The key question is: Do price promotions on some products differentially impact demand for other products depending on their relative locations within a display?

In a new Journal of Marketing study, we conclude that the answer is yes. When the proximal items (i.e., those placed nearby) and distal items (i.e., those placed farther) are strong substitutes for the promoted item, we find that a price promotion decreases the sales of proximal products relative to distal products. This is known as a negative proximity effect.

However, when the proximal and distal items are weak substitutes for the promoted item, the promoted product increases the sales of proximal products relative to distal products, known as a positive proximity effect. In this case, the proximal product benefits from the increased attention by virtue of being close to the promoted product.

We find evidence for these sales patterns across a series of eight studies. In one study, we analyze yogurt sales at a retail grocer. We determine how far apart each yogurt was located from one another and also record similarity in yogurt attributes to determine substitutability. When nonpromoted products are strong substitutes for the promoted product, a 1% decrease in the price of the promoted product results in a .25% decrease in sales of proximal products, but there is no change in sales of distal products. However, when nonpromoted products are weak substitutes for the promoted product, a 1% decrease in the price of the promoted product results in a .10% increase in sales of proximal products. Again, there is no change in sales for distal products.

What Did We Learn?

Our promotion–proximity results provide three insights:

• It is often assumed that price promotions draw attention toward the promoted brand and away from all other brands. In contrast, our results show price promotions direct attention to the promoted brand and the brands that surround it (i.e., consumers’ attention spills over).
• Prior research assumes that goal-directed consumers will search a product display so that all appropriate products enter a consideration set before the purchase decision is made. In contrast, our analysis indicates that a price promotion can increase (or decrease) the likelihood of a proximal (or distal) product entering the consumers’ consideration set.
• Prior research assumes multiple purchases come from a single consideration set. In contrast, we argue that consumers can search multiple locations in a product display, with each location generating a unique consideration set and purchase opportunity.

Opportunities for Marketing Managers

Understanding how attention spills over to proximal products creates several opportunities for marketing managers:

1. Managers may consider product subcategory boundaries as opportunities to exploit positive proximity effects. Consider butter cookies and chocolate chip cookies bordering each other on a shelf. Placing a border brand on price promotion should draw increased attention to a less substitutable proximal item and increase the probability of a positive proximity effect.
   
   Managers can take advantage of this to direct attention to full-priced, higher-margin brands. Taking this further, positive proximity effects may also occur for non-substitutes (e.g., refrigerated yogurt and refrigerated desserts).
   
   
2. Retailers commonly conceive of loss leaders (e.g., milk) as items used to increase exposure to other nonpromoted product categories in the store (e.g., product categories they pass on the way to the dairy aisle). However, a loss leader can also be used to introduce customers to new products within a product category. For example, imagine discounting a product like almond milk and surrounding it with novel flavors/versions of nonpromoted items (e.g., oat milk, soy milk) to induce trial of those new items. In this sense, price promotions benefit the promoted brand and also increase exposure to other high-margin items in the product category.
   
   
3. Some products, such as wines on a shelf, are organized by price levels. For categories in which substitutability is defined by price, placing any item on sale would have a negative influence on proximal items. Because consumers have little expectation of which cabernets should be located next to each other, managers may place lower margin items proximal to price-promoted items during the promotion.

From: Christina Kan, Yan (Lucy) Liu, Donald R. Lichtenstein, and Chris Janiszewski, “The Negative and Positive Consequences of Placing Products Next to Promoted Products,” Journal of Marketing.

Go to the Journal of Marketing

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Gen Z is a powerful and unique group of consumers, with purchasing power on the rise. For brands, understanding their shopping behavior and spending power is key to success.

Gen Z trusts Creators more than social media ads and celebrities when making purchase decisions, according to LTK’s 2023 Gen Z Shopper Study.

In this new whitepaper, LTK Insights shares findings from the study with important advice for developing an effective marketing strategy.

Covered topics include:

• Gen Z shopping habits, with upcoming summer 2023 trends
• Economic check-in
• Insights on Gen Z linking behavior

The post Insights for connecting with Gen Z through Creator marketing appeared first on American Marketing Association.

From 2016 to 2022, the U.S. machine translation market grew from $400 million to $1.1 billion, and it’s still climbing. In order to stay on top of the ever-changing landscape of website translation, you need to make sure you stay on the edge of innovation and immerse yourself in the world of AI.

What emerging translation trends should you expect in 2023 and beyond? A greater tolerance for AI, and its rapid development with tools like Adaptive Translation, and translation quality scoring which have made translation faster, easier, and less expensive than ever before.

Take Aways:

• The top 5 trends in website translation in 2023.
• Insights on how to spend less for human quality translations.
• AI in website translation. Why a growing 24% of marketers use machine translation for their sites as of 2020.
• How translation quality scoring will dramatically reduce translation costs.
• New trends and technologies such as Adaptive Translation.

The post Translation Trends in Digital Marketing 2023: The AI-Driven Evolution appeared first on American Marketing Association.

The data is clear. Share of voice (SOV) leads to increased market share.  For every 10 points of excess SOV, brands tend to grow market share an extra 0.5%. For brand leaders, it’s an extra 1.5%¹.So, have you evaluated your brand’s SOV lately? This might be the market to take a closer look and BlueOcean is a powerful tool in maximizing SOV. 

Download, to learn:

• The value and significance of SOV
• Strategies your brand can implement to increase SOV
• 3 ways BlueOcean can help you accelerate market share growth

1. Binet & Field

The post Share of Voice: The Growth Lever You Can’t Neglect  appeared first on American Marketing Association.

 
Interested in learning about how it works? Click here to learn more.  

But what if you could take it even further by understanding the content discovery process that drives new members to your organization? 

While AI-driven content curation tools deliver the right content to your existing audience based on their behavior, content discovery platforms help you understand how and why audiences engage with your content. 

Read on to learn more about how content discovery works, the best content discovery tools on the market today, and how you can use content discovery software to enhance your subscriber experience. 

Understanding Content Discovery 

The term “content discovery” refers to searching for and finding relevant content. It is the process a customer or a lead goes through whenever they discover and then engage with a brand’s content, whether on its website, through its social media channels, or anywhere else. 

As an organization, if you can fully understand your audience’s unique content discovery journey, you’ll better grasp how they engage with the content you deliver. Once you do that, you’ll find new ways of improving your own marketing strategy, thus encouraging increased engagement among users. 

Audience Research is the Backbone of Content Discovery 

When you can successfully tap into an audience’s context, you’ll be better able to determine what content your organization should be creating. The best way to truly understand an audience’s contexts is through thoughtful research, asking the right questions, and testing out new things. 

You’ll want to start with the fundamentals: 

Who’s your audience? 

You don’t have to be a one-stop shop for all of your audience’s needs. Instead, you’ll want to aim for specific targets while hopefully attracting others along the way. This allows you to niche down and provide high-value service or insight for those targets.  

There’s a good chance you already understand your target audience, but you can use the following information to fill in the blanks. Of course, if you have nothing at all, you’ll need to do some digging: 

• What’s your audience’s average age? 

• Is your audience in a specific location? 
• What devices do they use to access your content? 
• Where are they finding the content they want? 
• What social media channels are they using to discover content? 
• What do they want from your organization? 

General information creates your content discovery map, while your audience’s needs and motivations will help to fuel your overall content strategy. You can figure out those needs and motivations through user stories, which tell you exactly what your audiences crave and why. 

What is holding back your audience? 

Understanding what an audience wants represents the initial step in creating content that drives traffic. However, it’s about more than audience motivation. The content discovery process involves determining what might be holding back your audience.  

Often, your audience knows what they need to do. But, there may be something holding your audience back such as the time it takes to learn a new tool, the costs associated with new technology, or the fear of failing with a new venture. Identifying those barriers your audience has erected allows you to speak directly to them. 

How is your audience engaging with your existing content? 

You should audit your content to truly understand your audience’s content discovery journey. When you audit the content you have already published, you open a window into how your audience is accessing and engaging with it. 

When performing your own organization’s content audit, you should also consider an audit of your competitors’ content. Remember, parallel organizations and competitors will have relevant content your target audiences probably already engage with. An audit will help you understand which content your audience consumes. 

Best Content Discovery Tools and Platforms 

There are a significant number of content discovery software solutions available to help you on this quest. Some of the most popular include the following: 

• UpContent: UpContent allows users to discover, collaborate, and distribute great content across the web. UpContent takes the guesswork out of finding the high-quality content your audience wants. Its easy team collaboration features, user-friendly platform, and seamless integrations make it a leader in content discovery software. 
• Social Animal: Social Animal is like the Swiss Army knife of content marketing. It is an AI-powered solution that allows users to browse millions of posts and articles to discover new and trending content categorized based on performance across all platforms. 
• Scoop.It: Using the Scoop.It content discovery engine, you can find and organize industry thought leadership articles, reports, and news that can be curated for your readers as a way of boosting your content strategy. 
• rasa.io: The rasa.io AI automatically curates a set of articles based on your reader’s engagement with your email newsletter. You’ll have the tools necessary to find the content they are actually clicking on, your subscriber’s topics of interest, and more! 

Combining Content Discovery with rasa.io’s AI-Driven Curation 

When you use rasa.io with your content discovery strategy, you’ll get more eyes on your most relevant content, regardless of whether you use one of these excellent content discovery tools or some other content discovery software solution. 

While content discovery tools are a great way to get new eyes on your content, rasa.io’s AI-driven content curation tools help you put your best content in front of your existing subscriber base. 

By leveraging both your internal content and external content it takes a huge burden off of creating new content while maintaining engagement, building more trust, and increase your authority. Deliver the content they want to see and get more eyes on you. 

Start seeing better results by sending better emails.

The post Content Discovery and AI-Driven Curation: The Perfect Combination  appeared first on American Marketing Association.

Details

• Date and time: July 24, 2023, 7 A.M.–5 P.M. EDT (time is subject to revision)
• Location: Online; registration details will be provided upon acceptance
• Fee: US$10 to be collected after acceptance

Proposal Submission Guidelines

• Submission deadline: June 30, 2023
• Proposal submission method: Please email proposals to Hari Sridhar (ssridhar@mays.tamu.edu)
• Decision notification: July 14, 2023
• Proposal length: Maximum of 3,000 words (excluding tables and references)
• Proposal format: Proposals should be submitted as a single Word or PDF file. The cover page should provide the full name, title, affiliation, email address, and phone number of each author. The proposal should include the following sections: Abstract, Introduction and Motivation, Methods and Data, and Results.

Introduction to the Special Issue on New Paradigms for a New World

Scientific progress is fueled by findings that do not conform to existing paradigms. Such challenges to expectations set the stage for new paradigms to emerge. We propose that marketing is likely to be on the cusp of such a transformation, prompted by three sources of disruption: the pandemic and related crisis-driven acceleration and adaptation, technological hyperconnectivity, and societal fragmentation.

This shift has challenged marketing in at least two ways. First, corporations are prompted to take responsibility for their potential contributions to the growth of inequality. Second, marketers have undertaken novel initiatives intended to alleviate some of these societal ills, including promoting consumption that supports equity and inclusion, embracing meaningful brand purpose, fostering economic health and entrepreneurship across socioeconomic strata through social marketing and bottom-of-the-pyramid strategies, amplifying critical and sometimes corrective voices, challenging entrenched power structures, and empowering consumer mobility.

Why This Special Issue, and Why Now?

In this Special Issue, we challenge marketing scholars to reexamine, question, and, in some cases, even discard current paradigms and identify new ones that can help shed light on the new realities with which marketers are faced.

Submitted papers should not only describe the present landscape but also help set theoretical foundations for future study. To encourage further thought, we have posted short videos pertaining to several thought leaders’ perspectives on our website for the Special Issue.

The post Call for Submissions | Journal of Marketing Virtual Symposium: New Paradigms for a New World (July 24, 2023) appeared first on American Marketing Association.

Generative AI has raised considerable buzz lately, but with this hype comes a lot of misconceptions and confusion on how it can help marketers. With customer expectations rising and personalization now an expectation, marketers can use generative AI to help maintain customer loyalty and gain insights in a post-cookie world.  

We’ve already seen how AI can help marketers, commerce teams, salespeople, and more make informed decisions. This merely scratches the surface on how brands can use AI in their marketing to become more efficient and productive.

Though generative AI is still in its early stages, here are three ways marketers can use it today to better connect with customers.

What generative AI for marketing could look like

Generative AI can help with drafting marketing materials or providing quick answers to customer responses. But that’s just the start of what businesses can do with this technology. 

Combining generative AI with an intuitive customer data platform can arm companies with the tools to take action on real-time insights. This can help you deliver personalization at scale, such as product recommendations, tailored to individual customers based on their browsing and purchase history. 

Consumers also expect brands to use their data to offer more relevant services. We found that over 60% of customers expect that companies instantly react with the most up-to-date information when transferring across departments. Generative AI can satisfy this customer need by giving agents suggested responses generated right in the moment, based on real-time data. 

The last mile of personalization

Today’s customers expect personalization at every step. Recently, we found 65% of customers say they will stay loyal if the company offers a more tailored experience. 

Combining the power of generative AI with your CRM data gives marketers the ability to create those kinds of digital experiences for their customers. Altogether, this results in more efficient marketing journeys that are better tailored to their audience across content generation, design, and targeting. 

3rd-party cookie replacement

Third-party cookie deprecation and access to high-quality data — data that’s well-structured and useful — is a growing challenge for marketing organizations. We discovered that 41% of business leaders cite a lack of understanding of data because it’s too complex or not accessible enough. 

As data becomes increasingly difficult to collect, store, and analyze, marketers can now turn to AI tools to help analyze the data they do have and make the right decision. AI will help marketers process their existing, perhaps limited, first-party data and provide them with rich insights.

Letting you focus on the customer

This shift in focus and conversation around generative AI is imperative, not a nice-to-have. By eliminating the confusion and delay in analyzing data, generative AI takes the heavy lifting out of content creation. This technology can generate product descriptions that are accurate, compelling, and optimized for search engines. 

With generative AI handling lower-level tasks, marketers are able to focus on strategic campaigns, executing on creative, and creating connections with customers. Generative AI can fundamentally change how marketing departments operate, allowing teams to place more focus where it belongs — on the customer. 

This article was originally published on Salesforce.com on March 24, 2023. 

Original blog post: https://www.salesforce.com/blog/outreach-marketing-use-cases-generative-ai/

The post 3 Ways Generative AI Will Help Marketers Connect With Customers appeared first on American Marketing Association.

Marketers need to get things right the first time, especially in an uncertain marketplace. But to do so, they need accurate insights and data to anticipate competitive moves and market trends.

Get the report and discover:

• How marketers plan to address growing competition and market pressures in 2023
• Where marketers are missing opportunities to show value to leadership and their organization
• Why 41% of marketers say it’s challenging for them to keep up with market needs—and what they can do to change it
• The top 5 list of what marketers say is most important for job success

The post Find Out How Marketers Plan to Win in 2023 in this Report appeared first on American Marketing Association.

Two recent Journal of Marketing articles provide new insights into marketing and societal issues

From consumers to investors to employees, a recent survey reports that every stakeholder group expects businesses to help find solutions to issues including economic inequality, gender bias, and climate change. With these expectations only growing, there may be a need to develop new measures in marketing to investigate questions at the intersection of marketing and society. Using such measures has the potential to inform policymakers, which may ultimately improve outcomes on some of the most critical issues facing society today. Two recent Journal of Marketing articles provide nuance to previously used measures to consider marketing’s impact on societal outcomes.

The Positive Influence of Female Executives in the C-Suite

Despite significant strides during the 20th century, gender equality remains a pressing societal issue. In business, women continue to face inequality leading most notably to lower pay, with even starker consequences for women of color. However, recent findings suggest that women in top management reap not only personal benefits but also financial performance benefits for their firms. The Journal of Marketing article, “Customer Orientation and Financial Performance: Women in Top Management Teams Matter” by Chandra Srivastava, Saim Kashmiri, and Vijay Mahajan, shows that women executives influence the financial performance of firms by centering and focusing on customers.

The authors introduce female influence in the top management team (FITMT) as a measure of female executives’ leverage on decision making within the entire management team (TMT). FITMT differs from traditional demographic standards that focus on female representation in the TMT, thus allowing the authors to tease out these important findings. As Srivastava notes, “By expanding access to leadership among women, we get better marketing for the firm, and we get a more equal society.”

Rethinking Financial Vulnerability

The Journal of Marketing article “Beyond Income: Dynamic Consumer Financial Vulnerability” by Linda Court Salisbury, Gergana Y. Nenkov, Simon J. Blanchard, Ronald Paul Hill, Alexander L. Brown, and Kelly D. Martin addresses another critical societal issue: consumer financial vulnerability (CFV). The authors suggest that addressing CFV requires broadening CFV to account for individuals’ risk of experiencing harm, not just those currently experiencing harm. Given the current measures of CFV, Salisbury provides a powerful example explaining why we typically underestimate the number of vulnerable people in the marketplace: “An uninsured person may delay medical treatment, preventive treatment because they can’t afford it. That could lead to a medical crisis, which then could lead to short-term disability and loss of work. It becomes a kind of domino effect of harm. So, we wanted to try to make it clear that vulnerability is a risk of harm…You don’t have to be experiencing harm to still be vulnerable to it.” The researchers also show that by analyzing customer financial data, marketers can help to offset consumer financial vulnerability.

In addition to the managerial insights and policy implications, these articles shed light on the need for new tools and measures to address issues at the intersection of marketing and society appropriately. Referring to FITMT, Srivastava explains that companies “can look at it and say, ‘Well, we have an equal number of women to men, but the women don’t hold any of the top leadership positions. They’re all at the lower ranks.’ And so, this would enable them to really see how much influence they’re giving diverse bodies outside of what’s the norm.” Discussing the logic behind expanding CFV, Salisbury adds that “in other domains, firms might start to think of considering measurement, which would allow us to identify the risk of certain types of harms that consumers might experience, rather than waiting for the harms to occur. I think that could really benefit, both consumers and firms alike.”

Stakeholders increasingly expect firms to address societal issues. Thus, as marketing academics and practitioners consider marketing’s impact on societal outcomes, new ways of measuring this impact may become necessary. While the stakes are high, given the challenges of the moment, the rewards could mean a more equitable and just society for all.

Advice for Firms Addressing Societal Issues

1. Growth and profit maximization prioritizes one group of stakeholders, owners/investors, often at the expense of other stakeholders. Firms should prioritize the needs of all their stakeholders (e.g., employees, customers, communities), focusing on long and longer-term performance.  
2. Firms should recognize that some of the measures that have been used in the past may be insufficient to analyze and assess the issues of the moment. 
3. Financial performance measures are no longer enough. Firms should begin measuring their social impact as well.
4. Figuring out the best metrics may require investing time, financial, and personnel resources.

Go to the Journal of Marketing

The post New Perspectives on Addressing Issues at the Intersection of Marketing and Society appeared first on American Marketing Association.

Managers expect that introducing a new product under an existing brand name can reduce introduction costs, lower the risk of failure, and increase firm profit. However, only 30% of all brand extensions in the U.S. consumer packaged goods market survive the first two years—a success rate similar to new brands. Given this high failure rate of brand extensions, it is vital for marketers to understand what drives the success of brand extension.

In a new Journal of Marketing study, we offer insights into the drivers of brand extension success. We explore how companies can devise more successful brand extension strategies in terms of contextual factors (parent brand, extension, communication, and consumer factors) and the research methods used.

Prior research has inferred that parent brand equity and extension fit are the two key success drivers. However, empirical findings are mixed. Drawing on signaling theory, categorization theory, and a large database spanning the years 1990–2020, we address these mixed findings through a meta-analysis to develop empirical generalizations.

Pay Attention to Parent Brand Equity and Extension Fit

Our work provides three key findings that will benefit chief marketing officers.

1. There is a 60.6% probability of a more positive response to a brand extension if parent brand equity improves. Similarly, there is a 61.4% probability of a positive response to a brand extension if extension fit improves. Extension fit is defined as consumer perceptions of the similarity and congruity between the parent brand and the extension product.
   
   We recommend that managers leverage both parent brand equity and extension fit to enhance brand extension success. However, managers should pay more attention to extension fit because it is slightly more influential than parent brand equity.
   
   
2. Managers should pay attention to the differential effects of various dimensions of parent brand equity and extension fit. For example, when introducing an extension product, creating and highlighting similarities in product features (vs. usage occasions) and images of the parent brand and the extension is more beneficial.
   
   We find that parent brand equity can strengthen the positive impact of extension fit on brand extension success and vice versa. Therefore, managers should consider parent brand equity and extension fit simultaneously. We also find that parent brand equity has a positive (though small) effect on brand extension success even if the extension has a poor fit. Similarly, extension fit exerts a positive (though small) effect on brand extension success even if the extension has a low parent brand equity. If the parent brand does not have high equity, brand extensions can still be a viable strategy for launching new products as long as the extension fits well with the parent brand; an extension that does not have a good fit can still be successful as long as the parent brand is strong.
   
   
3. Managers should take a broader perspective on brand extension strategies by considering contextual factors related to the parent brand, the extension product, communication, and consumers. For example, managers of brands whose existing core products are services should particularly emphasize the equity of the parent brand (and its dimensions) when introducing an extension product.
   
   Besides the contextual factors, we also investigate the potential moderating effects of research method factors. For example, in our large database covering 26 countries, we do not find evidence of a moderating role of the region in which the data were collected, thereby contributing to the debate on whether Eastern cultures have a different way of evaluating brand extensions than Western cultures.

In summary, we develop empirical generalizations and findings about the main effects, relative importance, and interaction effect of the two key drivers of brand extension success: parent brand equity and extension fit. We suggest how to devise more successful brand extension strategies in terms of five groups of moderators: contextual factors (parent brand, extension, communication, and consumer factors) and research method factors. We hope that this will prove helpful to improving the performance of brand extension strategies.

From: Chenming Peng, Tammo H.A. Bijmolt, Franziska Völckner, and Hong Zhao, “A Meta-Analysis of Brand Extension Success: The Effects of Parent Brand Equity and Extension Fit,” Journal of Marketing.

Go to the Journal of Marketing

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