(De)marketing to Manage Consumer Quality Inferences
Author(s)
Zhang, Juanjuan; Miklos-Thal, Jeanine
DownloadZhang_De marketing.pdf (1.031Mb)
OPEN_ACCESS_POLICY
Open Access Policy
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Terms of use
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
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
Date issued
2013-02Department
Sloan School of ManagementJournal
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
ISSN
0022-2437
1547-7193