Category: Neuromarketing

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Are You Future Oriented? Your Language Tells the Tale

The structure of the language spoken by a company’s top team affects the firm’s planning for the future, according to doctoral student Hao Liang, Christopher Marquis of Harvard Business School, and two colleagues. If the language is English, Spanish, or one of many others that use mainly grammar, rather than context, to distinguish present from future (“It is raining,” “It will rain”), people tend to focus less on the future, presumably because it seems more distant. On corporate social responsibility, which is a highly future-oriented activity, firms in countries speaking these “strong-future-time-reference” languages underperform firms in weak-future-time-reference countries by more than 1.2 grades on a 7-step scale, the researchers say.

SOURCE: Speaking of Corporate Social Responsibility

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The Price of Popularity: Lower Ratings

In the two years after books win splashy awards such as the Man Booker Prize, their average ratings on Goodreads.com decline by about a quarter-point on a 1-to-5 scale, whereas those that were runners-up maintain their high ratings, say Balázs Kovács of the University of Lugano and Amanda J. Sharkey of the University of Chicago. A big award draws a larger audience, which includes a greater proportion of people whose tastes aren’t aligned with the book’s style or subject. Also, readers sometimes react negatively to popularity and are thus more inclined to give lower evaluations to popular books, the researchers say.

popular

SOURCE: The Paradox of Publicity: How Awards Can Negatively Affect the Evaluation of Quality

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Your Belief That the World Is “Just” Can Make You Cruel

eople’s wish to see the world as just and orderly sometimes leads them to harm those who have already suffered injustice, according to Daniel P. Skarlicki and R. Anthony Turner of the University of British Columbia. In an experiment, managers with self-reported hiring experience provided lower ratings for fictitious job applicants whose only difference was that they had been mistreated by their former employers, such as by being laid off without notice. People derogate victims in this way to avoid the cognitive dissonance that comes from trying to understand how individuals can suffer injustice in a just world, the researchers say.

SOURCE: Unfairness begets unfairness: Victim derogation bias in employee ratings

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Feeling Fear in the Presence of a Brand Makes You More Attached to It

People who were scared by clips from the movies The Ring and Salem’s Lot felt more emotionally attached to a brand of sparkling water that had been placed on their desks than did others who watched clips from exciting or sad movies or happiness-inducing scenes from the series Friends (3.70 versus 2.11, 2.54, and 2.28, respectively, on a 7-point emotional-attachment scale), say Lea Dunn of the University of Washington and JoAndrea Hoegg of the University of British Columbia. Fear makes people want to share their experience with others, and if a brand is present it can satisfy this desire, almost as though it were a person, the researchers say.

fear in marketing
SOURCE: The Impact of Fear on Emotional Brand Attachment

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Rigid Gender Roles Can Take a Toll on Women’s Quality of Life

In countries with strict gender roles, women’s total work hours tend to increase as they perform more paid labor outside the home. In Spain, for example, women’s work at home (housework and child care) declined by only 6 hours per week as their workplace labor increased by 8 hours per week from 2002 through 2010, say Jose Ignacio Gimenez-Nadal of the University of Zaragoza in Spain and Almudena Sevilla of Queen Mary University of London in the UK. The result is that Spanish women lost 2 hours of weekly leisure time over that period. A decline in leisure hours suggests a declining quality of life.

working-womN
SOURCE: Total work time in Spain: evidence from time diary data

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Do You Need to Hear a Musical Group to Judge Its Quality?

Research participants who watched silent videos of chamber-music ensembles were 26% more accurate at guessing which ones had been winners of past musical contests (such as the Saint Paul String Quartet Competition) than people who had watched both audio and video of the groups, says Chia-Jung Tsay of University College London. Participants who listened to audio without video were the worst at guessing the competition winners. In evaluating the groups without sound, the viewers were apparently responding to what they perceived as strong leadership and indications of group unity, such as the players’ proximity and similarity of appearance—probably the same factors that had influenced the judges of the competitions, Tsay says.

music

SOURCE: The vision heuristic: Judging music ensembles by sight alone

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Children’s Feelings About Brands Persist into Adulthood

I know this is true for me

Consumer-brand companies’ investments in child-oriented advertising provide brand benefits long after the audience has grown up, says a team led by Paul M. Connell of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. For example, people in the UK who had been exposed to the Kellogg’s Frosties character Tony the Tiger as children and the Cocoa Pops character Coco the Monkey as adults rated Frosties as more healthful than Cocoa Pops (3.84 versus 3.24 on a 7–point scale), suggesting that the participants retained warm feelings about Tony from childhood. The findings raise concerns about child-oriented ad campaigns for products with potentially adverse health consequences, the researchers say.

Teenager girl makes chewing gum's bubble

SOURCE: How Childhood Advertising Exposure Can Create Biased Product Evaluations That Persist into Adulthood

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When Women Take Over Family Firms, Profitability Increases

A study of thousands of family-owned firms in Italy reveals that, on average, replacing a male CEO with a woman improves a company’s profitability, an effect that becomes more pronounced as the proportion of women on the board of directors increases, says a team led by Mario Daniele Amore of Bocconi University in Milan. Overall, the more women on the board of a female-led firm, the more profitable it is likely to be. The presence of women directors may make female CEOs feel more comfortable, improving cooperation and facilitating information exchange, the researchers say.

entrepreneurial mind
SOURCE: Gender Interactions Within the Family Firm

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High-Status People Perform Poorly After Being Humbled

When high-status people suffer a humbling loss, their performance tends to decline dramatically, because they’ve become dependent on their rank to maintain a positive view of themselves, say Jennifer Carson Marr of Georgia Institute of Technology and Stefan Thau of London Business School. For example, a study of Major League baseball players shows that in the 58% of salary arbitrations where players lost, the higher a player’s status, the greater the fall-off in performance the following year. If you’re a high-status person, sometimes the best way to cope with a work-related humiliation is to get a job with a new employer where you feel respected, say the researchers, whose study appears in the Academy of Management Journal.

SOURCE: High status is a liability when careers sputter, study finds