Alexander Mafael

Consumers are often exposed to prior reviews when considering posting themselves. We examine how finding one’s opinion in the minority (vs. majority) of previous ratings affects a consumer’s decision to post. Specifically, we contrast the posting decisions of frequent posters with those of less frequent posters. Results from seven experimental studies show that frequent posters prefer review environments in which their opinion belongs to the minority of previously posted ratings. We support these findings with additional evidence from secondary review data. This behavior sets them apart from infrequent posters, who are reluctant to share minority opinions. In addition, we show that this effect is driven by differences in how a minority post is perceived: As an opportunity to signal one’s reviewer identity or as socially risky. Based on these insights, we explore how rating platforms can motivate review posting, particularly among infrequent posters. Our findings extend previous research on social influence effects in online reviews and have implications for various stakeholders who rely on and aim to solicit reviews on rating platforms.

Firms struggle to respond to product recalls and achieve high recall effectiveness, i.e., the percentage of affected consumers who participate in corrective actions. We present the first comprehensive study of recall effectiveness that analyzes a broader set of product categories, identifies managerially relevant drivers, outlines boundary conditions, and demonstrates the underlying psychological processes. Specifically, three studies investigate the impact of remedy choice, incident likelihood , and their interaction with firm reputation on recall effectiveness. In Study 1 (unique secondary data set), we show that remedy choice and incident likelihood each interact with the firm's reputation to influence recall effectiveness. In two subsequent experiments, we not only test the findings of the secondary data in a causal setting but also examine the underlying psychological process. We find that offering full remedy leads to higher recall effectiveness for high reputation firms and that recall effectiveness is higher for recalls with a high incident likelihood, but only for high reputation firms. In both cases, firms not only make consumers feel like they would benefit more from participating in the recall, but they also make them feel more comfortable in their ability to participate in the recall. These nuanced findings enable us to derive actionable guidelines for firms to increase recall effectiveness.

Firms struggle to respond to product recalls and manage post-recall customer satisfaction. In three studies, we examine the impact of firms’ remedy choice on satisfaction and provide evidence that firms’ post-recall remedy efforts are often not optimal. In Study 1 (field study), we estimate the longer-term effects of remedy on different satisfaction metrics and show that offering full remedy is much more important for low and high (vs. medium) brand equity firms, especially when failure severity is high. In Study 2 (experiment), we find further evidence that the positive impact of full remedy on satisfaction is moderated by brand equity in a u-shaped fashion. Finally, Study 3 (experiment) provides further evidence that the relationship between remedy and brand equity is contingent on failure severity. The findings contribute to the literature on firms’ management of negative relationship events and provide managers with the empirically grounded 5R guidelines to make better remedy decisions in response to product recalls. © 2021, The Author(s).

Prior research on creativity and the effectiveness of executional factors in advertising has focused on the impact of uniqueness and consistency in comparison to prior and competitive advertising. Relatively little is known about the specific impact of these variables and their relationship to each other, and few existing measures of consistency and uniqueness extend beyond subjective rating scales. In this research, we develop new measures of advertising uniqueness and consistency. We use data from 10 years of Super Bowl advertisements along with panel data on word-of-mouth communication for the advertised brands (buzz) to demonstrate the validity of this methodology. Our findings suggest it is not the presence of any particular element but whether the element and what it is combined with are unique and consistent. Advertisements are likely to be more effective if they are unique from earlier ads for all brands but also consistent with ads for the same brand from prior periods.