Ashwin Papers

Organizational corruption imposes a steep cost on society, easily dwarfing that of street crime. We examine how corruption becomes normalized, that is, embedded in the organization such that it is more or less taken for granted and perpetuated. We argue that three mutually reinforcing processes underlie normalization: (1) institutionalization, where an initial corrupt decision or act becomes embed...

Conceptual research is fundamental to advancing theory and, thus, science. Conceptual articles launch new research streams, resolve conflicting findings, explain new phenomena, and integrate divergent research areas. Yet, compared with other disciplines, marketing publishes little conceptual research. This article provides a multidisciplinary perspective of conceptual research to help increase the...

Despite the importance of establishing good, clear concept definitions in organizational research, the field lacks a comprehensive source that explains how to effectively develop and articulate a concept's domain. Thus, the purpose of this article is to explain why clear conceptual definitions are essential for scientific progress and provide a concrete set of steps that researchers can follow...

Branding has emerged as a top management priority in the last decade due to the growing realization that brands are one of the most valuable intangible assets that firms have. Driven in part by this intense industry interest, academic researchers have explored a number of different brand-related topics in recent years, generating scores of papers, articles, research reports, and books. This paper...

Marketing inherited a model of exchange from economics, which had a dominant logic based on the exchange of \"goods,\" which usually are manufactured output. The dominant logic focused on tangible resources, embedded value, and transactions. Over the past several decades, new perspectives have emerged that have a revised logic focused on intangible resources, the cocreation of value, and...

Retailers gather data about customers' online behavior to develop personalized service offers. Greater personalization typically increases service relevance and customer adoption, but paradoxically, it also may increase customers' sense of vulnerability and lower adoption rates. To demonstrate this contradiction, an exploratory field study on Facebook and secondary data about a personalize...

Using a grounded theory approach, the authors investigate the nature and consequences of brand love. Arguing that research on brand love needs to be built on an understanding of how consumers actually experience this phenomenon, they conduct two qualitative studies to uncover the different elements ("features") of the consumer prototype of brand love. Then, they use structural equations...

Building theories is important for advancing knowledge of management. But it is also a highly challenging task. Although there is a burgeoning literature that offers many theorizing tools, we lack a coherent understanding of how these tools fit together—when to use a particular tool and which combination of tools can be used in the theorizing process. In this article, we organize a systematic revi...

Extant research suggests that consumers can become emotionally attached to consumption objects, including brands. However, a scale to measure the strength of consumers' emotional attachments to brands has yet to be devised. We develop such a scale in Studies 1 and 2. Study 3 validates the scale's internal consistency and dimensional structure. Study 4 examines its convergent validity with...

Although the relationship metaphor dominates contemporary marketing thought and practice, surprisingly little empirical work has been conducted on relational phenomena in the consumer products domain, particularly at the level of the brand. In this article, the author: (1) argues for the validity of the relationship proposition in the consumer-brand context, including a debate as to the legitimacy...

Digital platforms that aggregate products and services, such as Google Shopping or Amazon, have emerged as powerful intermediaries to brand offerings, challenging traditional product brands that have largely lost direct access to consumers. As a countermeasure, several long-established brands have built their own flagship platforms to resume control and foster consumer loyalty. For example, sports...

This article presents a consumer-psychology model of brands that integrates empirical studies and individual constructs (such as brand categorization, brand affect, brand personality, brand symbolism and brand attachment, among others) into a comprehensive framework. The model distinguishes three levels of consumer engagement (object-centered, self-centered and social) and five processes (identify...

This article by Allen, Fournier, and Miller argues that traditional branding theory — rooted in cognitive psychology and information processing — is insufficient for understanding brands in today's marketplace. The "received view" treats brands as knowledge structures in consumers' minds, controlled primarily by marketers. The authors propose an alternative "emergent paradig...

Over the past decade, several studies have argued that customer satisfaction has high relevance for financial markets because it has a significant impact on stock returns. However, little attention has been given to understanding the impact of customer satisfaction on the risk of stock returns. The finance literature suggests that investors that judge performance only in terms of returns place mor...

The text, an article from the Journal of Marketing , discusses the evolution of the dominant logic for marketing from a traditional goods-centered perspective to an emerging service-centered view. The authors, Stephen L. Vargo and Robert F. Lusch, argue that the original model, inherited from economics, focused on tangible resources , embedded value, and discrete transactions. The new dominant log...

The text, an excerpt from the seminal 1997 Strategic Management Journal article "Dynamic capabilities and strategic management" by David J. Teece, Gary Pisano, and Amy Shuen, proposes the dynamic capabilities framework as a means to understand how firms create and maintain competitive advantage in environments marked by rapid technological change . This framework argues that long-term su...

The text presents excerpts from a Journal of Marketing article by Sirdeshmukh, Singh, and Sabol, which introduces a framework for understanding how service provider actions affect consumer trust, value, and loyalty. Their model conceptualizes trustworthiness using multiple dimensions, including operational competence, benevolence, and problem-solving orientation , evaluated through two distinct fa...

The provided text is an excerpt from a meta-analysis published in the Journal of Marketing that investigates the factors influencing the effectiveness of relationship marketing (RM) . The authors synthesize empirical research to determine how various RM strategies, like relationship investment and communication , influence relational mediators such as trust and commitment , and subsequently affect...

The provided text is an excerpt from a 1994 academic paper by Robert M. Morgan and Shelby D. Hunt titled "The Commitment-Trust Theory of Relationship Marketing," which defines relationship marketing as all efforts aimed at establishing, developing, and maintaining successful relational exchanges . The authors theorize that relationship commitment and trust are key mediating variables (KM...

The provided text outlines a research article by Mick and Buhl from 1992, which introduces and empirically evaluates a meaning-based model of advertising experiences centered on the consumer's perspective. The authors challenge conventional advertising theories that view ads as fixed stimuli and consumers as passive reactors, advocating instead for an approach that stresses the subjectivity of...

The provided text is an academic article titled "The penalty for privacy violations: How privacy violations impact trust online" by Kirsten Martin, focusing on consumer trust in websites . The research, utilizing a factorial vignette survey methodology, investigates how the violation of privacy expectations , particularly the secondary use of information, diminishes a consumer's trus...

The provided text, an excerpt from an essay by Scott B. MacKenzie, discusses the critical issue of poor construct conceptualization in academic manuscripts, particularly within marketing science, arguing that this foundational flaw leads to a cascade of negative consequences for research validity. The author highlights that inadequate definition of constructs is a more significant problem than oft...

The provided text, an excerpt from Kevin Lane Keller's 1993 paper, Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Customer-Based Brand Equity , lays out a detailed conceptual model of brand equity from the individual consumer's perspective. It defines customer-based brand equity as the differential effect that brand knowledge—which includes both brand awareness and brand image —has on a consumer...

The provided text, an academic article by Douglas B. Holt, constructs a dialectical theory to explain the emergence of a powerful antibranding countercultural movement that targets successful, highly branded companies. Holt challenges older theories of consumer resistance, which view marketers as "cultural engineers" dictating consumer desires, by arguing that this perspective is outdate...

The provided text, an excerpt from an academic paper, focuses on developing a relationship theory in consumer research by moving beyond traditional notions of short-term exchange and mere brand loyalty. The author advocates for treating brands as active relationship partners with whom consumers form various types of emotional and behavioral bonds. The research employs an exploratory, qualitative m...