J. Jeffrey Inman

Donation-based crowdfunding platforms often claim to pursue equitable outcomes for all beneficiaries, yet many face criticism for failing to do so across different demographic profiles. In response, platform managers are eager to understand how these inequities emerge and explore solutions to address them. In this research, the authors show that the degree of facial emotional expressiveness of beneficiaries in uploaded images can differentially impact donation amounts for White versus Black beneficiaries. Drawing on social vision theory, the authors propose that facial emotional expressiveness in images, combined with the beneficiary’s race, activates racial stereotypes of emotion expression that result in differential donation amounts to Black and White individuals. Analyzing a sample of 4,153 campaigns from GoFundMe between June 2021 and September 2022, along with a follow-up experiment, the authors find that higher facial emotional expressiveness is associated with significantly lower donation amounts for Black compared with White beneficiaries. Further exploring our moderating constructs reveals that the use of call-to-action cues, affective messaging, and race-gender homophily cues can attenuate the activation of stereotypes and therefore reduce differences in donation amounts between racial groups. Based on these findings, the authors offer targeted recommendations for platform managers to reduce racial inequities in crowdfunding outcomes.

This research studies the impact of articles appearing in the top four journals for consumer research—JCR, JMR, JM, and JCP—by examining factors that influence scholarly, public, and practical impact. This conceptually distinguishes between “incongruent novelty” (novelty arising from incongruity between an article and other existing articles) and “recombinant novelty” (novelty based on drawing from more disparate references). Incongruent novelty is decomposed into two components: (1) topic incongruity—incongruity between an article's topic and other existing topics at the time and (2) article incongruity—incongruity between an article and other existing articles on the same primary topic. By integrating topic modeling and word embedding to measure these constructs, we demonstrate varying impacts of types of novelty on three types of impact. Overall, our findings illustrate that topic and article incongruity have effects above and beyond recombinant novelty. For both scholarly and public impact, our results suggest that moderately high topic incongruity has the largest influence, suggesting that researchers should address novel topics. Additionally, scholarly citations are positively affected by lower and higher (vs. moderate) levels of article incongruity, suggesting that researchers either engage in programmatic research or add a new approach to the existing research on a topic.

Marketers are adopting increasingly sophisticated ways to engage with customers throughout their journeys. We extend prior perspectives on the customer journey by introducing the role of digital signals that consumers emit throughout their activities. We argue that the ability to detect and act on consumer digital signals is a source of competitive advantage for firms. Technology enables firms to collect, interpret, and act on these signals to better manage the customer journey. While some consumers’ desire for privacy can restrict the opportunities technology provides marketers, other consumers’ desire for personalization can encourage the use of technology to inform marketing efforts. We posit that this difference in consumers’ willingness to emit observable signals may hinge on the strength of their relationship with the firm. We next discuss factors that may shift consumer preferences and consequently affect the technology-enabled opportunities available to firms. We conclude with a research agenda that focuses on consumers, firms, and regulators.

This work describes and illustrates a free and easy-to-use online text-analysis tool for understanding how consumer word use varies across contexts. The tool, Wordify, uses randomized logistic regression (RLR) to identify the words that best discriminate texts drawn from different pre-classified corpora, such as posts written by men versus women, or texts containing mostly negative versus positive valence. We present illustrative examples to show how the tool can be used for such diverse purposes as 1) uncovering the distinctive vocabularies that consumers use when writing reviews on smartphones versus PCs, 2) discovering how the words used in Tweets differ between presumed supporters and opponents of a controversial ad, and 3) expanding the dictionaries of dictionary-based sentiment-measurement tools. We show empirically that Wordify’s RLR algorithm performs better at discriminating vocabularies than support vector machines and chi-square selectors, while offering significant advantages in computing time. A discussion is also provided on the use of Wordify in conjunction with other text-analysis tools, such as probabilistic topic modeling and sentiment analysis, to gain more profound knowledge of the role of language in consumer behavior.

Seeking to help consumers make healthier decisions, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) mandated in 2010 the direct posting of calorie information on menus. Research, however, consistently demonstrates this mandate to not be as effective as intended despite required compliance in 2018. In response, the present research proposes a social marketing technique that leverages provincial norms (i.e., norms that are specific to consumption contexts) to nudge consumers toward healthier decisions. Across one field and two laboratory experiments, exposure to low‐calorie provincial norms consistently reduced calorie totals (relative to both a descriptive and no‐norm control condition). This reduced calorie total stemmed from a heightened motivation to align with the norm and did not undermine satisfaction, facilitate overindulgence on subsequent choices, or heighten guilt. Collectively, these findings offer an important means of increasing the efficacy of the FDA mandate while providing unique insight into how provincial norms nudge consumers toward healthier decision making.

To remain competitive in a connected world, offline retailers have responded with integrating digital in-store technologies into their physical servicescapes. Often, the introduction of multichannel connecting services like click & collect or order from or return to store are first steps. Shopper-facing advanced technologies can be key to creating a different physical shopping experience for consumers and delivering benefits to retailers such as improved traffic, conversion and baskets or streamlined operational cost. In general, consumers consider retailing technologies as useful. However, shoppers assess the fairness of the exchange about procedures, outcome and treatment and the value of the technology they receive compared to what the retailer gets. Also, satisfaction, trust and privacy concerns are relevant for customers. Retail managers need to ensure the functionality and safety of their application and take consumer concerns seriously. Also, they need to address privacy concerns and build trust, if they want proximity marketing to deliver on its promise of increasing basket size or attracting new shoppers.