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Companies in the twenty first century are exposed to a variety of pressures to respond to environmental issues and responding to these pressures affects several aspects of business such as purchasing, marketing and logistics. Conventional wisdom regarding the incorporation of sustainability posits sustainability as a tradeoff with other corporate goals; however, during the last decade, this paradigm has been challenged by a view that proposes this incorporation as a complementary strategy, or even as an opportunity. Understanding how firms integrate environmental issues into their corporate agendas and how these integration strategies affect performance has become very important. The process of sustainable new product development (SNPD) is one of the core areas that these strategies focus on in order to achieve economic and environmental sustainability. This thesis investigates the integration of environmental specialists into SNPD teams and the relative influence of motivational factors of environmental strategy development and the structural relationship of how they affect the performance of SNPD. It relies on two main research streams: work on sustainable management and conventional new product development. The first essay examines the integration of environmental specialists into new product development teams that are composed of several other functional specialists such as marketing, manufacturing, and R&D personnel, and its impact on SNPD performance across three stages: (1) concept development (CD) (e.g., the generation and refinement of new product ideas, market analysis, preparation of product concepts), (2) product development (PD) (e.g., actual technical product development, execution of prototype tests, test marketing), and (3) product commercialization (PC) (e.g., market launches, training, after-sales support). In this paper, we draw upon resource dependency theory as our theoretical background. We present evidence that, integrating an environmental specialist into a new product team has a positive influence on SNPD project performance beyond what the traditional members of such a team would accomplish. Through analyzing this relationship across the stages of SNPD, we gained a clearer picture of the effectiveness of this integration. In particular, the integration of the environmental specialist was more effective on SNPD project performance in the final stage of the SNPD process when the product was being launched. This effect is even greater for high-innovative projects. The second essay investigates the different motivations that drive firms to adopt environmental marketing strategies and their relative impact on new product advantage and SNPD performance. Theoretically grounded in Stakeholder Theory and the Resource - Based View of the Firm Theory, a conceptual framework was developed that portrays the antecedents and consequences of environmental marketing strategy. In regard to the antecedents of environmental marketing strategy, we examined the drivers of environmental marketing strategy development: public concern, regulatory pressures and market opportunity. The results showed that developing environmental strategies that exceed regulations (proactive strategies) leads to better new product performance than only adhering to regulations (reactive strategies). In addition, the results showed that commitment from top management becomes critical only for proactive strategies, not for reactive strategies. Finally, in regard to the consequences, we found that environmental marketing strategies lead to new product advantage and in turn, better sustainable new product performance. This thesis fills a gap in the literature with respect to the lack of conceptual and empirical contributions on the integration of sustainability issues into the new product development process, by aiming to provide new insights into how firms are integrating environmental specialists into their new product development teams and by extending our knowledge of how firms develop environmental marketing strategies and how these strategies affect new product performance. / Business Administration/Marketing

This two essay dissertation explores the impact that various types of consumer insecurity have on response to and evaluation of products. Consumer insecurity has long been noted as an influence on consumption behavior; however, this research examines it from two specific angles – materialism level and economic insecurity level of the consumer. Literature suggests that one of the major antecedents of materialism is insecurity. Therefore, Essay 1 focuses on the impact that consumers’ materialism levels have on the evaluation of a sustainable luxury product. Five experiments demonstrate that although the product is originally valued less than its traditional counterpart, positioning it as essentially providing the same status benefits as its non-sustainable counterpart increased its value amongst materialistic consumers. Promoting the ethicality of the sustainable luxury product actually hurt its valuation amongst consumers high in materialism. Essay 2 examines the effect that economic insecurity has on consumer response to products. This research suggests that economically insecure consumers notice the brand gendered characteristics of products more so in comparison to more economically secure consumers. Initial support is also found for an association between more economically insecure consumers and a preference for gendered products. The results of both essays demonstrate the noticeable effects that feelings of insecurity have on consumer responses to products. / Business Administration/Marketing

This two essays dissertation proposes that an in-store display condition continuum––from disarrayed to neatly organized––exists as a function of consumers touching product displays in stores and store employees straightening the impacted displays, and that shopping behavior is negatively impacted at both the neat and disarray ends of the display condition continuum. This dissertation examines the interaction of visual and haptic sensory stimuli on consumer behaviors while examining folded apparel display, as apparel products are easily disturbed by daily shopping activities from being fabricated from materials not rigid enough to hold shapes. Essay 1 examines the impact of display disarray. Four experiments and a field study in a major retailer demonstrate that color preferences shift and product sales decline significantly for darker, but not brighter, color products when previously touched by others. The conceptual model builds on the contamination, disgust, and color literatures. Essay 2 proposes that some consumers who desire to touch neat product displays also feel anxious and uncomfortable touching neatly organized displays. Four competing theories, which are tested across five studies, are developed from the sociology social identity, social phobia, and social norms literatures, haptic sensory literature, environmental criminology literature, and management and marketing perceived ownership literature. Thus, this research suggests that apparel retailers may benefit by allowing their folded displays to appear slightly touched by shoppers. However, apparel retailers should keep the darker products neatly folded, as product selection and overall product sales decrease when the lower brightness product exhibit cues of being previously touched. / Business Administration/Marketing

Mobile technology is changing the way consumers consume content and connect with others. At the same time, marketers admit that effectively implementing mobile targeting and promoting deals through mobile devices remains a challenge. To address these challenges and reveal consumer insights in the mobile marketing space, I propose a research stream via three essays that investigate the contextual factors that influence consumer receptivity to mobile messages. One of these factors is environmental contexts, such as the crowdedness of a consumer's environment, which is the focus of the first essay. Another factor is the context of social cues and the framing of the mobile message itself, which is the focus of the second essay. Yet another factor is whether the promoted product has social value beyond the consumption value itself, which is the focus of the third essay. How contextual factors may influence consumer receptivity to targeted mobile promotions is complex and is explored in detail in the following studies. / Business Administration/Marketing

Although prior studies have widely examined how descriptions of task environment influence consumer preference, the effect of procedure elicitation methods on consumer preference have not yet been explored thoroughly. To address this issue, this three-essay dissertation investigates the effect of preference elicitation methods on consumer preference in three different domains: anchoring, risky choice and decision framing. This dissertation also uses a multi-method approach that includes behavioral experiments, meta-analysis, p-curve analysis, eye-tracking, and computational modeling to deeply understand the impact, robustness, and underlying processes of procedural manipulations in the three domains. The overall results show that changes in decision processes not only affect consumer preference immediately in all three domains, but also have long-term effects. Critically, these findings imply that the impact of procedural manipulations on consumer preference is robust and is not a short-term distortion of preference. Thus, marketers and policy makers can utilize different procedural elicitation methods to shape long-term consumer preferences, and need to consider decision procedure in setting up marketing strategies. Limitations and future research directions are discussed in the last chapter of the dissertation. / Business Administration/Marketing

This two-essay dissertation explores how sensory aspects of consumption (e.g., food packaging and food texture) influence consumer well-being. Consumers make more than 200 decisions about food every day (HealthDay 2007). Thus, it is of great importance to understand consumers’ relationships with foods (Block 2013). Essay 1 is the first research, to the best of my knowledge, to demonstrate packaging gloss biases consumers’ healthfulness perceptions and, as a result, food preference, choice, and consumption. Nine experiments, including a field experiment, show that people have learned to associate glossy surfaces on snack food packages with unhealthy products, whereas matte surfaces signal with healthier products. We further demonstrate that such associations are due to sensation transference triggered by packaging gloss and are especially true for restrained eaters, who are more sensitive to food healthfulness cues (e.g., Irmak, Vallen, and Rozin 2011). Essay 2 examines the effect of food textures (e.g., crunchy versus chewy) on consumers’ psychological arousal levels. Results from four experiments and a field experiment show that chewing crunchy (versus chewy) foods lead to increased physiological arousal levels, and consumers strategically choose foods as a function of different textures (e.g., crunchy or chewy) to regulate their physiological arousal levels. Specifically, when people want to feel more awake and energetic, they are more likely to choose crunchy snacks over chewy snacks, whereas when they want to feel calmer and more relaxed, they are more likely to opt for chewy snacks. The results of both essays demonstrate the noticeable effects that sensory aspects of consumption (e.g., food packaging and food texture) have on consumers’ biological and psychological welfare. / Business Administration/Marketing

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The formation of a consumer's brand related schemas results from prior exposure to brand information through advertising, product experience and other sources. A framework based on categorization theory, priming and the advertising/evidence interaction research, investigates the effect of arousal of schema based expectations on consumer evaluative judgments. The two step model in advertising/evidence interaction research suggests that advertising at first arouses tentative expectations because of the partisan nature of the source. In the second step, the credibility of such ad-induced expectations are evaluated using available evidence in the form of product search and experience to influence evaluative judgments of quality. Priming increases the accessibility of a conceptual category, thereby increasing the likelihood of the use of that category to encode new information. The main argument, is that priming with a brand/logo (well known brand prime, unknown brand prime or no prime) activates brand based schemas and arouses expectations similar to ad-based expectations about the brand. The focus of this research is to show that schema based expectations aroused through priming, in conjunction with evidence about product performance (which may be ambiguous or unambiguous), influence brand evaluations and judgments of quality. Priming effects are predicted to be similar for repeat purchase and expensive durable products. Higher levels of attitude and intentions are predicted with "well known brand primes" than an "unknown brand prime". Information processing differences between concept driven (or top-down) and data driven (or bottom-up) processes are also predicted. Data collected from student samples shows support for the main hypothesis--that schema-based expectations aroused through priming interacts with product evidence on quality judgments. The effect is however strongest for unknown brand primes than well known brand primes showing that priming with unknown brand primes may be more successful. Subjects showed equal levels of satisfaction of information provided across the two product classes. Attitudes were also more positive with "well known primes" than with "unknown brand primes". Surprisingly, unambiguous product evidence did not lead to greater confidence in judgments than ambiguous evidence. Partial support was found for information processing differences across the prime and evidence conditions.

A creator platform utilizes marketing tools and pricing policies to maximize customer acquisition and revenue, with trade-offs among the creators, their audience, and the platform itself. In chapter “Referral Program Design”, we focus on how a platform can leverage a referral program to acquire new subscribers and maximize profit, and quantify the financial consequences of referral marketing with a structural model. The return from implementing a referral program for the creator is a function of the size of the monetary reward for successful referrals, and the price charged for new subscriptions. We find a substantial contribution of applying referral marketing to creators’ revenue, but this varies for specific types of content with different referral effectiveness and operation costs. Further, we document inverted-U shaped relationships for profit and demand as the size of referral rewards increase. Using counterfactual analysis, we highlight the disparity of profit-optimizing referral marketing design between creators and the platform since creators focus on short term profit while the platform focuses on long run user base growth. In chapter “Platform Commission Design”, we study the impact of platform commission changes on creators’ pricing decisions and quality. The same creator platform underwent significant adjustments to its commission policy. In August 2019, the platform increased its commission from 5% to 20% for all creators, and later allowed eligible creators to revert to the original 5% commission. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we examine the consequences of subsidizing eligible creators with a lower commission, and find a significant price increase induced by the commission cut, which contrasts sharply with classic prediction from third-degree price discrimination. If the initial commission increase altered market concentration, the subsequent reduction in commission could incentivize some creators to raise prices in order to reveal their status as high-quality content providers. This study suggests that changes in commission should be approached with caution due to their irreversible effects. Increasing commission while discriminating against a segment of creators shifts content and price distribution, potentially disadvantaging subscribers and reducing their welfare.