How I Wrote This

Karen learns how Rachel Gershon and Zhenling Jiang merged their behavioral and quantitative skillsets to identify the robust effect of referral contagion. Their findings are published in their paper “Referral Contagion: Downstream Benefits of Customer Referrals” in JMR.

Brett talks to Ankit Sisodia, Alex Burnap and Vineet Kumar about their forthcoming JMR paper “Generative Interpretable Visual Design: Using Disentanglement for Visual Conjoint Analysis.”

On the first episode of Season 2, Karen talks to authors Huachao Gao, He (Michael) Jia, and Bingxuan Guo about their paper “Resources Available for Me Versus Us: Implications for Mitigating Consumer Food Waste.” 

In the final episode of season 1, JMR Co-Editor Brett Gordon speaks with Yufeng Huang, Paul Ellickson, and Mitch Lovett about their paper Learning to Set Prices.

JMR Co-editor Karen Winterich talks with Annika Abell, Carter Morgan, and Marisabel Romero about the impact of star ratings relative to numerical ratings. Their findings are published in “The Power of a Star Rating: Differential Effects of Customer Rating Formats on Magnitude Perceptions and Consumer Reactions”. You’ll also want to hear how their experience complying with the new JMR Research Transparency policy when their manuscript was conditionally accepted.

In Episode 8, JMR Co-editor Karen Winterich talks with Joyce Liu and Anirban Mukhopadhyay from Bayes Business School, City, University of London about how they, along with coauthor Amy Dalton, developed an idea from movie night into a JMR publication, “Favorite Possessions Protect Subjective Well-Being Under Income Inequality”. The article finds effects of income inequality on feelings of deprivation can be attenuated by focusing on a favorite possession, but we’ll hear how the idea started out with a different focus before the role of favorite possessions became clear. You’ll want to listen to learn why the final submission of this article is unforgettable for one of the authors plus how the nuggets they uncovered along the way shaped the paper.

Listen on Apple, Google, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the podcast on Twitter (@HIWTPod) or visit the podcast’s homepage.

In Episode 7, JMR Co-editor Brett Gordon talks with Jessica Fong (University of Michigan), Tong Guo (Duke University), and Anita Rao (Georgetown University) about their forthcoming paper, “Debunking Misinformation about Consumer Products: Effects on Beliefs and Purchase Behavior” (SSRN version). Perhaps you’ve seen a toothpaste ad that claimed their brand didn’t contain any toxic ingredients. Of course, this implies that their competitors do use toxic ingredients, which for most major brands isn’t true. This is precisely the type of misinformation the authors wanted to study: Does it increase consumers’ willingness-to-pay? Can a debunking message counteract the false claim? This team of authors came together after a chance encounter at a conference and a seminar visit prompted discussions around the misinformation they saw spreading in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tune in to learn more about how the project evolved in terms of its data, methods, and message.

Listen on Apple, Google, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the podcast on Twitter (@HIWTPod) or visit the podcast’s homepage.

In Episode 6, JMR Coeditor Karen Winterich talks with Kaitlin Woollley, Associate Professor of Marketing at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, and Peggy Liu, Ben L. Fryrear Chair in Marketing and Associate Professor of Business Administration at the University of Pittsburgh Katz Graduate School of Business about how they, along with co-author Daniella Kupor, developed the idea for their 2023 paper, “Does Company Size Shape Product Quality Inferences? Larger Companies Make Better High-Tech Products, but Smaller Companies Make Better Low-Tech Products”. As the title implies, this intriguing article explains why consumers perceive high-tech products to be higher quality when made from large companies and the opposite for low-tech products. The article took shape from a slightly different idea that was just one of three ideas these friends turned co-authors were exploring out of a motivation to find a project to work on together. Drawing upon each author's strengths and speedy turnaround time, they went from idea nugget to published article in seemingly record time.

Brett talks to Eva Ascarza about her paper “Retention Futility: Targeting High Risk Customers Might be Ineffective,” published in JMR in 2018. Eva is the Jakurski Family Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. She is a co-founder of the Customer Intelligence Lab at the D^3 Institute at HBS, and she is an expert on customer management. Share your thoughts about the show at [email protected] -- Brett and Karen would love to hear from you!

"Publish or perish” — it’s a maxim that we academics live by. But how does a paper become a publication? How do researchers take a rough idea and craft it into a draft? And how do they navigate the publication process, with all the bumps and bruises along the way? In each episode of “How I Wrote This,” marketing professors Brett Gordon and Karen Winterich speak to the authors of an academic marketing paper to get the backstory of how that paper came to be.