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George Mason marketing professor receives prestigious research funding

Katelynn C Hipolito — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 14:56:59 +0000

George Mason marketing professor receives prestigious research funding Katelynn C Hipolito Wed, 10/08/2025 - 10:56

Jessica Hoppner

Jessica Hoppner, associate professor of marketing at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at ��, has been named a recipient of Academy of Marketing Research Funding for 2025.

According to the submitted proposal, the awarded project—entitled “Bridging the Digital Divide: The Paradox of Sales and Marketing Collaboration on Social Media”—“will contribute to both academic research and industry best practices, guiding B2B firms toward more effective digital engagement strategies.”

The Academy of Marketing’s research sub-committee chooses a mere handful of recipients each year for grants of up to £5,000. Funding is offered in collaboration with Marketing Trust, an independent charity dedicated to supporting marketing projects serving the public good.

Hoppner’s co-PI on this project is Severina Cartwright, senior lecturer (associate professor) in marketing at University of Liverpool.

Hoppner and Cartwright plan to use the grant money to carry out an in-depth practitioner survey leading to the creation of a unique and granular data-set. Anticipated final output will include an academic article submitted to a top marketing journal, as well as a whitepaper and other translational content for a practitioner audience.

As per the proposal, the project will unfold in three phases: survey development and pre-testing, data collection and analysis, and dissemination and knowledge transfer. Hoppner and Cartwright aim to complete their project within a twelve-month timeframe.

Saurabh Mishra

“Congratulations to Prof. Hoppner on this well-deserved funding award—an achievement that underscores the excellence of her work and exemplifies the innovative and managerially meaningful research being conducted within the marketing area in Costello.”

— Saurabh Mishra, marketing area chair

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“Doing well by doing good?" There’s a framework for that

Jennifer Anzaldi — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 15:38:03 +0000

“Doing well by doing good?" There’s a framework for that Jennifer Anzaldi Wed, 07/02/2025 - 11:38

Today’s customers don’t just buy products—they buy into what a company stands for. It is no longer just low prices or flashy marketing that target the latest trends. Stakeholders are asking harder questions: Does this company treat its workers fairly? Are they harming the environment?

In a recent study published in the Journal of Brand Management, Russell Abratt, a marketing professor at the Costello College of Business at ��, tackles a key strategic challenge: How companies can move beyond shallow social and environmental messaging to meaningfully shift consumer perceptions. Joining Abratt on this research team are co-authors Emmanuel Silva Quaye of University of Witwatersrand and Nicola Kleyn of University of Pretoria.

Russell Abratt

When a brand is described as being true to themselves, holding values of fairness, a concern for society, and an obligation to goodness, it becomes what they call a conscientious corporate brand. These are brands who are trusted to do the right thing consistently and authentically.

But trust alone is not enough. Companies want to know: Does being conscientious also deliver better business outcomes?

Building on their 2023 work, which introduced a framework for developing conscientious corporate brands, the research team now offers empirical evidence that this framework not only enhances brand trust but also leads to the response companies are hoping for—responsible branding can drive tangible value.

“Firms in order to succeed these days really need to go beyond profits,” says Abratt. “You’ve got to be ethical in whatever you do. You’ve got to be socially aware. And you’ve also got to be very, very conscientious about what you are doing.”

To further investigate Abratt’s 2023 framework and understand what changes stakeholder perceptions, the researchers conducted two experiments with South African participants. Each participant was shown a scenario involving a fictional construction company: the control group highlighted traditional business goals such as efficiency and profitability, and the experimental group emphasized ethical leadership, social impact, and environmental sustainability. The results were striking.

“We saw very clearly the differences between the control group and the experimental group,” Abratt explains. Participants viewed the purpose-driven, socially engaged version of the company as significantly more conscientious, responsible, and authentic than the version focused purely on business efficiency.

Their research identified four elements in a chronological sequence that contribute to conscientious corporate branding: organizational purpose, brand authenticity, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and ethical organizational culture. These are not separate strategies; they reinforce each other.

“Firms in order to succeed these days really need to go beyond profits,” says Abratt. “You’ve got to be ethical in whatever you do. You’ve got to be socially aware. And you’ve also got to be very, very conscientious about what you are doing.”
— Russell Abratt, Instructional Professor, Marketing

The first element of this sequence is organizational purpose. A company must begin by defining why it exists beyond just profits. Next is authenticity. “Authenticity leads to trust,” says Abratt. “The more authentic that an organization is perceived to be, the more positive perceptions the stakeholders have.” The paper finds that authenticity acts as a bridge that connects an organization’s purpose to stakeholders’ perceptions of conscientious corporate branding.

Next is the third element: corporate social responsibility. This must be integrated, not performative. “Developing a corporate social responsibility strategy should be part of the organization’s overall strategy,” says Abratt. “It should not be seen as greenwashing, as added on and fake.”

Lastly, an ethical organizational culture is created by top leadership through example and prioritizing ethical values across the organization.

According to Abratt, “In order for a firm to say this is our purpose beyond profits, they’ve got to have a top leadership that says these are our values. This is what we stand for. Then that needs to be typicalized throughout the organization.”

So what does this mean for business leaders? It means that building a conscientious brand is no longer just a marketing strategy—it’s a business imperative. But the real challenge lies in making sure those sustainable actions resonate with consumers to ultimately result in success. Can companies do well by doing good?

Looking ahead, Abratt and his colleagues hope to expand their research to other industries and other countries or regions to test whether their results are generalizable to other contexts.

“Brands that have a purpose beyond profit are the ones that are going to be seen by stakeholders in a more positive light. And if they are seen in a more positive light, those stakeholders, especially customers, are likely to support that particular organization,” Abratt concludes.

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Russell Abratt

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Brett Josephson’s GovCon research honored with coveted award

Nilesh Patel — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 18:40:36 +0000

Brett Josephson’s GovCon research honored with coveted award Nilesh Patel Mon, 06/16/2025 - 14:40

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Brett Josephson

The American Marketing Association (AMA) has awarded the prestigious Louis W. Stern Award for 2025 to a paper co-authored by Brett Josephson, associate dean for Executive Education at �� and associate professor of marketing at the Costello College of Business.

The award’s namesake, Louis W. Stern, is the John D. Gray Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, best known for his influential work on marketing channels.

Josephson describes Stern as “one of the founding godfathers of marketing, especially on the interorganizational side, involving B-to-B channels and distribution.” Appropriately, the Louis W. Stern Award is given annually by the AMA’s Interorganizational Special Interest Group, in recognition of “a published article that has made a significant and lasting contribution to the field of interorganizational marketing and channels of distribution.”

The winning paper, “Uncle Sam Rising: Performance Implications of Business-to-Government Relationships,” was published in Journal of Marketing in 2019. Josephson’s co-authors were Ju-yeon Lee of Iowa State University, and Babu John Mariadoss and Jean L. Johnson of Washington State University-Pullman.

The paper proceeded from Josephson’s observation that “the notion of the government as a customer — not just any customer, but the largest, most impactful customer in the world — had been left out of the business scholarship consensus.”

To fill the knowledge gap, the researchers conducted in-depth interviews with sector experts, who highlighted the additional transaction costs inherent in the B2G (business to government) space. “The interviewees were saying that government contracting had all these idiosyncratic costs, and it was really hard to diversify away from government contracting,” Josephson says. “If you wanted to be in this space, you had to be all in.”

By the same token, companies were rewarded for upping their commitment to government clients. Comparing firm value metrics to actual government contracts, the researchers found that the more a company’s portfolio was weighted toward B2G, the more market benefits it enjoyed.

However, there can be risks associated with deepening involvement in government contracting. Because federal agency budgets are linked to political priorities, they can change quickly and unpredictably. Josephson and his co-authors discovered that companies could hedge against that risk by catering to a greater number of government clients. Those with a more concentrated B2G portfolio faced higher risks when taking on more government contracting, but saw higher gains in firm value on the whole.

The dynamics of the B2G sector lend themselves to increasing specialization, Josephson says. “Just because you have knowledge of a customer, there’s no guarantee you know how to translate that to someone else, and if anything, it can become a detriment because you don’t know how to speak that customer’s language.”

With the government contracting ecosystem adjusting to rapidly shifting political winds, Josephson’s findings may be even more relevant today than they were in 2019. The risks Josephson describes in his paper are hitting close to home for contractors with deep ties to civilian agencies, while military contractors may be basking in a proposed trillion-dollar budget for the Department of Defense.

Nevertheless, Josephson does not expect to see serious attrition in the B2G ecosystem anytime soon. “Even with cuts and uncertainty and ambiguity, the federal government is still the largest customer in the world, hands down.”

The Louis W. Stern Award stands as gratifying proof of the paper’s ongoing impact and influence. “Past winners include not only some of my academic advisors, but also many other people who have made major contributions to marketing scholarship,” Josephson says. “So it’s pretty awesome, even just to be on that list.”

The award will be granted at the AMA’s annual summer conference in Chicago.

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Challenges of leading a hybrid workforce

Jennifer Anzaldi — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 14:00:58 +0000

Challenges of leading a hybrid workforce Jennifer Anzaldi Wed, 11/02/2022 - 10:00

In This Story

Brett Josephson

Brett Josephson, associate dean for executive development at Mason, shares his insight on the challenges of leading a hybrid workforce.

It’s 9 am. Do you know where your team members are?

Before Covid, the answer was simple: They were – or were expected to be – in the office. The pandemic erased that certainty and accelerated the pace toward work-place flexibility. As we move forward in our post-covid work environment, employees are strongly indicating their preference for flexibility and self-determination regarding their working environment. A portion of the workforce will desire to stay at home with high flexibility, whereas others will return to the office by choice.

In my role as Associate Dean of Executive Development at ��, I’m constantly talking to business leaders about their leadership and workforce struggles, concerns, as well as wins. Since Covid, a central theme of those discussions has been the complexity of managing hybrid teams. Fortunately, as we’ve all grown accustomed to the new normal, more and more managers are discovering that hybridity offers at least as many opportunities as challenges.

In my interactions with managers, I’ve seen that successful adaptation to the new normal requires managers to be intentional, purposeful, and transparent in their actions. Here are two areas managers need to consider as they continue to lead a hybrid workforce.

How to effectively monitor outcomes rather than activity. With hybrid, it is easy for managers to feel cut off from the day-to-day activities of their teams. Back when everyone was in the office, they could easily see what employees were working on. But the activity of remote workers is beyond such moment-to-moment oversight.

To recapture a sense of control, some companies have resorted to surveillance tools that use webcams, keystroke trackers, etc. to closely monitor employee activity. Like any other kind of micromanagement, though, these technologies send a discouraging signal to employees that their organization does not trust them. In some individual cases, that mistrust may be justified, but it shouldn’t be assumed for all employees.

Instead, managers need to experiment with a range of techniques to ensure not only that productivity remains high, but also that employees have the support they need to work effectively. The ideal solution will vary from team to team but could involve a mixture of interactive online tools (e.g., Slack, Teams, Google Docs), regular Zoom check-ins and one-on-one virtual meetings, even some in-person engagements and activities. It may take some time to get the recipe right – but once you do, the result will likely be maximised transparency and trust. A win-win for managers and employees alike.

Addressing power and politics. “Presentism” – the idea that leadership potential can be measured by the length of time one spends in the office – is still alive and well. Before the pandemic, employees who worked late also were more likely to receive personal attention from higher-ups who kept similar work habits, further increasing their opportunities for advancement. By the same token, it could be that employees who return to the office will enjoy an automatic political advantage over their remote-working colleagues.

The above-mentioned monitoring solutions would partly address this problem as well. Managers need a reliable way of measuring performance that doesn’t depend upon physical proximity. Beyond that, organizations should devise and implement proactive strategies for virtual mentoring, so that high potentials do not feel they have to choose between their career prospects and the flexibility of hybrid working. To be sure, any form of mentoring is time-consuming. But so is a preoccupation with office politics – a pre-pandemic obligation that could be lessened by virtual career development.

The politics of hybrid working can go in a different direction when all hands are urged to return to the office. Those with enough power may pull rank and refuse, creating an obvious hierarchical split– frontline staff commuting like it’s 2019, and higher-ups stubbornly staying at home. The perceived double standard could end up being a serious drain on morale. Yet another reason to embrace the new normal, rather than trying to force employees back to the office.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2022 issue of The Business Voice.

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Burnout and the future of B2B sales

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 13:38:21 +0000

Burnout and the future of B2B sales Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 09/20/2022 - 09:38

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Selling is inseparable from relationship management. In the past, the one-to-one "human touch" of a salesperson compensated for the standardized nature of their wares. However, today's sales environment tends towards customized solutions and co-creation with the client, especially in the B2B space. In many cases, these trends have greatly increased the network of stakeholders whom salespeople are obliged to keep happy.

Jessica Hoppner

Research shows that B2B customers benefit from being more involved in the process, but what about the sales force? Does their increased interpersonal burden translate to higher risk of burnout? �� School of Business Marketing Area Chair Jessica Hoppner's recently published paper in Industrial Marketing Management, co-authored by Paul Mills of Cleveland State University and David A. Griffith of Texas A&M University, finds some surprising answers.

Academic explanations of burnout often rely on the job's demands-resources model, which compares workplace challenges against the tools on hand to help employees meet them. When professional demands rise sharply without a corresponding change in available resources, exhaustion followed by burnout becomes more likely.

Hoppner and her co-authors developed a set of hypotheses about the resources B2B salespeople would need to prevent burnout, given the increased responsibilities of customer participation. Their study took the form of a survey (designed with input from actual B2B sales professionals) completed by 210 salespeople. Three-fourths of the respondents reported that customer participation in their company's development process had grown significantly over the past year. The survey went on to ask how burned out they felt by their job, how much autonomy they had in their work, whether they felt sales ability was fixed or changeable and how much they felt it was worth investing time in developing skills, knowledge, and relationships. The final question was about the competitive intensity of their industry in the previous year.

Holistic analysis of the survey responses revealed that the stress of customer participation was not directly heightening the risk of burnout. Instead, B2B salespeople were rising to the occasion by reinvesting in critical resources - the aforementioned skills, knowledge, and relationships. In doing so, they became even more skilled, and better prepared to work with their customers. You could say that they turned stress into their superpower.

The intensity of their resource investment, however, was influenced by (a) their level of job autonomy and (b) their belief that sales ability can improve. The positive relationship between autonomy and salespeople's resource investment was even stronger in less competitive industries.

As Hoppner explains, "The salesperson wants to respond to these new challenges by investing in resources and getting new skills. The autonomy provided by your company influences how much you invest. The competitive environment influences whether you can invest as much. And you only have so much bandwidth as a salesperson to invest in new skills."

But investment always requires both authority and a certain amount of faith. Respondents who believed good salespeople are born not made - i.e. those with what psychologist Carol Dweck called a "fixed mind-set" about sales ability - would presumably consider upskilling a waste of time, whether or not their organization gave them the autonomy to do so. Their fatalistic thinking would prevent them from tapping the resources that might buffer them against burnout. Indeed, the "fixed mind-set" salespeople in Hoppner's sample reported not only less investment in core skills but also higher burnout than peers with a "growth mind-set" grounded in self-improvement.

In today's B2B sector, burnout prevention is a critical issue since value co-creation demands fully engaged and committed salespeople. Widespread burnout defeats the purpose of customer participation.

Hoppner recommends that sales managers remember the winning combination of autonomy and growth mind-set, particularly when customer participation is a top priority. Good B2B sales managers, she implies, will be comfortable transferring some control, especially in high-competition industries that may be more challenging on salespeople to begin with. In addition to receiving a reasonable degree of independence, salespeople should be fully trained in problem solving, project management, and other skills needed for full self-sufficiency.

It is also a good idea to promote a growth mind-set throughout the sales force, so that they will equip themselves with the resources necessary to meet their new challenges. Hoppner emphasizes that mind-sets are malleable. "A lot of times you talk about selection when hiring salespeople. But with one's belief in innate selling ability, companies have the ability to have interventions where you can train, mentor or coach people to have this growth mind-set," she says.

While burnout is a near-universal threat for workplace teams these days, Hoppner is cautious about generalizing her findings, preferring instead that their possible applicability outside of sales remain a matter for future research. She emphasizes that while every individual is different, the typical sales persona and portfolio of responsibilities may foster a preference for autonomy. This preference becomes even greater when their role undergoes a structural shift such as additional customer participation, and they need freedom to navigate those changes more effectively.

"The job autonomy is really the freedom for them to choose what makes sense for the context and what to do for the customer," Hoppner says. "How you're developing close interactions with your client, and creating custom sales solutions. It's definitely a creative endeavor because you are not sure what exactly is going to come up in the processes you're developing, and what the ultimate sale is going to be."

At the same time, she observes that in general "having employees be able to feel in control - over how they do their job and if they have the ability to learn - can help mitigate burnout when job roles change."

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When It Comes to Innovation, More Is More

Jennifer Anzaldi — Mon, 02 May 2022 14:40:33 +0000

When It Comes to Innovation, More Is More Jennifer Anzaldi Mon, 05/02/2022 - 10:40

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Sharaya Jones

We tend to believe great innovations speak for themselves. Once they’ve connected with the marketplace, successful innovations acquire an aura of inevitability. It’s easy to forget that they were once only an idea on paper, competing with others for buy-in and resources.

In this earliest stage of innovation, creative proposals are judged according to their perceived novelty and usefulness. Sharaya Jones, assistant professor of marketing at Mason, has a simple yet counterintuitive rule for would-be innovators hawking their ideas: More is more.

Her recent paper in Marketing Science, co-authored by Laura J. Kornish of University of Colorado Boulder, pits verbose and detailed idea descriptions against terse ones. Over several studies, participants were shown random selections from a pool of descriptions—including short, very short, long-winded and highly specific versions of the same basic idea (all of which came from an actual crowdsourcing platform). They then scored each proposal for creativity, market uniqueness, and intent to purchase the hypothetical product. The longer and more specific they were relative to the others viewed by the participant, the higher their creativity score.

Subsequent studies revealed how this maximalist bias works. When participants were surveyed on their experience of reading the descriptions, a chain of associations surfaced between how easy it was to keep track of a description’s central concepts (which the researchers termed “fluency”), perceived complexity and the creativity score. Longer text that ventured into the weeds was harder for the reader to follow, which made it appear more complicated and thus more creative.

“When you have all these different pieces and you’re trying to fit them together, that’s basically the definition of complexity. And there’s a body of research linking complexity and novelty,” said Jones.

Remember, though, that novelty is only one of the two chief creativity criteria—the other being usefulness. When developing products and services for sale to consumers, it’s crucial to keep usefulness in mind, lest you end up with a cool innovation that has no clear practical purpose. The researchers used participants’ purchase intent as a rough indicator of perceived usefulness, as the two qualities are closely related. The correlation between length/granularity and purchase intent was slight to non-existent. Elaborate, highly specific descriptions may have been deemed more creative, but they did not induce readers to open their wallets.

“The more fluent an idea is, i.e., the easier it is to interpret, the more purchase intent increases,” explained Jones. “So that’s why there’s this balance, where novelty and usefulness are kind of at odds with each other.”

Ideally, there would be an equilibrium of novelty and usefulness criteria. But prior research finds that usefulness is often undervalued. Or, as the paper states, “Novelty is a much bigger driver of perceived creativity than usefulness is.” In Jones’s research, extreme length differences between the descriptions magnified this effect.

Therefore, one of Jones’s main takeaways is that in early-stage innovation contests, length requirements for entries should be kept within a fairly narrow range—long enough for evaluators to get the picture but not so long that innovators can start piling on the distracting detail. Indeed, in one study the length/creativity correlation disappeared when the researchers grouped the descriptions by length.

Absent a reasonable maximum length, innovators would obviously want to write more rather than less, throwing in specifics where possible. Jones suggests that the same recommendation may apply to everything from job descriptions (especially if you’re trying to attract millennials or Gen Z candidates looking for a creative workplace) to certain types of product marketing. (i.e., brand extensions where the usefulness of the item is already well-established).

The research also suggests that innovations that are mainly about usefulness—the proverbial better mousetrap—may be very marketable but still have a tough time competing with very novel concepts.” Innate pro-novelty bias can be compounded by dazzling descriptions of bright shiny objects. A good way to cut through the noise may be to augment text with visuals or even physical prototypes to render the proposal’s unique value more tangible.

“Putting a little bit more emphasis on usefulness is definitely something that organizations should be doing,” Jones said. “Figuring out other ways to convey usefulness, outside of the written description, could be very helpful, especially for marketers."

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Better Strategies for Protecting Against Uncertainty

Jennifer Anzaldi — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 16:36:58 +0000

Better Strategies for Protecting Against Uncertainty Jennifer Anzaldi Thu, 04/07/2022 - 12:36

In This Story

Saurabh Mishra

Turbulent times are challenging for decision-makers in business. This pervasive condition scholars call economic policy uncertainty (EPU) can turn a wise move into a costly one virtually overnight and is known to weigh on firm innovation, investments and value.

When confronting EPU, what’s a firm to do? Saurabh Mishra, professor and area chair of marketing at Mason, and co-authors Sachin Modi of Wayne State University and Michael Wiles of Arizona State University have penned a paper (forthcoming in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science) that explores that question.

Prior research suggests three capabilities that possibly buffer against the adverse effects of EPU. R&D capability refers to a firm’s capacity to convert knowledge into innovative discoveries or ideas, in the form of patents or processes. Operations capability is a catch-all term for principles of supply chain management enabling firms to balance innate tensions between flexibility and efficiency in the production processes. Marketing capability includes familiarity with the consumer base, sophisticated messaging and sales techniques, etc.

This research study was designed to gauge whether, and how much, each of the three capabilities counteracted EPU’s value-destroying impact. The researchers analyzed fluctuations in EPU over the years 1992-2015 alongside financial performance data and capabilities information for 4,316 U.S.-based firms for the same period of time. The results were quite nuanced. Marketing capability countered EPU’s drag on abnormal returns and Tobin’s Q (a measure of firm value outside of its physical assets), but had no perceptible effect on reducing firm-specific risks. Operations capability displayed an opposite effect in interacting with EPU: resulting in value destruction under high EPU but also reducing risk at the same time. Finally, R&D capability was neither here nor there when it came to protecting value, but marginally reduced EPU-derived risks.

Why was marketing capability the only real value-protector of the three? “If you are in a position where you are able to better understand your consumers through a better marketing function, and better meet them where they need to be met in terms of their needs and aspirations, then you might actually end up moving ahead of your competitors,” says Mishra.

To be sure, marketing was the only one of the three without a risk-lessening effect. However, this may not be as much of a drawback as it seems, since the paper finds that EPU reduces risk in general. In other words, managers facing uncertainty already tend to play it safe. Mishra suggests that for firms under EPU, pursuing tighter connections with customers should often be a higher priority than battening down the hatches.

A big, surprising takeaway from Mishra’s research, then, is that EPU’s implications for consumer demand are a key under-explored element of the wider uncertainty story. And because beefing up marketing capability attacks the demand side directly, it should be seriously considered as part of an organizational response to uncertainty.

By contrast, operations isn’t as much of a value-add under EPU because it reflects an efficiency focus, which can make the firm too lean to have a buffer or safeguards against EPU. R&D is more vulnerable to uncertainty, because EPU changes consumer needs as well as market conditions in ways that can’t easily be predicted and preemptively addressed through innovation.

But that doesn’t mean R&D and operations should be taken for granted. Mishra says that the best way for firms to weather uncertainty isn’t only to make smarter decisions about which capability or capabilities to invest in. Perhaps even more importantly, firms should work proactively—in today’s business climate, that means immediately—to build and shore up internal synergies, so that strengthening one capability enhances all three to some degree.

“A very strong message is this complementarity between functions,” Mishra says. “Within an organization, it should not be a zero-sum game, which it tends to be at times. It’s not about getting a bigger piece of the same pie, it’s about working together to make the pie bigger for your organization.”

Marketing and operations were an especially productive combination for combating EPU, for example. The professors found that a one-percent increase in both capabilities was associated with 0.438 percent higher Tobin’s Q and a statistically significant jump in abnormal returns. Together, this one-percent effect completely cancelled out EPU’s damage to financial performance.

However, not all capability combinations were winners. A joint focus on marketing and R&D actually lowered firm value under EPU. Dividing resources between the extreme ends of the product pipeline proved too unfocused a strategy, the professors concluded.

Obviously, deeply siloed firms and those engaged in intense intramural competition for resources will be limited in the types of synergies they can unlock, which puts them at a disadvantage. In times like ours when uncertainty reigns with no sign of stopping, an organization divided against itself will have an even harder time staying upright.

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Marketing Prof Named Finalist for Prestigious Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award

Jennifer Anzaldi — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 18:11:45 +0000

Marketing Prof Named Finalist for Prestigious Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award Jennifer Anzaldi Thu, 03/24/2022 - 14:11

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Costello Research Strategic Management

A paper co-authored by Jessica Hoppner, associate marketing professor at Mason, has been named a finalist for the American Marketing Association’s prestigious Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award.

The annual award recognizes “an article in the Journal of Marketing Research that has made the most significant long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology and/or practice” and eligibility begins five years post-publication.

Hoppner says, “I am grateful to have our article selected as a finalist for the Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award. With each article you hope to make an impact. To have the JMR community consider our article on inequity and interdependence as one that makes a long-term contribution to the field is an absolute honor.”

The paper being recognized, “The Influence of the Structure of Interdependence on the Response to Inequity in Buyer-Supplier Relationships,” appeared in JMR in February 2017. To date, “The Influence of the Structure of Interdependence on the Response to Inequity in Buyer-Supplier Relationships” has been cited within marketing, operations and B2B journals—attesting to its interdisciplinary impact.

Saurabh Mishra, chair of the marketing research area at the business school, says, “At Mason we have some of the brightest minds in marketing working on topics of high relevance to scholars and managers. Selection of Professor Hoppner’s work as a finalist for this award is a testament of the quality of her work and an honor for the marketing area and the School of Business.”

Hoppner and her collaborators, David A. Griffith of Texas A&M, Hanna S. Lee of Miami University, and Tobias Schoenherr of Michigan State University, looked into how power differences between buyers and suppliers, in addition to their relative level of dependence upon one another, affected the suppliers’ willingness to share valuable resources. Hoppner and her co-authors sent questionnaires to 1,000 Japan-based suppliers about their relationships with U.S. buyers. Their analysis identified a complicated three-way interaction between inequity, interdependence, and relative dependence that, in some cases, sharply deviated from received wisdom on resource-sharing. For example, suppliers who had the upper hand in a highly interdependent relationship did not take steps to equalize the dynamic by increasing resource-sharing, even though they could easily afford to do so. The researchers suggest a working culture that stresses competitive achievement over cooperation may have had something to do with this.

Therefore, Hoppner and her co-authors recommend that managers “consider both the limitations of magnitude of interdependence and the cultural orientation of the manager in determining managerial action.” For other academics, the paper offers novel frameworks for understanding business relationships, which, unlike standard frameworks based on equity theory, do not presume fairness as a primary motivation in workplace interactions.

Finalists for the Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award are selected by the editorial review board, associate editors, and advisory board members of JMR. A smaller group of selectors drawn from the same pool will meet in the coming weeks to choose the winner, which will be announced at the upcoming Summer AMA Academic Conference.

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Why “Woke” Advertising Matters

Marianne Klinker — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 20:18:34 +0000

Why “Woke” Advertising Matters Marianne Klinker Tue, 02/15/2022 - 15:18

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Imagine you were an alien from another planet, trying to form coherent opinions about human women and their place in this world based on advertising alone. It would be difficult, to say the least. On an average day, consumers may see sexually objectifying portrayals of women in beer and car commercials, as well as ads for cleaning products featuring housebound mothers (never fathers)—a more wholesome but similarly regressive stereotype.

In recent years, the “femvertising” trend has emerged to balance the scales of social progress with more empowering messages aimed at women. Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign, which began in 2004 and is ongoing, was a pioneer that inspired many brands to follow suit. Some have targeted markets where women are said to be lagging behind in their development—e.g. Ariel’s “Share the Load” campaign encouraging men in India to help out more with housework. But so-called “wokeness” has an uphill journey ahead if it is to make inroads against entrenched sexism in advertising. Also, detractors have labeled the trend “faux-feminism” with no impact on the real world.

Gautham Vadakkepatt

However, research by Gautham Vadakkepatt, associate professor of marketing at Mason, finds strong indications that gender equality in advertising and actual outcomes for women are on parallel rising trajectories, in the markets that need it most. His forthcoming article in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (co-authored by Andrew Bryant, Ronald P. Hill and Joshua Nunziato) runs the numbers to provocative effect, while making some plausible proposals about how, in the internet age, advertising could be a force for good.

The researchers used the United Nations Development Programme’s Gender Development Index (GDI) as a measure of women’s development during the years 2013-2017, the first golden era of “femvertising.” GDI captures gender disparities in the Human Development Index (HDI), which covers life expectancy, education and income. While the study was not designed to establish causation, they found associations between changes in the GDI and overall advertising spend—especially for countries with high internet penetration and large biases against women (as shown by the Gender Social Norms Index, another U.N. metric).

Among other robustness checks, the researchers swapped out the GDI for the Gender Inequality Index as well as a basket of other developmental variables, such as maternal mortality, adolescent birth rate, and infant mortality rate. They also ran comparisons using the women-only portion of the HDI, thus confirming that the observed changes were due to improvements for women, as opposed to a decline in men’s outcomes. Foreign direct investment and population size—two factors that influence societal development—were also included as control variables. Regardless of the specific measurements used, the basic interaction between ad spend, women’s development, and internet usage held firm.

The researchers had some guesses about what might be behind this. They launched two follow-up studies to test their hypotheses. In the first, 140 people (fewer than one-third of whom were women) were shown an ad for a Fiat convertible featuring a suggestively “topless” model, and a Chevrolet commercial featuring a confident, gifted young woman athlete. Both were ostensibly car commercials, but the similarities ended there. It would be harder to find a more striking contrast between retrograde and progressive ideas of womanhood. The divergence was also reflected in surveys that participants completed after watching the ads. The Fiat ad provoked more of an angry, disapproving response (the technical term is “psychological reactance”) than the Chevrolet ad. The latter ad’s message of women’s empowerment was praised by both women and men. One person wrote: “I love this ad and wish more kids AND adults could watch it and really, really SEE it and understand why it was made.”

The second study was a multi-country analysis of the top 100 YouTube comments for the seven videos in the 2018 “Dove Films/Real Beauty Sketches” series (a textbook example of “femvertising”). Comments in more than 10 different languages—among them English, Indonesian, Italian, Arabic and Japanese—were included in the data-set. They were then grouped together according to four overarching themes: the insecurities and negative social feedback that harm women’s self-esteem; recognizing new empowerment possibilities as a result of viewing the ad; the desire to share the empowering message with others; and how the ads themselves could be improved (e.g. by showcasing a more diverse group of women, or by mentioning inner as well as outer beauty).

The authors concluded that the reactance provoked by problematic advertisements and the good feelings induced by “femvertising” can help build resistance to deep-rooted sexism. As a mechanism for communication and social networking on a massive scale, the internet is key to amplifying this pushback. To be sure, there are staunch reactionaries commenting online too. In the Fiat-vs.-Chevrolet study, Vadakkepatt says “there were people who like the sexist ad...who said they wanted to date the woman and all that. But there were 15-20% of the people, men and women, who actually said, ‘No, this is not right. You’re objectifying a person.’” In contexts where gender equality is particularly lacking, online reactions to “femvertising” can help even the score.

Vadakkepatt, however, would reiterate that correlation is not causation. He does not claim to have located definitive proof that advertising is directly responsible for women’s recent advancements. But his investigation traces intriguing connections and tests some intuitions that suggest the advertising that blankets our cultural landscape is not wholly divorced from the social progress, or lack thereof, occurring around it. This research is not intended to be the final word on the matter, but help provide a footing for future research and stimulate new questions around advertisings and women’s equality, says Vadakkepatt.

“As advertisers, you have a choice now, right?” he says. “What we’re proposing is that positive messages, empowering messages, would actually help. Not just to improve the brand of the company but also help society move forward.”

Source: Gautham Vadakkepatt, Andrew Bryant, Ronald P. Hill and Joshua Nunziato (2022). “Can advertising benefit women’s development? Preliminary insights from a multi-method investigation,” in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science

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