mingyu Joo

The findings contradict conventional wisdom from airlines, where early buyers shop for lower prices and late buyers facing fewer seats and choices accept higher prices. The research suggests the post-pandemic cruise industry should plan ticket sales to attract loyalists, who book early, and focus on value more than price.

Joo and Kenneth C. Wilbur at UC San Diego obtained booking data from a leading cruise company for 2004. The data include all two-person cabin sales. Each sales record specified the purchase date, price paid, departure date, itinerary, and cabin type. The researchers analyzed 11 itineraries and three cabin types that collectively accounted for 397,498 bookings, more than 90% of all tickets sold by the firm.

Cruise tickets were sold up to a year in advance. However, 99.4% of bookings occurred during the final 40 weeks, with the final 20 weeks accounting for 87% of all tickets sold. Each cruise’s price changed weekly over the advance sales period.

Customers buying high-price itineraries often booked tickets earlier, while those booking low-price itineraries tended to buy later.

Early buyers were less sensitive to price changes than late buyers, behaving like “loyalists” less likely to respond to fluctuations around the average price. This suggests that perceived experiential value of the cruise mainly influenced their behavior.

Late buyers were driven by bargain-seeking behavior, with high responsiveness to price fluctuations. Their behavior was that of newcomers inclined to shop prices. The firm's policy of raising prices as the advance sales period progressed worked because the increase in demand was enough to offset sales lost due to increased price.

For an industry shattered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the time-based segmentation in cruise consumer price responses offers a pathway to recovery once it is safe to sail again.

“The cruise industry, in handling pandemic-driven cancellations, may prioritize the consumers who previously booked early in the advance sales period, when allocating promotional resources right after the pandemic,” Joo said. “The cruise industry can also open up post-pandemic tickets for booking as early as possible, as optimistic loyalists may tend to plan far ahead. Both tactics may attract those loyalists who plan early to book tickets for the first post-pandemic sails.”

Joo warns that big post-pandemic discounts to attract new customers may not be effective. Those who never cruised may be risk-averse and go on a cruise only when really big discounts are offered or when the COVID-19 risk is completely gone.

“The industry needs to carefully evaluate the tradeoff between having more sales with deep discounts and focusing on loyalists at reasonable prices and with more value-focused promotions,” Joo said.

Tags