Continuing to Broaden the Marketing Concept: Volume 17

We develop a four-factor conceptual framework to explain how information presented in comics differs from other media and therefore is processed differently. The unique ability of sequential art to manipulate time, prompt the reader for closure, utilize abstractions, and combine words and pictures to deliver a multimodal message mages comics an especially effected medium for marketing communications. The influence of these four factors is illustrated through the use of the comic medium in lieu of traditional text throughout this chapter. As a result, processing complex information is facilitated.

Often when we think about the need for democracy and democratic values we look externally to other countries like China, Russia, the former Soviet Union, and various banana republics. Today, the role of democracy is even challenged in the United States. Some candidates are even calling for more socialism.

But, are we even living up to democratic values today? About 98 million eligible voters did not vote in the 2016 election. Increasing number of surveys highlights the loss of democratic values. The continuous attacks by our president on free press and other democratic values, truth, and science are a fundamental threat to our most treasured values.

We believe that marketing, if practiced in an enlightened, positive, and ethical way, can help restore our democracy and democratic values. We elaborate on these values and how marketing can play a role in restoring democracy.

We hope that after reading our chapter you will join our movement to restore democracy and democratic values in America.

We live in very adversarial political times. Tribalism and hateful rhetoric abound. This chapter argues that this state of affairs was an inevitable consequence of political cable television. I blame Ted Turner and CNN. Once Ted showed the world that news could be a profit center, competition, differentiation, and partisan one-sided coverage in broadcasting were inevitable. Product differentiation of cable news stations coupled with confirmation biases that lead viewers to watch networks on which the broadcasters reinforce their political views polarizes public opinion. The chapter concludes with suggestions for climbing out of the downward spiral.

The 2016 presidential campaign in the United States was marked by widespread interference by Russian agents. The interference was especially prominent in digital media. This indicates the possible need for better regulation. To investigate the problem, I examined the legal and regulatory history of US Federal campaign regulation. While these regulations require various disclosures and disclaimers, and set some spending limits, they do not cover advertising messages. More to the point, the disclosure and disclaimer requirements for digital ads are limited and easily circumvented. Possibly because of this, political advertising in digital media has increased dramatically in recent years. I examine current proposals for improved regulation and make recommendations for changes in Federal regulation and in oversight by nonpartisan groups.

One of the most critical issues facing many industrialized countries is the lack of retirement savings among many individuals. Unfortunately, this lacking can have dire consequences for both consumers and societies in the coming years. Because of this, numerous research studies have been conducted in many disciplines such as economics, psychology, finance, and some in marketing and a number of recommendations or solutions have been made to try to address this critical issue. Yet, despite all this interest, the problem still exists and may even have become worse. In the current chapter, we examine this crisis from a consumer behavior perspective in order to derive new insights and offer additional and hopefully effective solutions to supplement previous efforts.

Market response models or marketing mix models quantify the effects of marketing actions on consumption-based outcomes such as sales and market share. They are frequently used in the business sector to help managers make effective resource allocation decisions, especially in the digital age. However, these models can also be used on social causes, in particular to gauge the efficacy of regulations on consumption levels that have social consequences. This chapter explores these principles in two major areas of social concern, alcohol consumption and narcotics abuse. We review the empirical findings in these two areas, based on published research in major marketing journals, and we formulate various recommendations for the effective regulation of alcohol and narcotics consumption.

Marketing is the business of matching supply and demand, profitably. More broadly it includes creating demand and/or creating supply. We apply these ideas to an urgent supply/demand problem, that of feeding the additional 3 billion people expected to be on earth by 2050. We argue that this can be achieved by a combination of tweaks to the supply side and tweaks to the demand side. But the sooner we start, the better.

Nowadays, most of our activities and personal details are recorded by one entity or another. These data are used for many applications that fundamentally enrich our lives, such as navigation systems, social networks, search engines, and health monitoring. On the darker side of data collection lie usages that can harm us and threaten our sense of privacy. Marketing, as an academic field and corporate practice, has benefited tremendously from this era of data abundance, but has concurrently heightened the risk of associated harms.

In this chapter, we discuss both the great advantages and potential harms ushered in by this era of data collection, as well as ways to mitigate the harms while maintaining the benefits. Specifically, we propose and discuss classes of potential solutions: methods for collecting less data overall, transparency of code and models, federated learning, and identity management tools, among others. Some of these solutions can be implemented now, others require a longer horizon, but all can begin through the advocacy of marketing research. We also discuss possible ways to improve on the benefits of data collection – by developing methods to assist individuals pursue their long-term goals while advocating for privacy in such pursuits.

One of the biggest challenges in markets where products have ambiguous values (like fine art, specialty coffee, and wine) is to determine the structure of the market. As products in these markets are unique and values are private, it is difficult to determine its market structure using traditional methods. In this chapter, we present a method to determine the market structure of ambiguously valued products using bidding data from auctions. We create a sociomatrix of artists based on bidders revealed bidding preferences and uncover the market structure with artists as the unit of analysis. We demonstrate our approach using bidding data from an online auction of Modern Indian Art. This approach resulted in the extraction of a two-dimensional art market structure with color and price being the two dimensions. This chapter concludes with a discussion on the implications and limitations of our approach, and directions for future research.

I present a framework for thinking about personal happiness. Ideas from philosophy are combined with research on happiness from various scientific traditions. But treatments in philosophy tend to be atomistic, focusing on one narrow approach at the exclusion of others; treatments in psychology tend also to be circumscribed, emphasizing specific hypotheses but at the neglect of overarching theory. My approach posits a far-reaching theoretical model, rooted in goal-directed action, yet mindful of nonpurposive sources of happiness as well. The heart of the theory is self-regulation of desires and decisions, which rests on self-conscious examination and application of self-evaluative standards for leading a moral life in the broadest sense of guiding how we act in relation to others. Seven elements of happiness are then developed and related to the conceptual framework. These encompass love and caring; work as a calling; brain systems underpinning wanting, liking, and pleasure; the need to deal with very bad and very good things happening to us; the role of moral concerns and emotions; the examined life and its distractions; and finally spirituality and transcendental concerns. The final section of the chapter sketches everyday challenges and choices academics face.

People invest much time and money in consuming knowledge. We argue that people systematically vary in the types of knowledge they prefer to know and that such preferences can have broad implications for consumer behavior. We illustrate this in the context of the preference for practical versus theoretical knowledge. Specifically, we propose and show that some people prefer to know more about how to apply and make use of phenomena they encounter, whereas others prefer to know more about what explicates and underlies the phenomena. We further propose and demonstrate that the extent to which people prefer practical versus theoretical knowledge can help predict their behaviors in a wide variety of consumption domains such as education (e.g., choice of learning materials, preference for different MBA programs), marketing information (e.g., skepticism toward advertising and reference prices), and intertemporal discounting (e.g., reaction to service delays; preference for fast food restaurants).

The phenomenon of creativity spans research topics across Marketing and Consumer Behavior. Interest in, and research on, creativity has grown over the past several decades. With this heightened attention comes the question of how best to conceptualize and measure creativity. This question is addressed by reviewing the conceptualizations and measures used in the psychological study of creativity. From this review, we build a framework by which to analyze papers from the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Marketing Research. Based upon this analysis, we provide recommendations and best practices for future research. Of particular importance, we recommend the use of convergent problem-solving tasks in combination with ratings of novelty and usefulness reported separately. Such measures allow one to distinguish between instances of effective-creativity (when an idea is both novel and useful) and instances of quasi-creativity (when an idea is novel but lacks usefulness). The importance of the framework to research and analysis beyond the experimental paradigm is discussed.

This chapter reviews and integrates recent research on curiosity. We discuss potential costs and benefits of curiosity, both hedonic and motivational. In particular, we examine the Pandora effect, the teasing effect, and the motivating-uncertainty effect.

This chapter reviews recent developments in sustainability regarding cities of the world. Using the approach of a literature review, this chapter highlights sustainability innovations in the context of cities. The chapter identifies several indexes which assess quality of life (QOL) or prosperity in cities of the world. One web-based index which relies heavily on the inputs of citizens around the world is Numbeo. The literature review identifies ways cities have pursued climate change mitigation through encouragement of electrical vehicles and alternative modes of transportation. Innovations that have become controversial in cities are also identified. Analysis of Numbeo suggests this index shows promise of future value for researchers interested in city QOL—specifically its pollution perceptions index. As urbanization continues with more than half of the world's population now residing in cities, interest in the sustainability of cities will intensify. Sustainability indexes for cities are now being developed. Analysis of Numbeo's novel approach to gauging the pollution of cities through the reports of hundreds of thousands of individuals living around the world suggests that this approach holds promise for future development. While other disciplines have taken focus on city sustainability, this is the first study within the domain of marketing research to provide an overview of city sustainability for marketing researchers and to analyze a new way of measuring a component of city QOL—perceptions of city pollution. Results suggest that valuable results will likely be forthcoming as researches continue developing city sustainability measures and indexes in the future.

This chapter reviews marketing scholarship on environmental sustainability. The literature covers several themes of both consumer behavior and firm-level topics. Consumer issues include their assessment of efficacy and the extent to which they are aware and sensitive to environmental issues. Numerous interventions and marketing appeals for modifying attitudes and behaviors have been tested and are reported. Consumers and business managers have both been queried regarding attitudes of recycling and waste. Firm-level phenomena are reflected, including how brand managers can signal their green efforts to their customers, whether doing so is beneficial, all in conjunction with macro pressures or constraints from industry or governmental agencies. This chapter closes with a reflection on the research.