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Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. <br/>How can consumers be encouraged to take better care of public goods? Across four studies, including two experiments in the field and three documenting actual behaviors, the authors demonstrate that increasing consumers’ individual psychological ownership facilitates stewardship of public goods. This effect occurs because feelings of ownership increase consumers’ perceived responsibility, which then leads to active behavior to care for the good. Evidence from a variety of contexts, including a public lake with kayakers, a state park with skiers, and a public walking path, suggests that increasing psychological ownership enhances both effortful stewardship, such as picking up trash from a lake, and financial stewardship, such as donating money. This work further demonstrates that the relationship between psychological ownership and resulting stewardship behavior is attenuated when there are cues, such as an attendance sign, which diffuse responsibility among many people. This work offers implications for consumers, practitioners, and policy makers with simple interventions that can encourage consumers to be better stewards of public goods.

Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. <br/>Marketers frequently style food to look pretty (e.g., in advertising). This article investigates how pretty aesthetics (defined by classical aesthetic principles, such as order, symmetry, and balance) influence healthiness judgments. The author proposes that prettier food is perceived as healthier, specifically because classical aesthetic features make it appear more natural. In a pilot, six main studies and four supplemental studies (total N = 4,301) across unhealthy and healthy, processed and unprocessed, and photographed and real foods alike, people judged prettier versions of the same food as healthier (e.g., more nutrients, less fat), despite equal perceived price. Even given financial stakes, people were misled by prettiness. In line with the proposed naturalness process, perceived naturalness mediated the effect; belief in a “natural = healthy” connection moderated it; expressive aesthetics, which do not evoke naturalness, did not produce the effect (despite being pretty); and reminders of artificial modification, which suppress perceived naturalness, mitigated it. Given that pretty food styling can harm consumers by misleading healthiness judgments for unhealthy foods, managers and policy makers should consider modification disclaimers as a tool to mitigate the “pretty = healthy” bias.

Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. <br/>Changes in the way customers shop, accompanied by an explosion of customer touchpoints and fast-changing competitive and technological dynamics, have led to an increased emphasis on agile marketing. The objective of this article is to conceptualize and investigate the emerging concept of marketing agility. The authors synthesize the literature from marketing and allied disciplines and insights from in-depth interviews with 22 senior managers. Marketing agility is defined as the extent to which an entity rapidly iterates between making sense of the market and executing marketing decisions to adapt to the market. It is conceptualized as occurring across different organizational levels and shown to be distinct from related concepts in marketing and allied fields. The authors highlight the firm challenges in executing marketing agility, including ensuring brand consistency, scaling agility across the marketing ecosystem, managing data privacy concerns, pursuing marketing agility as a fad, and hiring marketing leaders. The authors identify the antecedents of marketing agility at the organizational, team, marketing leadership, and employee levels and provide a roadmap for future research. The authors caution that marketing agility may not be well-suited for all firms and all marketing activities.

Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. <br/>Advances in technology, particularly smartphones, have unlocked new opportunities for consumers to generate content about experiences while they unfold (e.g., by texting, posting to social media, writing notes), and this behavior has become nearly ubiquitous. The present research examines the effects of generating content during ongoing experiences. Across nine studies, the authors show that generating content during an experience increases feelings of immersion and makes time feel like it is passing more quickly, which in turn enhances enjoyment of the experience. The authors investigate these effects across a broad array of experiences both inside and outside the lab that vary in duration from a few minutes to several hours, including positive and negative videos and real-life holiday celebrations. They conclude with several studies testing marketing interventions that increase content creation and find that consumers who are incentivized or motivated by social norms to generate content reap the same experiential benefits as those who create content organically. These findings illustrate how leveraging content creation to improve experiences can mutually benefit marketers and consumers.

Journal of Marketing, Ahead of Print. <br/>“Facts Up Front” nutrition labels are a front-of-package (FOP) nutritional labeling system that presents key nutrient information on the front of packaged food and beverage products in an easy-to-read format. The authors conduct a large-scale empirical study to examine the effect of adoption of FOP labeling on products’ nutritional quality. The authors assemble a unique data set on packaged food products in the United States across 44 categories over 16 years. By using a difference-in-differences estimator, the authors find that FOP adoption in a product category leads to an improvement in the nutritional quality of other products in that category. This competitive response is stronger for premium brands and brands with narrower product line breadth as well as for categories involving unhealthy products and those that are more competitive in nature. The authors offer evidence regarding the role of nutrition information salience as the underlying mechanism; they also perform supplementary analyses to rule out potential self-selection issues and conduct a battery of robustness checks and falsification tests. The authors discuss the implications of the findings for public policy makers, consumers, manufacturers, and food retailers.