Leadership Spotlight

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The present study by Kahn and Wansink added a subtle new twist. "It is widely assumed across disciplines that increasing the actual variety of an assortment can increase the quantity consumed," they write. "We show, however, that perceived variety can also influence consumption even when actual variety is unchanged."

Marketing professor Americus Reed II, meanwhile, is the department's only "identity theorist," focusing his research on the role consumers' self concepts play in guiding buying decisions. Why do so many smokers keep smoking, despite decades of health warnings? Why do brands like Harley Davidson motorcycles, Starbucks coffee and Nike engender such loyalty among very specific types of people?

In a recent Journal of Marketing Research study, Reed and marketing colleague Lisa Bolton found that judgments that are linked to a person's identity—from teenager to Republican, environmentalist or businessman—are virtually immovable, or "sticky."

Titled "Sticky Priors: The Perseverance of Identity Effects on Judgment," the paper included four studies that examined the effects of identity on judgment. The studies looked at judgments of a variety of issues and products, such as pollution, legalizing marijuana, and electronic books, that were linked to different identities held by participants, such as environmentalist, businessperson, or parent. Bolton and Reed then tried to influence participants' judgments using techniques that varied from evenhanded reasoning (listing pros and cons) to adopting the perspective of another identity (say, parent vs. teenager), with little success. Social influence—good old peer pressure—was somewhat effective in countering identity based judgment, "But not entirely," Bolton says. "Throughout, we really find that identity is really powerful in its effects on judgment."

In another study, Reed looked closely at brand identity by examining the triggers that lead consumers to identify with and become loyal to a product, brand or logo. Social identification with avocation, family, religious groups or gender appear to factor heavily into consumer buying patterns, he found, and consequently also in the marketing efforts of advertisers.

Reed argues that the mere existence of a particular lifestyle and an ad portraying that same situation is not enough to make the product appeal to the targeted consumer, because consumers often have a variety of roles linked to various preferences. Consumers are more likely to think about him or herself in terms of a particular identity if the identity is very self-important. "The more important that affiliation is to the customer, the easier it is to bring the group affiliation to mind and to connect it to the product," he adds.

Assistant marketing professor Patti Williams also studies how consumers' emotional responses influence consumption. Most recently, Williams and a co-author studied the impact of emotional versus rational advertising messages on older and younger consumers in a forthcoming study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

While Williams' research confirmed earlier suggestions that older adults are more likely to be swayed by emotional versus rational advertising appeals, she also debunked previous widely held perceptions that this greater interest in the emotional has to do with declining cognitive abilities among the elderly. Building on research in psychology, Williams found that older adults' preference for emotional content doesn't come from differences in ability, but about differences in motivation that come from a shortened or limited time horizon.

"With a perception that time is ending, you care less about learning new facts, and more about having emotionally satisfying encounters and making your life pleasurable in an affective sense," Williams says. In her research, when young adults were faced with a similarly limited time horizon, Williams found that young adults switched their preference from the logical to the emotional. The elderly, when also presented with a very long time period, preferred a rational appeal. "Thus, it's not a question of differences in ability that drives this effect, it's due to differences in what is important across the two age groups."

Identifying and understanding such quirks of consumer behavior, Hoch says, is one of the ways the marketing department "relishes diversity in different approaches to the problems that marketers face day in and day out. At the end of the day one of the great things about being a marketing professor at Wharton is that we have a whole heck of a lot of fun. It's serious, but we keep it playful."

Frequent contributor Nancy Moffitt is the former editor of the Wharton Alumni Magazine.

Editor's note: Excerpts from Knowledge@Wharton and Wharton Alumni Magazine articles were included in this story. Complete versions of nearly all of the research papers cited in this article can be found via the Marketing Department website: hops.wharton.upenn.edu.

Wharton's Paul Green: Helping Companies Develop Products Consumers Actually Want
By Lea Jacobson

Paul Green spent his childhood convinced he was going to be a famous chemist, commandeering the musty attic of his mother's suburban Philadelphia boarding house to lose himself in his microscopes and Bunsen burners.

But two happy accidents redirected the burgeoning scientist: During an attic chemistry experiment, he brushed a high-voltage Tesla coil against a water pipe, narrowly escaping blowing up his house. Years later, in 1946, he returned home from his military service to Penn armed with a university scholarship to discover that all the chemistry courses were reserved for pre-med students. Green chose economics and mathematics instead.

For almost all of the nation's Fortune 500 companies, law firms, hospitals, and government agencies, it's a good thing he did. Today, Green is often called "the father of conjoint analysis," the powerful predictive statistical technique and backbone of market research.

The framework has been used internationally by thousands of companies, including the hotel conglomerate Marriott Corporation in creating its Courtyard by Marriott chain, and by regional transportation agencies in the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area to investigate the potential of the now-successful EZPass electronic toll collection device, as well as in medical research, public policy and industrial engineering. Conjoint analysis allows marketing managers make accurate decisions about what products and services to sell—and helped make Green marketing's most cited author. "Wharton has been at the forefront because Green always published in the best publications and his breakthrough methodologies always had a practical touch to them," says Jerry Wind, Wharton marketing professor, director of the SEI Center for the Advanced Studies in Management and one of Green's most significant research co-authors and collaborators. "Green inspired through example, his involvement in recruitment, and his value system, his scholarship, his hard work and his sense of the importance of research for the field as a whole."

But when Green, who retired this year, came on the scene, the world of marketing was in a statistical infancy and market research was a much less mathematical discipline. "Market research done in the late 50s was a lofty enterprise that was more descriptive than proscriptive," he says.

The Early Days: Sun Oil and Lukens

Green went on to earn his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Penn, supplementing his income playing piano in a jazz band in what he calls "bars of dubious reputation" a few nights a week in and around Philadelphia. After graduating, Green got a job in the market research department at Sun Oil's home office in Philadelphia, then went to work for Lukens Steel in the fledgling market research department while working on his Ph.D. at Penn. At Lukens, he began asking questions based on operations research, a kind of methodology developed in World War II in which experts from various disciplines came together to solve wartime problems such as cryptographic puzzles and building better guidance systems. "Operations research provided a new way to look at marketing," Green says. "Before marketing was a survey. Now we had an accurate way to provide models and procedures." This blending of disciplines and the research and theories that came out of it were a revelation to Green.