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Inside sources are people who interact with target consumers on a frequent or intense basis. They can have powerful insights about why consumers behave as they do. This paper aims to focus on how to identify, interview and leverage inside sources to uncover new insights about target consumers and how to better engage with them.

This paper provides field-tested techniques on how to elicit the most useful insights from inside sources. The paper demonstrates how the generated insights can be used for everything from more precise targeting and message development to modifying products and services to increase loyalty, usage frequency or switching behavior.

Generating novel insights about a unique target market involves four steps: identify, locate, interview inside sources and then apply the insights.

There can be limitations to interviewing inside sources, such as interviewer bias, respondent bias and the Hawthorne effect. Some individuals react differently to different events, and some insights are not generalizable.

Costly wide-scale surveys, laddering interviews or focus groups are not always needed to uncover insights about target consumers. Within 24 hours, inside sources can produce the insights needed to better market products, develop research questions or design interventions.

Generating novel insights about a unique target market can be done quickly and inexpensively. It involves leveraging inside sources – those people who interact frequently or intensively with target consumers.

The purpose of this paper is to determine if the level of payment required for consumption changed the relationship between a consumer’s overall evaluation of a hedonic consumption experience and the evaluation of first, middle, last piece and peak consumption experiences.

Diners at an all-you-can-eat restaurant were either charged $4 or $8 for an Italian lunch buffet. Their taste, satisfaction and enjoyment evaluation of each piece of pizza they had was taken along with other measures of behavior and self-perceptions. Using regression analysis, we examine the relationship between these single event evaluations and their overall evaluations of the experience.

For the diners who paid $4 for their buffet, overall taste, satisfaction and enjoyment evaluation depend on the taste of the last piece of the pizza and the peak taste consistent with prior findings. For those paying $8 for the buffet, the first piece of pizza is more important in predicting the overall taste, satisfaction and enjoyment ratings.

Consumers do not evaluate their meal experience based on every moment of their experience. Rather, just a few moments appear to impact overall evaluation. Firms that sell access to a series of experiences, such as an all-you-can-eat buffet, should focus on leading customers to the best experience first particularly when prices may be considered moderate to high.

In this paper, we seek to unravel the relationship between price paid and the peak-end heuristic by examining the importance of peak and end experiences under two different pricing regimes. Our study also indicates that the peak-end rule may depend on specific contextual factors.

This study aims to examine whether companies’ donations to political parties can impact product experience, specifically taste.

Research design consists of four studies; three online, one in person. Participants were shown a cookie (Studies 1-3) or cereal (Study 4) and told that the producing company donated to either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party (Studies 1-3) or an unspecified party (Study 4).

Participants rated food products as less tasty if told they came from a company that donated to a party they object to. These effects were shown to be mediated by moral disgust (Study 3). Effects were restricted to taste and willingness to buy (Study 4), with no effects on other positive product dimensions.

The studies provide a first piece of evidence that political donations by companies can negatively impact product experience. This can translate to purchase decisions through an emotional, rather than calculated, route.

Companies should be careful about making donations some of their consumers may find objectionable. This might impact both purchase and consumption decisions, as well as post-consumption word-of-mouth.

Companies’ political involvement can negatively impact subjective product experience, even though such information has no bearing on product quality. The current findings demonstrate that alterations in subjective product quality may underlie alterations in consumer decision-making because of ideologically tinged information, and reveals moral disgust as the mechanism underlying these effects. In this, it provides a first demonstration that even mild ideological information that is not globally bad or inherently immoral can generate moral disgust, and that such effects depend on consumers’ own attitudes.

Managers of mature or established brands have received little guidance regarding the strategic and tactical decisions they must make to keep their brands healthy. By focusing on how existing consumers perceive, choose, and use brands, this paper suggests how managers can generate and prioritize strategic and tactical opportunities for revitalizing their brands. Specific recommendations are presented as to how these strategies can be successfully implemented by brands with differing levels of market share and resources.

In spite of wide civic and academic interest in obesity, there are no bibliometric records of this issue in the marketing corpus. Thus, this inquiry is conceived to address this shortcoming with a bibliometric analysis of Scopus indexed articles published on the subject.

The analysis followed a five-step science mapping approach of study design, data collection, data analysis, data visualisation and data interpretation. R programming software was used to review 88 peer reviewed journals published between 1987 and 2021.

A sizable stream of literature exploring obesity has accrued in the marketing area as authors have drawn parallels between the influence of persuasive communication and advertising on human wellbeing and child health. The United States of America is found to be by far the country with the highest number of publications on obesity, followed by Australia and the United Kingdom. The topic dendrogram indicates two strands of obesity discourse: (1) social and policy intervention opportunities and (2) the effects on social groups in the population.

This review will shape future enquiries investigating obesity. Beyond the focus on children, males and females, an emerging focus on cola, ethics, food waste, milk, policy-making and students is highlighted.

This is the first bibliometric review of obesity in the marketing literature. This is especially timely for weighing up the utility of research aimed at understanding and reporting the trends, influences and role of stakeholders in addressing obesity.

Understanding a brand’s equity is difficult for researchers. Building on means‐end theory, describes a method – laddering – which has proven useful in uncovering insights related to the source and the nature of a brand’s equity. Through laddering interviews, a meaningful “mental map” can be developed that visually links a brand’s attributes, the benefits or consequences of using it, and the personal values it satisfies. An analysis of 1,200 laddering interviews indicates that a combination of only seven basic values are at the core of most brand purchases. A number of illustrations of laddering insights and their implications for the marketing mix are given to show how laddering can help marketers understand and revitalize brand equity.

Most workplace health promotion efforts have failed to consistently and sustainably encourage employees to take responsibility for their health. The purpose of this paper is to explore a potentially high-impact solution – Health Codes of Conduct – for engaging and motivating employees to assume responsibility for their health.

This mixed methods study draws on interview and survey methodology with a sample of 149 working adults to examine the feasibility of Health Codes of Conduct. Descriptive and inferential statistics are calculated to understand reactions, characteristics of the companies likely to support the idea, and components of a Health Code of Conduct.

Nearly all employees offered moderate to high support for Health Codes of Conduct; this included overweight but not obese employees. Additionally, all demographic groups either moderately or strongly supported the policy when they included either monetary incentives (such as prescription discounts) or often overlooked non-monetary incentives (such as employee recognition). Some of the more popular features of Health Codes of Conduct included annual physical exams, exercise routines, and simply being encouraged to stay home when ill.

Health Codes of Conduct offer a surprisingly well-supported potential solution. Favorable reactions were observed across all examined segments of workers, even overweight (but not obese) employees. Using the specific features of Health Codes identified here, visionary companies can tailor their company’s Health Code of Conduct with the appropriate monetary and non-monetary incentives and disincentives.

What if the workplace could be a positive source of health and empowerment for valued employees? The authors show employee Health Codes of Conduct could be this empowering, engaging solution that has been missing.

This paper is the first to propose the concept Health Codes of Conduct and solicit feedback from employees on this novel idea. Furthermore, the authors identify both the monetary and non-monetary incentives and disincentives that employees believe would be most compelling.

With multiple theoretical traditions, diverse topical landscape and rapid regulatory advancements galvanising the ongoing discourse, the emergent marketing scholarship on healthy and unhealthy food and beverages (F&B) has become exhaustive, fragmented and almost non-navigable. Accordingly, this study aims to synthesise and trace two decades of research focused on healthy and unhealthy F&B marketing.

This study conducts a bibliometric analysis of papers published between 2000 and 2020. The data was retrieved from Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, yielding 338 papers for final analysis. Using VOSviewer software and the Biblioshiny package, the authors performed a detailed bibliometric analysis comprising performance analysis and science mapping.

The study delineated the contribution, theoretical and thematic structure of healthy and unhealthy F&B marketing scholarship. The authors also mapped the evolution trajectory of the thematic structure, which helped us contemplate the research gaps.

By delving deeper into the “who”, “where”, “how”, “what” and “when” of healthy and unhealthy F&B marketing, the study enhances the current understandings and future developments for both theorists and practitioners. However, the selection of literature is confined to peer-reviewed papers available in WoS and Scopus.

The findings delineate the existing scholarship which could guide F&B marketers and policymakers towards designing consumer-centric marketing/policy interventions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to perform a bibliometric analysis of healthy and unhealthy F&B marketing, likely to provide valuable guidelines for future scholars, policymakers and practitioners.