Interview: Kristin Diehl on KCRW's Press Play (Los Angeles)
DIEHL, professor of marketing, was a guest on KCRW's Press Play discussing the record Black Friday sales and the rising of consumer confidence in recent weeks.
Kristin Diehl's research examines how people anticipate, experience, and remember events that unfold over time. In particular, she is interested in how taking photos during such experiences affects consumers’ enjoyment and memories of the experience. She also studies how consumers search for and use product information, particularly in environments where search costs are low, assortments are large, and recommendation tools may be available.
Professor Diehl has published, among others, in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Psychological Science. In 2010, she received the Early Career Award from the Association for Consumer Research.
Professor Diehl is President-elect of the Association for Consumer Research and a member of the Editorial Review Boards of the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing, and the Journal of Consumer Psychology.
Professor Diehl teaches classes on consumer behavior and consumer insight. Previously, she taught at the University of South Carolina and Duke University.
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INSIGHT + ANALYSIS
Interview: Kristin Diehl on KCRW's Press Play (Los Angeles)
DIEHL, professor of marketing, was a guest on KCRW's Press Play discussing the record Black Friday sales and the rising of consumer confidence in recent weeks.
Interview: Kristin Diehl on Marketplace
DIEHL, professor of marketing, tells Marketplace that pre-Black Friday bargains entice self-gifting as consumers shop early and often throughout the holiday sales season.
Cited: Kristin Diehl and Davide Proserpio in Psychology Today
Psychology Today cites research from DIEHL, professor of marketing, and PROSERPIO, associate professor of marketing, finding consumers react more positively to online reviews that include accompanying photos.
Cited: Kristin Diehl in More Time to Travel
More Time to Travel cites research by DIEHL, professor of marketing, studying how taking photos affects a person’s experience and enjoyment of an activity.
NEWS + EVENTS
Marshall Faculty Publications, Awards, and Honors: February 2025
We are proud to highlight the many accomplishments of Marshall’s exceptional faculty recognized for recently accepted and published research and achievements in their field.
USC Marshall in the Media: December 2024
USC Marshall School of Business faculty are featured in national and regional publications as thought leaders and experts in their fields.
Marshall Faculty Publications, Awards, and Honors: November 2024
We are proud to highlight the many accomplishments of Marshall’s exceptional faculty recognized for recently accepted and published research and achievements in their field.
Marshall Faculty Publications, Awards, and Honors: August 2023
We are proud to highlight the amazing Marshall faculty who have received awards this month for their groundbreaking work.
Marshall Faculty Publications, Awards, and Honors: April 2023
We are proud to highlight the amazing Marshall faculty who have received awards this month for their groundbreaking work!
RESEARCH + PUBLICATIONS
Consumers lose more weight when they log their food consumption more consistently, yet they face challenges in doing so. We investigate how the modality of food logging—whether people record what they eat by taking photos versus writing text—affects their anticipated and actual logging experience and behavior. We find that consumers are more likely to adopt and anticipate better experiences with photo-based food logging tools over text-based tools. However, in a weeklong field study, these expectations reveal themselves to be inaccurate; once participants start logging, they find taking photos (versus writing text) to be more difficult, log less of what they eat, and are less likely to continue using the logging tool. These findings contribute to existing research on how people track goal progress, as well as persistence with and dis-adoption of products. Moreover, our findings provide insights into what might increase the use of products that encourage healthy eating.
The impact of technology on mindfulness is theoretically and practically important. We propose that photo-taking can naturally promote mindful attention to visual aspects of experiences. Such mindful photo-taking can increase enjoyment of and memory for experiences, generate positive mood, and heighten life-satisfaction. When people adopt a social or temporal outward-focused perspective, threats to mindful photo-taking may negate these positive consequences. A social outward-focus can arise when considering others’ evaluations of shared photos. A temporal outward-focus can arise with the principal objective and outcome of photo-taking: creating durable visual representations of experiences. Ultimately, reviewing photos provides visual memory cues, can improve memory, and allows people to reminiscence, although these benefits depends on the stock of accumulated photos.
Social media may encourage novel ways of signaling that involve different purchase types (experiential vs. material), signaling frequencies (multiple vs. single signals) and other features unique to social media (e.g., hashtags). This work examines how purchase signals are received on social media and how these signaling variations affect signal receivers’ perceptions of the authenticity of social media posts as well as the overall impressions receivers form of the signal sender. Data collected across six experiments shows multiple material purchase signals lead to more negative impressions compared to multiple experiential purchase signals. Signal receivers perceive multiple material purchase posts as less authentic, which dampens their impressions of the signal sender. In line with this mechanism, the impression premium of experiential purchase signals disappears when receivers use other cues (monetary mentions, other users’ comments, and marketer associations via hashtags) to infer a signal’s lack of authenticity. Additional data also documents downstream consequences on engagement. This work contributes theoretically to research in both signaling and social media and improves the understanding of substantive situations in which consumers’ objectives of curating a positive image and creating engagement with their posts, collide with marketers’ objectives of encouraging user-generated content and word of mouth.
The role of duration in the evaluation of experiences has been a topic of great interest. Extensive research finds “duration neglect,” defined as the duration of experiences exerting only a negligible direct effect on overall evaluations of experiences over that of key moments, usually peak and end. In contrast, we argue that the temporal location of key moments that are embedded in an experience affects how people experience these key moments. Thus, duration enters overall evaluations indirectly through the experience of key moments. Seven studies, as well as three supplementary studies, employing diverse designs and analyses find that temporal location affects the evaluation of peak and end, and consequently duration has a significant indirect effect on overall evaluations, while also replicating duration neglect. Establishing duration-dependent key moments in the evaluation of experiences, our account also uniquely predicts, and we subsequently test, that the temporal location of key moments matters for evaluations of experiences.
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