(De)marketing to Manage Consumer Quality Inferences
Name
Zhang_De marketing.pdf
Size
1.03 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
5603e8a7b57421e8012ef54088cc9f1f
Author(s)
Zhang, Juanjuan
Miklos-Thal, Jeanine
Date Issued
February 2013
Journal
Journal of Marketing Research
Publisher
American Marketing Association
Citation
Miklos-Thal, Jeanine, and Juanjuan Zhang. “(De)marketing to Manage Consumer Quality Inferences.” Journal of Marketing Research 50, no. 1 (February 2013): 55–69.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Savvy consumers attribute a product’s market performance to its intrinsic quality as well as the seller’s marketing push. The authors study how sellers should optimize their marketing decisions in response. They find that a seller can benefit from “demarketing” its product, meaning visibly toning down its marketing efforts. Demarketing lowers expected sales ex ante but improves product quality image ex post, as consumers attribute good sales to superior quality and lackluster sales to insufficient marketing. The authors derive conditions under which demarketing can be a recommendable business strategy. A series of experiments confirm these predictions
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.11.0432
