Madan Et Al (2023)
Madan Et Al (2023)
Madan Et Al (2023)
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-022-09648-1
Abstract
Over the past several decades, scholars have highlighted the obligations and oppor-
tunities for marketing as a discipline to play a role in creating a better world — or
risk becoming irrelevant for the largest problems facing consumers and society. This
paper provides a framework to enhance the relevance and rigor of research in mar-
keting that not only contributes new knowledge to science, but also makes a positive
difference in the world. To that end, we urge authors and reviewers to foster cross-
fertilization from different theoretical and methodological silos, bolster robustness
through multiple methods, and expand the domain of research to explore different
populations and cultures. In doing so, we hope to encourage further consideration of
the role of marketing scholarship in providing a novel lens into potential solutions
for societal concerns.
1 Introduction
The early twenty-first century is witnessing many disruptions, some with deep
historical roots and some relatively recent. These include climate change, pov-
erty, obesity, discrimination, and bias. Addressing these issues requires deep con-
sumer knowledge, and marketing as a discipline has a unique advantage in helping
to improve lives and livelihoods, reduce inequities, and work for the greater good.
* Shilpa Madan
[email protected]
Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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2 Marketing Letters (2023) 34:1–12
Unfortunately, according to some prominent authors (Ludwig & Nestle, 2008), mar-
keting is exacerbating these issues as the goals of some businesses may be at odds
with those of society.
Over several decades, marketing scholars have highlighted both the opportuni-
ties and the obligations that our discipline needs to address or risk becoming irrele-
vant (Kelly, 1971; Mick, 2008; White et al., 2019). Even if marketing as a corporate
function has traditionally been focused on the objective of increasing shareholder
profits, “it is not possible to have a strong business concern without addressing the
challenges of inequality, poverty, and climate change in the present times” (Paul
Polman, former Unilever CEO). There has been a recent surge in our field’s interest
in exploring marketing’s role in creating a better world (e.g., Journal of Market-
ing issue on this topic, Journal of Consumer Psychology issue on the greater good,
Journal of Marketing Research issue on marketing and education, Marketing Sci-
ence issue on health, various issues of Journal of Public Policy and Marketing and
Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, and Transformative Consumer
Research work). However, the gap between what we have studied and what market-
ing can do to address these issues remains substantial (Chandy et al., 2021).
This paper, which grew from a Knowledge Forum on Better Marketing for a Bet-
ter World at the 2021 Association for Consumer Research (ACR) Conference, has
three key objectives. First, we identify the key challenges for greater good marketing
research. Second, we propose multiple ways for researchers to confront these challenges.
Third, we suggest key considerations for review teams and gatekeepers to support and
strengthen marketing scholarship in pursuit of the greater good. Altogether, we hope to
spark conversations around how marketing scholarship can provide a more comprehen-
sive understanding of and solutions to the world’s most important societal concerns.
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Marketing Letters (2023) 34:1–12 3
is to elevate its relevance for key stakeholders. We see many win–win opportunities
but acknowledge that relevant questions may also involve societal wins that impose
business costs, at least in the short term.
The discussion at the Knowledge Forum also highlighted that research that
focuses on the greater good is often seen as “soft,” “wishy-washy,” or lacking in
rigor. This may be due to many reasons, including difficulty in collecting data that
accurately gauge societal impact, difficulty in collaborating with organizations and
governments to conduct field studies/source data, the real world being complex and
multifaceted, and academic journals tending to favor “clean” and singular explana-
tions for phenomena. We broadly classify these concerns as underscoring a need to
enhance or address the perceived rigor of greater good research.
Arising from the discussion at the Knowledge Forum, Fig. 1 outlines a list of
considerations that we detail below to help authors address these concerns. We also
present recommendations for reviewers and gatekeepers who evaluate these papers.
At the risk of sounding obvious, we underscore that the first step in doing good
research for a better world is to start with a research question rooted in the greater
good. Researchers (including us) have often treated societal and environmental
well-being as an afterthought — at best used as a context to demonstrate a theoreti-
cal idea or, at worst, simply relegated to a paragraph in the general discussion sec-
tion of a research article. A useful way to think about rooting a research question
in the greater good is to consider the ecosystem of the behavior one may be trying
to encourage (Labroo & Goldsmith, 2021). A better world outcome often involves
multiple actors, motivations, steps in the journey to a better world, and even multiple
barriers preventing them from acting for the greater good.
For example, research on prosocial behavior has investigated factors influencing
consumers’ willingness to donate. Whereas most research stops here, it is worth ask-
ing: what happens once a consumer has decided to contribute to a charitable cause?
7. Do Good Science
Fig. 1 Seven recommendations to conduct relevant and rigorous research for the greater good
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4 Marketing Letters (2023) 34:1–12
Most consumers in developed markets have no dearth of worthy causes to donate to.
How does this availability of choices affect consumers’ donation behavior? As Ein-
Gar et al. (2021) find, having to choose between worthy causes reduces consumers’
willingness to donate to any of them. Increasing charitable donations is a worthy
goal in and of itself, but identifying barriers to donation puts the greater good at the
heart of the research question.
Another route to increasing the relevance of marketing research is to study phe-
nomena with actual populations for whom our research has important implications
— which, apart from being important and relevant in the real world, can lead to new
theoretical insights. For example, although obesity is mentioned as a key societal
concern in most papers on food consumption, little to no research in marketing has
studied obese people. Indeed, we acknowledge that conducting research with hard-
to-reach populations is a resource-intensive endeavor, but enlarging the pool of par-
ticipants to actually include such populations is one of the most meaningful ways for
marketing academics to increase the relevance of our research. For example, a key
question linking food advertising to the obesity epidemic is the idea that some peo-
ple may have become obese because they are especially prone to food advertising. A
recent paper (Cornil et al., 2022) shows that whereas people with obesity were ini-
tially more responsive to food marketing, undergoing bariatric surgery reduced their
responsiveness to food marketing to the level of non-obese people. This paper points
to the important idea that the higher responsiveness to food marketing of people
with obesity is not a stable individual trait; rather, environmental or biological fac-
tors may shape stigmatized groups’ responses to marketing influences. Thus, the first
step to enhancing the relevance of our research for the real world is to think deeply
about the research question and how it can make a tangible difference in people’s
lives.
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Marketing Letters (2023) 34:1–12 5
win–win outcome for several stakeholders. Where win–win situations are not always
possible, research can also make trade-offs between different stakeholders’ objective
functions more transparent.
Research by Cornil and Chandon (2016, 2022) seeks to tackle a key barrier to
consumer health — people’s tendency to overconsume delicious, calorie-laden,
hedonic foods. To encourage consumers to choose smaller portions, they test an
intervention using multi-sensory imagery, asking people to think about the visceral
aspects of consumption — e.g., the food’s taste, texture, and smell. Merely thinking
about the multi-sensorial experience leads consumers to choose smaller portions of
rich, hedonic foods like chocolate cake because it helps them realize that a reason-
able portion will be as enjoyable as a supersized one. Furthermore, this paper finds
that consumers are willing to pay as much for smaller food portions when restaurants
use multi-sensory imagery as they are willing to pay for larger portions devoid of
any imagery. By providing a simple, actionable intervention that allows consumers
to control their portion size, does not lead to a reduction in business revenues, and
improves overall health, this paper proposes a win–win solution underscoring the
idea that it may be possible to improve consumers’ health and well-being, and the
pleasure they derive from their food, without any detrimental effects on businesses.
Another paper that exemplifies inclusive research is by Orhun and Palazzolo
(2019). They find that low-income households do not tend to take advantage of bulk
discounts or buy ahead of time to save money — even for staple goods like toilet
paper. Notably, the authors show that failure to use intertemporal savings strategies
is not due to a lack of understanding of their benefits but due to liquidity constraints.
Low-income consumers are systematically more likely to take advantage of such
discounts at the beginning of the month, when they have more liquidity, than at the
end. This finding is immensely valuable for marketing managers who can design and
time promotional efforts that yield the highest ROI and for policymakers who may
be keen to lower the prices paid by low-income consumers for everyday goods. This
example again underscores the point that marketing research can benefit both the
consumer and the firm.
But even if this is not the case, we encourage marketing scholars to ask broader
questions about the discipline itself. And perhaps by doing so, research may provide
insights not only into what marketing is but what marketing can be. For example,
understanding subsistence consumers and their participation in the marketplace is
worthy of study in its own right, and not simply because such consumers provide
potential markets for existing products. Studying such contexts can lead to relevant
insights for marketers about the form and function of the marketplace itself.
Research that makes a difference in people’s lives usually involves field testing of
interventions, often in the form of nudges that involve changing choice architec-
ture. This presents a major barrier for researchers who lack access to government
agencies and/or businesses to test changes in choice architecture. Although nudg-
ing and choice architecture interventions are important ways to change behavior,
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To conduct research that benefits the broader collective, we need to pay attention to
important issues which key stakeholders may be grappling with. Our first suggestion
for considering the bigger issues is to broaden your sources of research ideas beyond
discipline-specific journal articles to reading the newspaper, engaging with literature
in other disciplines, and being an observant participant in the marketplace.
Our second suggestion is to consider the problems that governments and prac-
titioners grapple with — both first-order problems and second-order ones. First-
order problems take the form, “when we find the problem, what should we do.”
Second-order problems ask, “should we do things differently for different people?”
As academics, we tend to specialize in particular theories or phenomena, for exam-
ple, budgeting or financial literacy. However, decision-makers often want to choose
between these options, necessitating comparative studies that evaluate the efficacy
of these different approaches. Even though incentive structures in academia are
often not conducive to these “horse race” studies because our field prizes theoretical
advances, marketing researchers can add a lot of value by investigating the second-
order problems that ask, “should we do things differently for different people/con-
texts?” We encourage authors to consider this context specificity (i.e., heterogeneity)
as moderation of the effect, which can add theoretical and practical nuance to our
understanding of what effects work, when, and for whom. A recent paper (Mrkva
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Marketing Letters (2023) 34:1–12 7
et al., 2021) illustrates this approach by studying the populations for whom choice
architecture interventions (i.e., nudges) are more effective. Even though nudges have
been widely implemented in multiple domains, our knowledge of how these nudges
work for different people is limited. This paper elevates the importance and rele-
vance of these choice architecture interventions by demonstrating that their effect
is largest for consumers with low domain knowledge and skill and those from low
socioeconomic status — that is, consumers who most need this kind of support.
As a field that prizes theoretical advances, there can be tensions between theory test-
ing and intervention design. However, these two aims need not be mutually exclu-
sive. To be deployed widely in the real world, a good intervention needs to have a
high impact (i.e., be strong enough to make a tangible difference in people’s behav-
ior) and be scalable. Insofar as ease of implementation includes plausibility, theory
testing can yield important interventions. For example, a classic prevention focus
manipulation involves asking participants to write down their duties and obliga-
tions. Although this manipulation is apt for theory testing, it cannot be used as an
intervention. However, an advertisement that reminds consumers of their duties and
obligations can work well as an intervention. Hence, for our research to aspire to
greater relevance and impact, we need to translate the manipulations in our research
into interventions that can be implemented in the field and can make a difference in
behavior.
Consumer researchers often test theories by controlling several extraneous vari-
ables in lab experiments and spending significant resources (time/effort) to pin down
the underlying mechanism. This is crucially important for relevant (and not just rig-
orous) research because a clear understanding of why there is an effect of A on B is
at the heart of designing an effective intervention. For example, in a recent paper,
Garbinsky et al. (2021) demonstrate that one reason people do not save enough is
because of the positive illusion of being financially responsible. Across several stud-
ies with lab and online samples, the authors first establish that people hold this illu-
sion of financial responsibility. Building on these findings, the authors then develop
and test a simple real-world intervention that dispels this illusion of responsibility by
asking consumers to indicate how often they engage in common superfluous spend-
ing behaviors, which encourages them to be more financially prudent.
In an ideal world, a combination of lab studies and field studies can give us the
best of both worlds. However, there may be times when some experimental control
might need to be given up to test real-world relevance (see “Sect. 4”). To increase
the relevance of any proposed interventions for practitioners, researchers need to pay
careful attention to the benchmark in use as the control condition against which dif-
ferent interventions are tested.
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For a research paper to help solve a real issue, a diverse methods toolkit can help
navigate the relevance-rigor challenge. Lab experiments, field experiments, quasi
or natural experiments, surveys, web scraping, etc., can individually enhance the
robustness of the research and collectively increase the confidence that stakeholders
have in the proposed solution. Whereas lab experiments are useful for demonstrat-
ing that something can happen — and why — field experiments can be valuable for
showing that something does happen — albeit in the context in which it is tested.
Field experiments also allow us to test the proposed interventions in a naturalistic
(noisy) setting. Archival data can also allow us to test for generalizability and for
response heterogeneity. In addition, methodological approaches, including ethnogra-
phy, netnography, semiotics, and computational techniques to study cultural artifacts
(e.g., the corpus of books, Google searches, movies, songs, etc., see Berger et al.,
2022) can be powerful in generating both knowledge of the broader context (see
“Sect. 3.4”) and ideas for designing effective interventions (“Sect. 3.5”). Together,
these methods can be considerably more powerful than any of them individually.
As an illustration of a diverse methods toolkit to enhance rigor and relevance,
consider a recent paper by Krishna and Orhun (2022). The authors find that female
candidates in a business school earned lower grades than men in quantitative
courses (e.g., finance) but higher grades in non-quantitative courses (e.g., organi-
zational behavior). This is an important observation because academic achievement
shapes occupational choices. The authors found significant differences in starting
salaries of women and men across three cohorts, primarily driven by women being
underrepresented in high-paying jobs such as investment banking. However, having
female instructor(s) significantly reduced the gender-related differences in grades for
quantitative courses, as female students earned relatively higher grades. A follow-
up survey indicated that this increase in grades was driven by female students who
were mid to high level in math aptitude. For these students, the presence of a female
instructor sparked their initial interest in the quantitative course. The authors lever-
aged econometric techniques, qualitative interviews, and surveys to point the way
for a real-world intervention that could help address a vexing problem in society
(i.e., the gender wage gap).
Apart from deploying a diverse methods toolkit, the paper illustrates several con-
siderations detailed above. First, it identifies and solves a thorny problem in business
education — increasing the diversity of the incoming student cohorts. However,
much less is known about how to help these students thrive in business schools once
they are admitted and further along in their careers. Second, once the authors docu-
mented this phenomenon, they also identified that female instructors teaching quan-
titative courses is a key solution. This research suggests that a high-impact, highly
actionable intervention for business school administrators is to recruit more female
faculty for quantitative courses. This paper also speaks to our earlier point on mul-
tiple constituents by expanding the scope of marketing to include not only the firm
(the business school in this case) but also the consumers (the students) and multi-
ple other stakeholders (e.g., the faculty, the administrators, and the human resources
team at the university) to make an impact on tangible outcomes. Finally, this paper
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Marketing Letters (2023) 34:1–12 9
also illustrates that assembling diverse author teams from a variety of subfields (e.g.,
consumer behavior, marketing strategy, etc.) and with a variety of methodological
skills (e.g., experimental, econometric, etc.) may be an under-leveraged route to
enhancing the rigor and relevance of research projects.
Although our primary target audience for this article is researchers aspiring to con-
duct research for the greater good, no conversation about good research can be com-
plete without discussing the people evaluating the research — the reviewers, asso-
ciate editors, and editors. In this section, we summarize the key themes from our
discussions with several scholars who have served in these roles.
We encourage review teams to be wary of the “it’s just…” problem when evalu-
ating papers, meaning that the finding is merely the application of well-established
theories. For example, the finding that consumers pick the “compromise” middle
option when a smaller size option is taken away, or a larger size is added, is just
“extremeness aversion” (Sharpe et al., 2008). When the impulse is to dismiss the
paper as an “it’s just” paper, we urge decision-makers to consider the following fac-
tors. First, is the paper trying to solve an important problem in the real world? The
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answer for Sharpe et al. (2008) is a resounding yes; it is about using extremeness
aversion to prompt consumers to choose smaller portion sizes of sugar-sweetened
beverages, as overconsumption is a leading cause of obesity worldwide (State of
Childhood Obesity, 2020). Even though extremeness aversion may not be a new
concept, the policy implication of this robust demonstration of extremeness aversion
in this context is very valuable.
Second, does applying the theory to the thorny problem offer important insights
into the better world question? MacInnis et al. (2020) outline phenomenon-to-
construct mapping as an important means of making a strong contribution. This
entails starting with observations of real-world marketing-relevant phenomena and
then helping identify (potentially new) theoretical constructs and relationships that
explain them (see “Sect. 3.4” above).
We also urge editors and reviewers to reconsider what they may recognize as pro-
totypical research. Slotting a manuscript as “behavioral,” “strategy,” or “quantita-
tive” and expecting it to “fully comply” with those norms may be a disservice to the
article and the field. For example, in consumer behavior research, it is possible to
misapply the rules of rigor for lab-based research to natural settings. When papers
are trying to address an important societal problem, we urge reviewers to evalu-
ate the research not only based on conformity to the norms of specific subfields of
research but also on its practical importance and how they can help strengthen these
aspects.
Finally, we recommend that editors and reviewers evaluate a specific paper as
presenting one set of findings that are part of a larger body of research. Expecting
the authors to answer all questions, eliminate all other potential explanations, and
explore most boundary conditions not only slows the pace of science but also limits
future research that can build on these findings.
5 Conclusion
Acknowledgements We would like to thank Vivian Xie, Sonia Kim, Eric Park, and Sherri Xue for their
invaluable assistance.
Declarations
Ethics approval and consent to participate No human subjects were collected, so no ethical approval or
informed consent was required.
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Marketing Letters (2023) 34:1–12 11
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