Katina Kulow

• University of Louisville

The use of social media influencers (SMIs) is of growing interest to advertisers as well as researchers. Though, to date, much research focuses on human influencers. Increasingly, advertising agencies and brands are turning to animal influencers to promote brands. Given the rise of the ‘petfluencer’, the authors investigate factors which could lead...

The use of influencer marketing campaigns has increased exponentially in recent years as brands have embraced such campaigns in order to capitalize on the relationships that social media influencers (SMIs) have built with their followers as a means of increasing brand awareness and sales. Although influencer marketing is extensively utilized in pra...

Does seeing a price in a physically low (vs. high) location prompt consumers to believe that the featured product is less costly? Recent research supports this possibility by showing that low price locations trigger “down=less” metaphors which prompt price perceptions that are monetarily “low” in magnitude. Extending such work, we offer a two‐stage...

Research has begun to examine if a price’s physical location—whether it is shown to the left versus right, or at the bottom versus top, of a marketing stimulus—can influence consumer judgment. Our research builds on initial evidence documenting the ability of a price’s low location to evoke “down = less” vertical metaphors that prompt perceptions o...

We examine decision-making under risk as a function of the degree to which consumers anthropomorphize their luck. We propose that consumers make riskier financial decisions when they anthropomorphize (vs. objectify) their luck and that this effect occurs because humanizing luck engenders a perceived sharing of risk in the presence of “lady luck.” A...

Can witnessing another individual commit a marketplace transgression (e.g., shoplifting) influence a consumer’s responsiveness to cause marketing (CM) offers? Four experiments demonstrate that consumers respond more favorably to CM offers as a means of atoning for another’s transgression. This vicarious moral compensation effect is observed only am...

The current research examines how products from personized sellers operate as a source of social support and solidarity for essential workers who are experiencing elevated levels of occupational stress since the advent of COVID-19. A series of experiments show that consumers who view themselves as essential workers prefer products from personized s...

Can spicy gustatory sensations increase variety-seeking in subsequent unrelated choices—and if so, how? The present research explores these questions. Based on the metaphor “variety is the spice of life,” and drawing on research on metaphors and embodied cognition, the authors propose that spicy gustatory sensations may activate a desire to be inte...

This research examines the implications of consumers’ belief in karma—the belief that the universe bestows rewards for doing right and exacts punishments for doing wrong—in the context of prosocial behavior. Although intuitively, believing in karma should result in greater intentions to do right by supporting a charity, karmic beliefs are found to...

Can spicy gustatory sensations increase variety-seeking? The present research explores this question. Based on the idiom “variety is the spice of life,” and drawing on research on embodied cognition and conceptual metaphors, we propose that spicy gustatory sensations can lead to increased variety in consumers’ subsequent choices because spiciness a...

Despite the ubiquity of fateful predictions in consumers' lives, little is known about how these forecasts impact subsequent choice. This research concerns fate as an inevitable outcome and posits that consumers who believe in fate have an implicit theory about the nature of fate, such that some consider that their fate is preordained and outside o...