Marketing Seminar series : Talk by Professor Piyush Kumar ,Professor of Marketing - Wharton School of Business/ Terry College of Business,University of Georgia

Title: "An Investigation into the Impact of Alternative Ingredient Strategies on Consumers’ Brand Evaluations"

 

 

Abstract: 

 

This paper investigates the impact of promoting added versus subtracted product ingredients on consumers’ brand evaluations.  It proposes a new counter-inferencing process according to which the addition versus subtraction of ingredients has an asymmetric effect on brand evaluations that is moderated by the match between the regulatory orientation of the host brand’s product category and the ingredient strategy deployed.  The results from a series of studies are consistent with this process and also show that the effect of a brand’s ingredient strategy spills over to affect consumers’ evaluation of a competing brand that does not deploy an ingredient strategy.  Based on these results, the paper provides guidelines for selecting category-specific ingredient strategies and raises a global call to prevent consumer deception by regulating not only added ingredients but subtracted ingredients as well.