Heiner Evanschitzky

Drawing on cognitive science research, this study explores mental time travel and its elicitation through digital product displays. Specifically, we examine how digital product displays elicit mental time travel to the past and future and how this cognitive process positively influences three purchase‐oriented outcomes: inspiration to purchase, booking intention, and willingness to pay. We test these effects across three studies using distinct digital product displays spanning three product categories and contexts: a low‐involvement fast‐moving consumer good (snack food), a high‐involvement experiential travel product (cruise ship), and a hedonic, symbolic food and beverage product (wine). Results from Study 1 demonstrate that mental time travel to the past positively influences future mental time travel and, in turn, enhances inspiration to purchase. Study 2 focuses on future mental time travel and shows that it positively affects booking intention. Across Studies 1 and 2, we further examine immersion as a boundary condition and find no evidence that it alters the proposed relationships. Study 3 extends these findings by showing that mental time travel positively influences willingness to pay and reveals a novel moderating effect of brain plasticity, such that habitual fiction engagement strengthens the impact of future mental time travel on willingness to pay. Finally, results across all three studies highlight the mediating role of future mental time travel in linking mental time travel to the past with all three purchase‐oriented outcomes examined.

Higher education institutions face increasing pressure to promote their complex services in competitive global markets, yet they lack evidence-based insights into effective marketing communication strategies. Drawing on signaling theory, the current research examines how universities’ social media content influences student acquisition. Based on interviews with university social media managers, text analyses of more than one million tweets from 94 U.K. universities, and two experiments, the authors outline how universities’ communication content and style choices drive student acquisition. Rather than content focused on the service environment or outcome quality, the study findings indicate that content pertaining to interaction quality has the strongest positive effect on acquisition. Stylistically, an emotional tone enhances the impact of such content, but a cognitive tone is more effective for content about outcome quality; the tone has no significant effect on content about the service environment. Furthermore, external signals offered by third-party rankings moderate these effects: Highly ranked institutions benefit most when they signal environment quality, whereas lower-ranked institutions benefit from emphasizing interaction quality. With such strategic guidance, universities can align their social media content and style and third-party quality signals to optimize student acquisition.

In dynamic and uncertain business environments, marketing organizations need to be constantly ready to enact strategic changes. However, a robust measure for capturing the organizational capabilities and underlying marketing activities required to achieve effective marketing-related strategic changes is lacking. This study addresses this gap by developing a measurement tool for strategic change capability (SCC). Drawing on interviews with marketing consultants and senior marketing managers, the authors conceptualize SCC as a multidimensional dynamic marketing capability that comprises five dimensions: establishing the business case for change, preparing employees for change, setting up the organization for implementing change, institutionalizing change, and assessing and adjusting implementation. Following rigorous scale development procedures—including (1) item generation, (2) expert evaluation, (3) scale purification, (4) scale validity, (5) nomological and predictive validity, and (6) scale generalizability studies—a psychometrically sound and reliable measure of SCC is developed. The SCC scale facilitates different types of strategic marketing change and predicts performance outcomes better than established constructs (i.e., strategic flexibility, agility, adaptiveness, and responsiveness). This study contributes to the dynamic capabilities theory and provides empirically substantiated guidance for marketing organizations on how to prepare for and effectively enact strategic changes in dynamic business environments.

The extant retail research has placed much emphasis on understanding customer switching and the concept of switching costs (SCs). However, the empirical evidence is inconclusive with respect to the moderating role of SCs in general and relational switching costs (RSCs) in particular. Therefore, this research focuses on the moderating role played by SCs on the satisfaction-loyalty link. Specifically, our study attempts to clarify the nonlinear moderating effect of RSCs. Furthermore, we investigate RSCs in greater depth, considering their two dimensions, brand relationship loss costs (BRLCs), and personal relationship loss costs (PRLCs). We find that there is an optimal level of BRLC whereas increasing PRLCs decreases the impact of satisfaction on loyalty in a linear manner, calling for a more nuanced assessment of this type of SC in future studies. Our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of SCs as a retention strategy.