Joseph Nunes

The literature is filled with numerous idiosyncratic definitions of what it means for consumption to be authentic. The authors address the resulting conceptual ambiguity by re-conceptualizing authenticity, defining it as a holistic consumer assessment determined by six component judgements (accuracy, connectedness, integrity, legitimacy, originality, and proficiency) whereby the role of each component can change based on the consumption context. This definition emerges from a two-stage, multi-method concept reconstruction process leveraging data from more than 3,000 consumers across no less than 17 different types of consumption experiences. In stage one, they take a qualitative approach employing both in-depth interviews and surveys (one conducted on a nationally representative sample) to identify authenticity’s six constituent components. The final components are based on themes emerging from consumer data that were integrated and reconciled with existing definitions in the literature. In stage two, quantitative analyses empirically estimate the six components and support the composite formative nature of the construct. While the authors document how certain components contribute to assessments of authenticity differently across contexts, they also show authenticity has consumer-relevant downstream consequences while being conceptually distinct from consumer attitudes. Their findings offer practitioners direction regarding what to emphasize in order to convey authenticity to consumers.

Mastering aesthetics is a precious source of competitive advantage in creative industries. In fashion, innovation is reflected by how and how much styles change. Elite designers claim to be the only endogenous force shaping fashion innovation season by season. Yet, each season, fashion critics vet the new collections these designers introduce, assessing what is original as opposed to reworked and uninspired, in this way playing a fundamental role as gatekeepers in setting taste within the industry. In this research, we document how stylistic innovation, vis-a-vis the styles premier design houses introduced each ` season, is impacted, among the others, by the specific exogenous force of critics’ assessments of designers’ past work. Our data, which include 61 measures detailing the styles introduced by 38 prestigious Italian and French design houses over a nine-year period, suggest designers move further away from styles reviewed less favourably while adhering more closely to styles reviewed more positively. Additionally, the styles a designer introduces are shown to depend on critical assessments of competing designers’ styles, revealing how design houses attend to each other’s work. This work documents the strong correlation between style dynamics and critics’ feedback. It also has important implications for any company trying to find a balance between independence and conformity in setting its own unique positioning into the market.

This work investigates self-promotion partitioning, a strategy used in group conversations by self-promoters trying to overcome the self-promotion dilemma – a desire to share self-enhancing information without appearing to be overtly bragging. Self-promotion partitioning occurs when individuals partition their audience by addressing one or more specific recipients, deliberately turning unaddressed recipients into “bystanders.” Across a series of experiments and the analysis of secondary data, we show people disproportionally favor partitioning their audience when they face the self-promotion dilemma, both in face-to-face conversations and on social media platforms. They do so because they expect bystanders to believe they were not intended recipients, and in turn be less likely to see the self-promoter as overtly bragging, resulting in a more favorable impression. We also identify an important boundary condition, audience size; when partitioning creates a single bystander, the self-promoter worries partitioning would make the lone bystander feel excluded and ultimately hurt impressions.

Abstract The appearance of songs including featured artists on Billboard’s Hot 100 music charts has increased exponentially in the past two decades. This particular type of creative collaboration involves one artist integrating another artist’s contribution, either instrumentally or vocally, into their work and publicizing it with a “featuring” credit. According to broad literature in sociology on categorical boundaries, artists who deviate from existing genres are expected to be penalized for violating collective expectations and norms. We find songs featuring other artists actually have a greater likelihood of making it into the top 10 than songs not featuring other artists. Additionally, consistent with theorizing about congruency in the co-branding literature, we observe that the greater the difference (cultural distance) between the genres of the artists involved, the more likely the song is to reach the top of the charts. We argue that by combining the expertise of specialists in each genre, as well as comingling audiences while still maintaining each collaborator’s original positioning, artists who feature artists from other genres are able to produce more successful songs.