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Debbie MacInnis is the Charles L. and Ramona I. Hilliard Professor of Business Administration and Emerita Professor of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. She is an expert on consumer behavior and branding. She is a Fellow of the American Marketing Association, the Association for Consumer Research, and the Society for Consumer Psychology. She has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Marketing Association’s Consumer Behavior Special Interest Group and the Faculty Lifetime Achievement Award from the University of Southern California. She has received numerous awards for her academic articles. Debbie has served as Coeditor and Associate Editor for Journal of Consumer Research and Associate Editor for JOURNAL OF MARKETING and Journal of Consumer Psychology.
Debbie is coauthor of a leading textbook on consumer behavior, several edited volumes on branding, and a book on developing, enhancing, and leveraging brand admiration. She is former Treasurer and President of the Association for Consumer Research, former Vice President of Conferences and Research for the American Marketing Association’s Academic Council, and former President of the AMA’s Consumer Behavior Special Interest Group. Debbie is the winner of local and national teaching awards, and she has also served the Marshall School of Business as Vice Dean of Research and Strategy and Vice Dean of the Undergraduate Program. She has also received the USC Mellon mentoring award for her mentoring work with faculty. Her consulting includes work with major consumer goods companies, branding agencies, and advertising agencies.
NEWS + EVENTS
Top Honor for Marshall Marketing Scholar
Deborah MacInnis named an American Marketing Association Fellow.
RESEARCH + PUBLICATIONS
New products can evoke anticipatory emotions such as hope and anxiety. On the one hand, consumers might hope that innovative offerings will produce goal-congruent outcomes; on the other hand, they might also be anxious about possible outcomes that are goal-incongruent. The authors[MK1] demonstrate the provocative and counterintuitive finding that strong anxiety about potentially goal-incongruent outcomes from a new product actually enhances (vs. weakens) consequential adoption intentions (Study 1) and actual adoption (Studies 2 and 3) when hope is also strong. The authors test action planning (a form of elaboration) and perceived control over outcomes as serial mediators to explain this effect. They find that the proposed mechanism holds even after they consider alternative explanations, including pain/gain inferences, confidence in achieving goal-congruent outcomes, global elaboration, affective forecasts, and motivated reasoning. Managerially, the findings suggest that when bringing a new product to market, new product adoption may be greatest when hope and anxiety are both strong. The findings also point to ways in which marketers might enhance hope and/or anxiety, and they suggest that the use of potentially anxiety-inducing tactics such as disclaimers in ads and on packages might not deter adoption when hope is also strong.
Consumer research often fails to have a broad impact on members of the marketing discipline, on adjacent disciplines studying related phenomena, and on relevant stakeholders who stand to benefit from the knowledge created by rigorous research. The authors[MK1] propose that impact is limited because consumer researchers have adhered to a set of implicit boundaries or defaults regarding what consumer researchers study, why they study it, and how they do so. The authors identify these boundaries and describe how they can be challenged. By detailing five impactful articles and identifying others, they show that boundary-breaking, marketing-relevant consumer research can influence [MK2] relevant stakeholders including academics in marketing and allied disciplines as well as a wide range of marketplace actors (e.g., business practitioners, policymakers, the media, society). Drawing on these articles, the authors articulate what researchers can do to break boundaries and enhance the impact of their research. They also indicate why engaging in boundary-breaking work and enhancing the breadth of marketing’s influence is good for both individual researchers and the fields of consumer research and marketing.
The authors test five theoretically-derived hypotheses about what drives sharing of video ads across social media. Two independent field studies test these hypotheses using 11 measures of emotion and over 60 ad characteristics. The results are consistent with theory and robust across studies. Information-focused content has a significantly negative effect on sharing, except in risky contexts. Positive emotions of amusement, excitement, inspiration, and warmth, positively affect sharing. Various drama elements such as surprise, plot, and characters, including babies, animals, and celebrities arouse emotions. Prominent (early versus late, long vs short duration, persistent versus pulsing) placement of brand names hurts sharing. Emotional ads are shared more on general platforms (Facebook, Google+, Twitter) than on LinkedIn; the reverse holds for informational ads. Sharing is also greatest when ad length is moderate (1.2 to 1.7 minutes). Contrary to these findings, ads use information more than emotions, celebrities more than babies or animals, prominent brand placement, little surprise, and very short or very long ads. A third study shows that the identified drivers predict sharing fairly well in an entirely independent sample.