Papers Under Review

It is well known that marketing myopia hurts long-term firm value. Yet, Top Management Teams (TMTs) are frequently myopic by curtailing marketing and R&D expenses to boost earnings. Investors have few options to predict myopia ex-ante (i.e., before it is observed), and learning it post-hoc is too late as there is no arbitrage opportunity. We propose that since myopia is a trade-off between Marketing Emphasis and Earnings Emphasis, we can identify it a-priori by examining TMT’s relative attention to the two strategically opposing foci. We use linguistic dependency parsing to extract relationships between myopic actions and marketing objects in earnings call transcripts. Results from analysis of nearly 25,000 quarterly observations from almost 1,200 firms between 2008 and 2019 show that our approach can predict the likelihood of marketing myopia up to four quarters in advance. We find that TMT’s Enhanced Marketing Emphasis, regardless of temporal orientation, and Diminished (Enhanced) Earnings Emphasis, only in past and current, are associated with a lower (higher) likelihood of future myopia. Our proposed approach (1) produces higher financial returns by allowing evasive actions ex-ante; (2) reduces information asymmetry faced by investors and the board of directors; and (3) can be strategically valuable to competitors.
Keywords: marketing myopia, top management team, earnings conference calls, text analysis, panel data

Working Papers

In this paper, we add to the nascent data breach recovery literature by investigating the effects of firms’ data breach response strategies on the consumer brand funnel. To do this, we capture the impact of privacy data breaches of 198 national brands from public and private firms on brand perception as measured by YouGov from 2012 to 2021. Due to heterogeneous state laws regulating privacy breaches, firms face different requirements to inform victims of the breach via a letter from the firm. We analyze the content of breach notification letters sent to customers from 130 of the breached firms to determine the moderating effect of communication strategy on brand funnel metrics. We find that privacy breaches negatively affect all seven dimensions of brand perception measured by YouGov, and surprisingly, that some firm response strategies exacerbate the adverse effects of the privacy data breach. This work fills the knowledge gap in marketing regarding how privacy data breaches affect consumer reactions and how a firm’s data breach response strategies can alter those reactions. It also addresses several marketing research priorities called for by multiple marketing research organizations and journals.

Despite the increasing relevance of online privacy laws among consumers and legislators, their impact on consumers’ decision-making, and consequently on brand outcomes, is unclear. We add to the nascent privacy policy literature by investigating how: (1) online privacy laws affect brands with respect to consumers’ stated purchase intentions; (2) online display advertising (ODA) and data breaches magnify or mitigate the impact of online privacy laws on purchase intentions; and (3) online privacy laws’ impact on purchase intentions vary systematically by product categories. Using a quasi-experimental setting where one state, i.e., California, decided to adopt an online privacy law (California Consumer Privacy Act – CCPA) in the US, we gathered data on purchase intentions for 1,983 brands from 2012 to 2021. Results from a Difference-in-Difference model show that, on average, consumer purchase intentions decrease after the introduction of CCPA, and even more so when firms increase online advertising spending and following data breaches. Still, brands can reduce the negative impact of data breaches after CCPA by increasing their ODA. We also find that these risks flip for certain product categories. This work has implications for brand managers and crisis response teams..

Organizations across the US invested more than $8 billion towards anti-bias training, but little is known about whether consumers value it. This current research uses experimental choice studies, text analysis, and choice-based conjoint analysis to provide evidence that when anti-bias training is explicitly communicated, consumers value this information and consider it a signal of safety. Our research contributes to the extant literature by showing how anti-bias training influences physician selection. For socially vulnerable consumers, such as racial minorities and women, anti-bias training may increase the odds that they would choose even a lower-rated (vs. higher-rated) doctor by 30%. Public policy and healthcare marketing implications are also discussed.

In this paper, we add to the international data breach literature by investigating the effect of data breaches, country-specific policies and firm strategies on brand funnel metrics. This is a global study that considers country-specific factors (e.g. culture and privacy regulations) and the moderation effect of institutional cultural contexts.

In this paper, we investigate the defense contractor bidding strategies of bid price and schedule inflation when participating in federal contract auctions. Based on contract characteristics and firm/government relationships, it may be beneficial to participate in an auction but not win.