Browsing by Author "Landgraf, Polina"

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    How mortality salience hurts brands with different personalities
    (Elsevier B.V., 2024) Landgraf, Polina; Yang, Haiyang; Stamatogiannakis, Antonios; Agencia Estatal de Investigación; Ivey Business School; Western University; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
    From deadly disease outbreaks to crimes and terrorism,consumers often experience mortality salience (MS). This research examines how MS-inducing events impact brand evaluations. We propose that under MS,consumers avoid experiencing change. Because consumers perceive brands with an exciting personality to be more closely associated with the notion of change than brands with other types of personality,the onset of MS is more likely to hurt the evaluations of exciting brands than those of other brands. Study 1,a large-scale secondary data study,showed that the 9/11 terror attacks degraded consumers’ evaluations of exciting brands but not of other types of brands. Subsequent studies demonstrated causality and the underlying mechanism. In Study 2,experimentally inducing MS decreased evaluations of an exciting brand but not of a control brand. Using a process-by-moderation approach,Study 3 showed that manipulating consumers’ perception of the extent to which an exciting brand was associated with the notion of change moderated the negative impact of MS on brand evaluations. Studies 4a-4b demonstrated that consumers’ tendency to avoid experiencing change mediated the detrimental effect of MS on the evaluations of an exciting brand but not of a control brand. These findings add to the literature on branding and offer practical insights for brand management during crises. © 2024 The Authors
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    Publication
    Macro-level perspectives on consumer brand preference
    (IE University, 2021-04-30) Landgraf, Polina; Stamatogiannakis, Antonios; https://ror.org/02jjdwm118
    In the last few decades, a lot has changed—new technologies have substantively re-shaped markets and human behaviors, the threats of terrorist attacks and deadly pandemics have become realities, and the political climate has grown increasingly polarized. These new challenges can directly impact consumption. However, little is known about how such macro-level factors can affect consumers’ preferences for brands. This thesis seeks to add to the marketing literature by investigating the influence of several important macro-level drivers on consumers’ brand preferences and the psychological mechanisms underlying this influence. Chapter 1 explores how consumers’ brand preferences are shaped in the context of new technologies. The chapter focuses on the increasingly important phenomenon of crowdfunding. In a large-scale field study and two follow-up studies, I find that non-semantic brand names—those that do not evoke a specific meaning—can arouse curiosity in consumers. This heightened curiosity then positively affects the outcomes of crowdfunding campaigns for new products. Chapter 2 investigates how consumers’ brand preferences can be impacted by events that increase mortality salience, such as terrorist attacks or deadly pandemics. In a field study using a difference-in-differences methodology and three experiments, I show that mortality salience increases consumers’ tendency to avoid change. Exciting brands are closely associated with the notion of change, and consumers tend to prefer exciting brands less when mortality is salient. Chapter 3 examines how consumers’ brand preferences can be influenced by sociopolitical events, such as electoral successes or failures. In two large-scale field studies and three experiments, I demonstrate that, because exciting brands closely reflect the liberal political ideology, electoral success for the liberal side can increase consumers’ preferences for exciting brands. Yet, the electoral failure for the liberal side has an opposite effect. The insights from this thesis are consequential, because they shed light on what are currently under-researched sets of drivers of consumers’ brand preferences. In addition, because practitioners typically have limited control over the macro-level factors, the findings from this thesis offer much-needed guidance on how marketers can recognize, adapt to, and take advantage of such large-scale market pressures.