How I Wrote This

Kaitlin Woollley from Cornell and Peggy Liu from University of Pittsburgh talk about their paper on consumer perceptions of product quality based on company size. They discuss the evolution of their initial idea, the role of lay theories and reviews in refining the study, collecting data for the final study, surprising findings, and handling project rejection.

Brett talks to Eva Ascarza about her paper “Retention Futility: Targeting High Risk Customers Might be Ineffective,” published in JMR in 2018. Eva is the Jakurski Family Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. She is a co-founder of the Customer Intelligence Lab at the D^3 Institute at HBS, and she is an expert on customer management. Share your thoughts about the show at HIWTpod@gmail.com -- Brett and Karen would love to hear from you!

"Publish or perish” — it’s a maxim that we academics live by. But how does a paper become a publication? How do researchers take a rough idea and craft it into a draft? And how do they navigate the publication process, with all the bumps and bruises along the way? In each episode of “How I Wrote This,” marketing professors Brett Gordon and Karen Winterich speak to the authors of an academic marketing paper to get the backstory of how that paper came to be.

In Episode 4, Karen talks with Andrea Webb Luangrath and Joann Peck about their 2022 paper  “Observing Product Touch: The Vicarious Haptic Effect in Digital Marketing and Virtual Reality”. After Andrea developed the idea in a doctoral seminar over a decade ago, the project hibernated for a few years before she and Joann brought it back to life. Knowing the paper addressed a relevant question digital marketers were interested in plus a theoretical gap, they’ll talk about how they pushed forward post-rejection and worked with coauthors William Hedgcock and Yixiang Xu to bring this now well-cited paper to publication.

Joining Brett this month are Stephan Seiler (Imperial College London), Anna Tuchman (Northwestern University), and Song Yao (Washington University in St. Louis) to talk about their paper, “The Impact of Soda Taxes: Pass-Through, Tax Avoidance, and Nutritional Effects,” published in the Journal of Marketing Research in 2021. Soda taxes are a relatively new phenomenon, and this paper was among the first to provide a rigorous evaluation of their efficacy. You’ll hear how the project came together and what the authors learned about handling feedback during the review process.

Maura Scott and Martin Mende discuss their research on service robots, including the challenges of transporting a 600-pound robot through NYC. They explain how they revised their paper based on reviewer feedback to increase the realism of their studies. The benefits of hiring actors for research consistency and their successful collaboration as married co-authors are also discussed. The importance of understanding the uncanny valley, defending their work against reviewers, and the managerial relevance and risks of service robots are explored.

Judy Chevalier and Dina Mayzlin discuss the impact of online book reviews on sales, starting the research project, conducting research on online reviews, the importance of simplicity in writing, and reflections on collaboration.