Over the last 15 years, digital media platforms have revolutionized marketing, offering new ways to reach, inform, engage, sell to, learn about, and provide service to customers. As a means of taking stock of academic work’s ability to contribute to this revolution, this article tracks the...

The call for papers for this special issue of the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research began with this vignette: “A street scene in New York, Shanghai or Moscow today differs from the same scene in 2005 in one particular respect: today most of the pedestrians, some of the cyclists,...

Today’s consumers are immersed in a vast and complex array of networks. Each network features an interconnected mesh of people and firms, and now, with the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), also objects. Technology (particularly mobile devices) enables such connections, and facilitates...

Does your company have consumer data it isn’t legally authorized to possess? Don’t be too quick to answer. Many ethical, lawfully-managed businesses do have such data and it comes from a surprising source: their customers, who inadvertently share the personal data of their peers, such as...

People share billions of pieces of content such as news, videos, and photos through social media every day. Marketers are interested in the extent to which such content propagates and, importantly, which factors make widespread propagation more likely. Extant research considers various factors,...

This research considers how marketers can encourage or “nudge” consumers to transmit word of mouth (WOM), such as referrals or recommendations to friends, in a manner that helps reach, inform, or influence large numbers of consumers quickly, which is an outcome referred to as faster...

Consumers frequently express themselves by posting about products in social media. As consumers can use physical products to signal their identities, posting products in social media may be a way for consumers to virtually signal identity. Paradoxically, we propose that there are conditions...

This research considers how marketers can encourage or “nudge” consumers to transmit word of mouth (WOM), such as referrals or recommendations to friends, in a manner that helps reach, inform, or influence large numbers of consumers quickly, which is an outcome referred to as faster...

In the context of user-generated content (UGC), mobile devices have made it easier for consumers to review products and services in a timely manner. In practice, some UGC sites differentiate between reviews posted from mobile versus non-mobile devices. For example, TripAdvisor uses a “via...

Consumers have become always on and constantly connected. Search costs have plummeted, individuals’ abilities to digitally express themselves and their opinions increased, and the opportunities for superior business and market intelligence for companies have skyrocketed. This has given rise to...