How I Wrote This

A single demographic statistic about car leasing. That's all it took to spark a fascinating research journey into how the perceived stability of our romantic relationships shape the products we choose to rent versus own. In this episode, Yuechen Wu  joins JMR Co-Editor Karen Winterich to reveal the story behind "Who Will I Be Without You? Consequences of Perceived Romantic Relationship Status Stability on Product Rentals." From that initial nugget of curiosity to navigating the challenges of the review process, Yuechen and co-authors Jared Watson and Ali Faraji-Rad share how persistence—and friendship—can transform a curious observation into groundbreaki...

To figure out how much a company is worth, start with its customers. This episode explores customer-based corporate valuation and how individual buying behavior ultimately drives firm value. Join JMR Co-Editor Brett Gordon as he speaks with Dan McCarthy (University of Maryland) and Peter Fader (University of Pennsylvania) about their paper, “Customer-Based Corporate Valuation for Publicly Traded Noncontractual Firms,” and how they used publicly disclosed customer metrics to value companies like Wayfair—work that even caught the attention of Wall Street.

Have you ever been inspired to study a research problem, only to hear: “How is that relevant to marketing?” Such was the case for Muzeeb Shaik who wanted to understand if the impacts of fatal shool shootings extended to the marketplace. In this episode, JMR Co-Editor Karen Winterich talks with Muzeeb, John Costello, and Adithya Pattabhiramaiah to learn how they were able to build on initial data showing decreased grocery purchases to identify that heightened anxiety for consumption in public spaces not only impacts grocery purchases but also spending at food and beverage places, leading to their JMR article coauthored wit...

For some, the strategies that save money require money they don't have. This episode explores the "poverty penalty" and how financial constraints make saving money a challenge for lower-income households. Join JMR Co-Editor Brett Gordon as he speaks with Yesim Orhun (University of Michigan) and Mike Palazzolo (UC Davis) about their award-winning article, "Frugality is Hard to Afford.

You might talk slang with your friends, but what happens when brands try using slang?  In this episode, JMR Co-Editor Karen Winterich talks with Bryce Pyrah and Alice Wang about their article, The Slang Paradox: Connecting or Disconnecting with Consumers?, coauthored with Yiyi Li and Ying Xie. Hear how Alice decided to give the idea a chance even though she was uncertain at first and how Bryce has already learned the importance of perseverance in Episode 21. 

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

How I Wrote This is back for Season 3. In Episode 20, JMR Coeditors Karen Winterich and Brett Gordon go LIVE at Summer AMA in Chicago to chat with authors of this year’s JMR award-winning articles. You’ll hear from Yiyi Li about her Weitz-Winer-O’Dell award-winning article with Ying Xie and also from Michal Maimaran on her Paul E. Green/Vithala R. Rao Award article with Szu-chi Huang and Daniella Kupor. Listen in for insights on how external collaborations on relevant problems along with perseverance resulted in these impactful articles.

Does the content of a news article influence the effectiveness of ads placed within it? In this episode, JMR Co-Editor Brett Gordon discusses the recently published paper, “Attention Spillovers from News to Ads: Evidence from an Eye-Tracking Experiment,” with authors Andrewy Simonov (Columbia Business School),Tommaso Valletti, and Andre Veiga (both from Imperial College Business School). The idea for the paper was born in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the researchers learned that some advertisers were using “block lists” to prevent their ads from appearing on publishers' websites with pandemic-related news content. Did the advertisers have a point...

We all likely know that there’s valuable data in our social media posts, but just how can this be used? In this episode, JMR Co-Editor Karen Winterich talks with Verena Schoenmueller and Simon Blanchard about their paper, “Who Shares Fake News? Uncovering Insights from Social Media Users’ Post Histories,” co-authored with Gita Johar. What started out as a collaboration to understand the spread of misinformation led them to uncover the value of social media post histories. While user post history can indeed be useful in predicting fake news sharers, it likely holds much more insight for which this paper’s multi-m...

Every business knows that customers who spend more in the past usually spend more in the future. But what if there are some products for which the opposite is true? That is, seeing a customer buy one of these categories means they are less–not more–likely to return to you. JMR Co-editor Brett Gordon speaks with Ayelet Israeli (HBS) and Eric Anderson (Kellogg) to learn about “canary categories,” as in “canary in a coalmine,” which predict exactly this type of behavior. Tune in to learn more about how the authors navigated a complex revision journey.

Ever wonder if those papers with 1000’s of citations are easy to publish? In this episode, JMR Co-Editor Karen Winterich chats with Sankar Sen from Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business to look back at this oldie but well-cited goodie: Does Doing Good Always Lead to Doing Better? Consumer Reactions to Corporate Social Responsibility, published in 2001 by Sankar and CB Bhattacharya, before CSR was a hot topic. Then listen in as they discuss how authors can develop research streams and consider future research opportunities regarding corporate social responsibility.

In part to of this special mini episode. Brett and Karen break down the review process and share insights from two current JMR reviewers.

On this special mini episode of How I Wrote This, Karen and Brett take you behind the scenes to hear about what it's really like to be a co-editor for a journal.

Brett Gordon sits down with JP Dube and Günter Hitsch from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and Peter Rossi from the UCLA Anderson School of Management. They discuss their influential paper, “Do Switching Costs Make Markets Less Competitive?” Since the 1960s, marketing and economics scholars have studied switching costs, with theoretical literature largely suggesting that these costs lead to higher prices among competing firms. However, when these three researchers conducted an empirical analysis, they found surprising results that challenged the prevailing wisdom. Join them as they share how their project evolved over time, including their measured res...

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 i...

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...

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...

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 HIWTpod@gmail.com -- 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.

In Episode 4, Karen talks with Andrea Webb Luangrath and Joann Peck about their 2022 paper  “Observing Product Touch: The Vicarious Haptic Effect in Digital Marketing and Virtual Reality”. After Andrea developed the idea in a doctoral seminar over a decade ago, the project hibernated for a few years before she and Joann brought it back to life. Knowing the paper addressed a relevant question digital marketers were interested in plus a theoretical gap, they’ll talk about how they pushed forward post-rejection and worked with coauthors William Hedgcock and Yixiang Xu to bring this now well-cited paper to publication.

Joining Brett this month are Stephan Seiler (Imperial College London), Anna Tuchman (Northwestern University), and Song Yao (Washington University in St. Louis) to talk about their paper, “The Impact of Soda Taxes: Pass-Through, Tax Avoidance, and Nutritional Effects,” published in the Journal of Marketing Research in 2021. Soda taxes are a relatively new phenomenon, and this paper was among the first to provide a rigorous evaluation of their efficacy. You’ll hear how the project came together and what the authors learned about handling feedback during the review process.

In the second episode, join Karen Winterich’s interview with Maura Scott and Martin Mende as they talk about transporting a 600-pound robot through the streets of New York City to make realistic stimuli for their 2019 JMR paper, “Service Robots Rising”. When their paper was first rejected at another journal, they took the reviewer feedback seriously and substantially revised the paper to increase the realism of their studies before submitting it to JMR, which was ultimately published and is currently the most well-cited JMR publication since 2018.

In the first episode, Brett speaks with Dina Mayzlin and Judy Chevalier to talk about their 2006 JMR paper, “The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews.” You’ll hear how a seemingly innocuous post-seminar question turned into this successful collaboration, which eventually landed them the 2011 O’Dell Award for making a significant long-term contribution to marketing.