May 9–10, 2024
Check-in at Hanover Inn begins at 3:00 p.m. Rooms are reserved under your name.
7:00 p.m.
Dinner at Pine, in the Hanover Inn.
8:15–8:45 a.m.
Continental Breakfast in Buchanan 051 (Volanakis) at the Tuck School of Business
8:45–9:00 a.m.
Welcome by Praveen Kopalle, Signal Companies’ Professor of Management and Professor of Marketing at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College
Opening remarks by Brian Tomlin, Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research and the William and Josephine Buchanan Professor of Management
9:00–10:00 a.m.
Shunyuan Zhang- Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Harvard Business School
“Ambiguity in Multi-modal Digital Ads” (view abstract)
10:00–10:15 a.m.
Break
10:15–11:15 a.m.
Caleb Warren, Susan and Philip Hagenah Associate Professor in Marketing
Eller College of Management at University of Arizona
“What Makes People Cool?” (view abstract)
11:15–11:30 a.m.
Break
11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
Young-Hoon Park, Sung-Whan Suh Professor of Management
Cornell SC Johnson College of Business
“The Impact of Experiential Store on Customer Purchases” (view abstract)
12:30–1:30 p.m.
Lunch in Buchanan 051 (Volanakis)
1:30–2:30 p.m.
Kelly Herd – Associate Professor of Marketing
University of Connecticut
“Embracing Space: The Positive Impact of Low Social Density on New Product Co-Creation” (view abstract)
2:30 – 2:45 p.m.
Break
2:45–3:45 p.m.
Kusum Ailawadi
Charles Jordan 1911, T’12 Professor of Marketing - Tuck School of Business
“Household Response to School Nutrition Mandates: The Shift from Grocery to School Meals” (view abstract)
3:45–6:00 p.m.
Free Time
7:00 p.m.
Dinner at Murphy’s on the Green, Hanover.
Visit concludes. Check-out time at The Hanover Inn is 11:00 a.m.
Shunyuan Zhang, Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Harvard Business School
“Ambiguity in Multi-modal Digital Ads”
We explore the effect of digital ambiguous ads on consumers’ behavior throughout the purchase funnel, considering a multi-modal perspective of the display ad’s visual banner and its textual caption. We collaborate with a display ad platform, analyzing consumers’ click-through rates (CTRs) and conversions (CRs) for tens of thousands of cross-category digital ads. To operationalize ambiguity, we develop two custom deep learning-based ambiguity prediction models, each for one data modal. We find that beyond a rich set of ad characteristics (e.g., photographic attributes, language features, and image-text coherence), ambiguous ads garnered higher click-through rates. However, these ads resulted in lower conversion rates and efficiency. Next, to verify the causal links suggested in the field data, we conduct a pre-registered randomized field experiment, where we manipulated the amount of ambiguity of in a campaign. In particular, we create four versions of ads for a hearing-aid product with very similar images and texts, but different levels of ambiguity. Our analysis further reveals a negative correlation between ad ambiguity and the end-to-end conversion (conversions/impressions). Overall, our findings suggest that advertisers and scholars are well-advised to assess images and texts together rather than individually, and use ambiguity with care.
Caleb Warren, Susan and Philip Hagenah Associate Professor in Marketing
Eller College of Management at University of Arizona
“What Makes People Cool?”
What makes people cool? Is being cool the same thing as being good? Do the attributes that make people cool vary across cultures? We answer these questions by investigating which values and personality traits are associated with cool people and whether these same attributes are associated with good people. An experiment with 4,261 respondents in the United States, Australia, Germany, Spain, Turkey, Mexico, Chile, India, Hong Kong SAR, China (Mainland), South Korea, South Africa, and Nigeria revealed that many of the attributes associated with cool people are also associated with good people. Cool and good, however, are not the same. Cool people are perceived to be more extroverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open to new experiences, and autonomous, whereas good people are more conforming, traditional, secure, warm, agreeable, benevolent, conscientious, and calm. This pattern is stable across countries, which suggests that the meaning of cool has crystallized on a similar set of values and traits across the globe.
Young-Hoon Park, Sung-Whan Suh Professor of Management
Cornell SC Johnson College of Business
“The Impact of Experiential Store on Customer Purchases”
Despite the rising popularity of non-traditional retail spaces providing immersive experiences, empirical
evidence on their impact on customer behavior remains limited. We study the causal impact of customers visiting an experiential store on their purchase behavior. Analyzing individual-level transactions from a personal care business over a year before and after the store’s launch, we find a positive and economically significant average treatment effect on customer spending. However, substantial heterogeneity exists, with only around 20% of customers exhibiting a significant positive effect, while the majority show no significant change. The most substantial treatment effects are observed among high-value customers who, despite a long lapse since their last interaction, actively engaged with the firm. We decompose the treatment effect across the differing needs using a model that links product purchases in a customer basket to underlying customer needs. We find that needs linked to sophisticated skincare routines, connecting to high-priced items that customers can assess through hands-on testing and workshops provided in the store, exhibit positive significant effects. In contrast, treatment effects associated with basic skincare routines show no significant impact. The results align with experiential learning and haptics, offering insights into the implications for experiential retailing.
Kelly Herd, Associate Professor of Marketing
University of Connecticut
“Embracing Space: The Positive Impact of Low Social Density on New Product Co-Creation”
New product co-creation, a joint activity in which companies invite consumers to select and/or develop various elements of a new product offering, has transformed the role of consumers from passive onlookers to active participants in developing new products. Although extant research provides strong evidence for why companies should engage consumers in co-creation, research to date has yet to explore the spaces where this co-creation takes place and how the presence of other consumers in co-creation spaces influences 1) consumers’ willingness to co-create new products and 2) the creativity of their co-creation outcomes. Across six studies, we show that low (vs. moderate) social density increases consumers’ willingness to co-create and the creativity of their co-creation outcomes. Specifically, we find that low (vs. moderate) social density increases consumers’ open-mindedness, which increases their willingness to co-create and creative ability in new product development contexts. We also examine what happens when a consumer is alone in a co-creation space (i.e., no social density). As companies continue to invite consumers into co-creation spaces to develop new products, this research offers important implications for how they design and manage these settings.
Kusum Ailawadi - Charles Jordan 1911, T’12 Professor of Marketing
Tuck School of Business
“Household Response to School Nutrition Mandates: The Shift from Grocery to School Meals”
In 2012, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA) placed strict nutritional mandates on food served at public schools. This policy change offers a unique opportunity to study household response to a large, exogenous change in healthiness of food available to their children. Did more healthy school meals lead households to substitute towards them, and away from grocery food purchases? Or did the opposite happen as detractors of the HHFKA had predicted? Which households were more responsive to the nutritional mandates? And was there a spillover effect on the healthiness of their grocery food purchases? We examine these questions in this research.
We first estimate average effects of the policy on grocery food quantity and quality with a Difference-in-Difference analysis of changes in the shopping of treatment households (with school-age kids) and a matched control group of households without kids. We document a meaningful decrease in the quantity of grocery food purchased in response to the HHFKA, and a small decrease in quality. Consistent with substitution towards now-healthier school meals, much of this shift comes from items likely to be purchased for children and categories traditionally associated with breakfast and lunch (the meals served at school).
We then use a causal forest approach to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects and explore how financial constraints, time constraints, and nutrition knowledge (three factors that are known to drive both school meal participation and healthiness of food choices) are associated with household response. We find that the HHFKA attracted even greater participation from financially and time constrained households for whom the pre-existing benefits of school meals were already important and were now coupled with the additional benefit of healthier food. It also had a stronger pull among less educated households (who may have lower nutrition knowledge) and those who were previously purchasing less healthy grocery food.
We conclude with several implications of our findings for policy makers, marketers, and researchers.