How I Wrote This

A single demographic statistic about car leasing. That's all it took to spark a fascinating research journey into how the perceived stability of our romantic relationships shape the products we choose to rent versus own. In this episode, Yuechen Wu joins JMR Co-Editor Karen Winterich to reveal the story behind "Who Will I Be Without You? Consequences of Perceived Romantic Relationship Status Stability on Product Rentals." From that initial nugget of curiosity to navigating the challenges of the review process, Yuechen and co-authors Jared Watson and Ali Faraji-Rad share how persistence—and friendship—can transform a curious observation into groundbreaking consumer research.

Have you ever been inspired to study a research problem, only to hear: “How is that relevant to marketing?” Such was the case for Muzeeb Shaik who wanted to understand if the impacts of fatal shool shootings extended to the marketplace. In this episode, JMR Co-Editor Karen Winterich talks with Muzeeb, John Costello, and Adithya Pattabhiramaiah to learn how they were able to build on initial data showing decreased grocery purchases to identify that heightened anxiety for consumption in public spaces not only impacts grocery purchases but also spending at food and beverage places, leading to their JMR article coauthored with Mike Palazzolo and Hari Sridhar.

You might talk slang with your friends, but what happens when brands try using slang? In this episode, JMR Co-Editor Karen Winterich talks with Bryce Pyrah and Alice Wang about their article, The Slang Paradox: Connecting or Disconnecting with Consumers?, coauthored with Yiyi Li and Ying Xie. Hear how Alice decided to give the idea a chance even though she was uncertain at first and how Bryce has already learned the importance of perseverance in Episode 21. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Does the content of a news article influence the effectiveness of ads placed within it? In this episode, JMR Co-Editor Brett Gordon discusses the recently published paper, “Attention Spillovers from News to Ads: Evidence from an Eye-Tracking Experiment,” with authors Andrewy Simonov (Columbia Business School),Tommaso Valletti, and Andre Veiga (both from Imperial College Business School). The idea for the paper was born in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the researchers learned that some advertisers were using “block lists” to prevent their ads from appearing on publishers' websites with pandemic-related news content. Did the advertisers have a point? Or, they wondered, might this be based on a misunderstanding of how we, the audience, actually engage with content and the ads that appear alongside it?

Every business knows that customers who spend more in the past usually spend more in the future. But what if there are some products for which the opposite is true? That is, seeing a customer buy one of these categories means they are less–not more–likely to return to you. JMR Co-editor Brett Gordon speaks with Ayelet Israeli (HBS) and Eric Anderson (Kellogg) to learn about “canary categories,” as in “canary in a coalmine,” which predict exactly this type of behavior. Tune in to learn more about how the authors navigated a complex revision journey.

In part to of this special mini episode. Brett and Karen break down the review process and share insights from two current JMR reviewers.

Brett Gordon sits down with JP Dube and Günter Hitsch from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and Peter Rossi from the UCLA Anderson School of Management. They discuss their influential paper, “Do Switching Costs Make Markets Less Competitive?” Since the 1960s, marketing and economics scholars have studied switching costs, with theoretical literature largely suggesting that these costs lead to higher prices among competing firms. However, when these three researchers conducted an empirical analysis, they found surprising results that challenged the prevailing wisdom. Join them as they share how their project evolved over time, including their measured response to critical feedback and how they expanded their initial scope of inquiry.

Brett talks to Ankit Sisodia, Alex Burnap and Vineet Kumar about their forthcoming JMR paper “Generative Interpretable Visual Design: Using Disentanglement for Visual Conjoint Analysis.”

In the final episode of season 1, JMR Co-Editor Brett Gordon speaks with Yufeng Huang, Paul Ellickson, and Mitch Lovett about their paper Learning to Set Prices.

In Episode 8, JMR Co-editor Karen Winterich talks with Joyce Liu and Anirban Mukhopadhyay from Bayes Business School, City, University of London about how they, along with coauthor Amy Dalton, developed an idea from movie night into a JMR publication, “Favorite Possessions Protect Subjective Well-Being Under Income Inequality”. The article finds effects of income inequality on feelings of deprivation can be attenuated by focusing on a favorite possession, but we’ll hear how the idea started out with a different focus before the role of favorite possessions became clear. You’ll want to listen to learn why the final submission of this article is unforgettable for one of the authors plus how the nuggets they uncovered along the way shaped the paper. Listen on Apple, Google, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the podcast on Twitter (@HIWTPod) or visit the podcast’s homepage.

In Episode 6, JMR Coeditor Karen Winterich talks with Kaitlin Woollley, Associate Professor of Marketing at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, and Peggy Liu, Ben L. Fryrear Chair in Marketing and Associate Professor of Business Administration at the University of Pittsburgh Katz Graduate School of Business about how they, along with co-author Daniella Kupor, developed the idea for their 2023 paper, “Does Company Size Shape Product Quality Inferences? Larger Companies Make Better High-Tech Products, but Smaller Companies Make Better Low-Tech Products”. As the title implies, this intriguing article explains why consumers perceive high-tech products to be higher quality when made from large companies and the opposite for low-tech products. The article took shape from a slightly different idea that was just one of three ideas these friends turned co-authors were exploring out of a motivation to find a project to work on together. Drawing upon each author's strengths and speedy turnaround time, they went from idea nugget to published article in seemingly record time.

"Publish or perish” — it’s a maxim that we academics live by. But how does a paper become a publication? How do researchers take a rough idea and craft it into a draft? And how do they navigate the publication process, with all the bumps and bruises along the way? In each episode of “How I Wrote This,” marketing professors Brett Gordon and Karen Winterich speak to the authors of an academic marketing paper to get the backstory of how that paper came to be.