How I Wrote This

JMR Co-editor Karen Winterich talks with Annika Abell, Carter Morgan, and Marisabel Romero about the impact of star ratings relative to numerical ratings. Their findings are published in “The Power of a Star Rating: Differential Effects of Customer Rating Formats on Magnitude Perceptions and Consumer Reactions”. You’ll also want to hear how their experience complying with the new JMR Research Transparency policy when their manuscript was conditionally accepted.

In Episode 8, JMR Co-editor Karen Winterich talks with Joyce Liu and Anirban Mukhopadhyay from Bayes Business School, City, University of London about how they, along with coauthor Amy Dalton, developed an idea from movie night into a JMR publication, “Favorite Possessions Protect Subjective Well-Being Under Income Inequality”. The article finds effects of income inequality on feelings of deprivation can be attenuated by focusing on a favorite possession, but we’ll hear how the idea started out with a different focus before the role of favorite possessions became clear. You’ll want to listen to learn why the final submission of this article is unforgettable for one of the authors plus how the nuggets they uncovered along the way shaped the paper. Listen on Apple, Google, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the podcast on Twitter (@HIWTPod) or visit the podcast’s homepage.

In Episode 7, JMR Co-editor Brett Gordon talks with Jessica Fong (University of Michigan), Tong Guo (Duke University), and Anita Rao (Georgetown University) about their forthcoming paper, “Debunking Misinformation about Consumer Products: Effects on Beliefs and Purchase Behavior” (SSRN version). Perhaps you’ve seen a toothpaste ad that claimed their brand didn’t contain any toxic ingredients. Of course, this implies that their competitors do use toxic ingredients, which for most major brands isn’t true. This is precisely the type of misinformation the authors wanted to study: Does it increase consumers’ willingness-to-pay? Can a debunking message counteract the false claim? This team of authors came together after a chance encounter at a conference and a seminar visit prompted discussions around the misinformation they saw spreading in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tune in to learn more about how the project evolved in terms of its data, methods, and message. Listen on Apple, Google, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the podcast on Twitter (@HIWTPod) or visit the podcast’s homepage.

In Episode 6, JMR Coeditor Karen Winterich talks with Kaitlin Woollley, Associate Professor of Marketing at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, and Peggy Liu, Ben L. Fryrear Chair in Marketing and Associate Professor of Business Administration at the University of Pittsburgh Katz Graduate School of Business about how they, along with co-author Daniella Kupor, developed the idea for their 2023 paper, “Does Company Size Shape Product Quality Inferences? Larger Companies Make Better High-Tech Products, but Smaller Companies Make Better Low-Tech Products”. As the title implies, this intriguing article explains why consumers perceive high-tech products to be higher quality when made from large companies and the opposite for low-tech products. The article took shape from a slightly different idea that was just one of three ideas these friends turned co-authors were exploring out of a motivation to find a project to work on together. Drawing upon each author's strengths and speedy turnaround time, they went from idea nugget to published article in seemingly record time.

Brett talks to Eva Ascarza about her paper “Retention Futility: Targeting High Risk Customers Might be Ineffective,” published in JMR in 2018. Eva is the Jakurski Family Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. She is a co-founder of the Customer Intelligence Lab at the D^3 Institute at HBS, and she is an expert on customer management. Share your thoughts about the show at HIWTpod@gmail.com -- Brett and Karen would love to hear from you!

"Publish or perish” — it’s a maxim that we academics live by. But how does a paper become a publication? How do researchers take a rough idea and craft it into a draft? And how do they navigate the publication process, with all the bumps and bruises along the way? In each episode of “How I Wrote This,” marketing professors Brett Gordon and Karen Winterich speak to the authors of an academic marketing paper to get the backstory of how that paper came to be.

In Episode 4, Karen talks with Andrea Webb Luangrath and Joann Peck about their 2022 paper “Observing Product Touch: The Vicarious Haptic Effect in Digital Marketing and Virtual Reality”. After Andrea developed the idea in a doctoral seminar over a decade ago, the project hibernated for a few years before she and Joann brought it back to life. Knowing the paper addressed a relevant question digital marketers were interested in plus a theoretical gap, they’ll talk about how they pushed forward post-rejection and worked with coauthors William Hedgcock and Yixiang Xu to bring this now well-cited paper to publication.

Joining Brett this month are Stephan Seiler (Imperial College London), Anna Tuchman (Northwestern University), and Song Yao (Washington University in St. Louis) to talk about their paper, “The Impact of Soda Taxes: Pass-Through, Tax Avoidance, and Nutritional Effects,” published in the Journal of Marketing Research in 2021. Soda taxes are a relatively new phenomenon, and this paper was among the first to provide a rigorous evaluation of their efficacy. You’ll hear how the project came together and what the authors learned about handling feedback during the review process.

In the second episode, join Karen Winterich’s interview with Maura Scott and Martin Mende as they talk about transporting a 600-pound robot through the streets of New York City to make realistic stimuli for their 2019 JMR paper, “Service Robots Rising”. When their paper was first rejected at another journal, they took the reviewer feedback seriously and substantially revised the paper to increase the realism of their studies before submitting it to JMR, which was ultimately published and is currently the most well-cited JMR publication since 2018.

In the first episode, Brett speaks with Dina Mayzlin and Judy Chevalier to talk about their 2006 JMR paper, “The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews.” You’ll hear how a seemingly innocuous post-seminar question turned into this successful collaboration, which eventually landed them the 2011 O’Dell Award for making a significant long-term contribution to marketing.