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.

Marketers commonly seed information about products and brands through individuals believed to be influential on social media,which often involves enlisting micro influencers, users who have accumulated thousands as opposed to millions of followers (i.e.,other users who have subscribed to see that individual’s posts). Given an abundance of micro influencers to choose from, cuesthat help distinguish more versus less effective influencers on social media are of increasing interest to marketers. The authorsidentify one such cue: the number of users the prospective influencer is following. Using a combination of real-world data analysisand controlled lab experiments, they show that following fewer others, conditional on having a substantial number of followers,has a positive effect on a social media user’s perceived influence. Further, the authors find greater perceived influence impactsengagement with the content shared in terms of other users exhibiting more favorable attitudes toward it (i.e., likes) and a greaterpropensity to spread it (i.e., retweets). They identify a theoretically important mechanism underlying the effect: following fewerothers conveys greater autonomy, a signal of influence in the eyes of others.