Michael R Hyman

Institute for Marketing Futurology and Philosophy · None

For various reasons, survey participants may submit phoney attitudinal self-reports meant to bypass researcher scepticism. After suggesting reasons for this new category of problematic survey participant – the mischievous respondent (MR) – and reviewing related response bias, faking, inattentive respondent and outlier literatures, an initial algori...

Structured Abstract: Purpose: Given their expense, the psycho-dynamic they induce among many viewers, and the lack of empirical evidence for their efficacy, studies to assess anti-child-abuse ad campaigns are warranted. As a preliminary foray into this research domain, this study explores a dual-pro-cess model for a single ad from the NSPCC's FULL...

Although ads with subtle racist imagery can reinforce negative stereotypes, advertisers can eliminate this problem. After a brief overview of predominantly U.S.-based research on the racial mix of models/actors in ads, a theoretical framework for unmasking subtle racial bias is provided and dimensional qualitative research (DQR) is introduced as a...

Purpose Sport celebrities often endorse their team, their sport, and non‐sports‐related products. Increased idolizing of sport celebrities by adolescents is one artifact of this promotional practice. Although seemingly innocuous, adolescents who idolize sport celebrities may, as adults, come to worship such celebrities; this unhealthy obsession may...

China is now a world-leading e-commerce market. As a result, studies to deconstruct online relationships in China can inform marketing scholarship and practice. Hence, our primary goal is to create an improved e-tailing-centric e-guanxi scale to assess guanxi in online B2C and C2C commerce contexts. We also explore and confirm the factors contribut...

In their article entitled “AI is Changing the World: For Better or for Worse?” Grewal, Guha, and Becker imply two symptom-avoidance rather than goal-approach questions: (1) What fundamental societal problems, previously identified in the marketing literature, will AI exacerbate? and (2) How can society remedy these problems? By only considering art...

Neither the deontology-teleology dichotomy central to Western-grounded business ethics models nor reductionist Taoist and Confucian approaches fully consider the contextualized meanings, underlying mechanisms, and shifting connotations inherent to Chinese business ethics. The posited synthetic framework includes the multifaceted sources, norms, an...

Most proposed remedies to the social and medical sciences' 'replication crisis', like more open and transparent research, more published conceptual and exact/direct/close replication studies, or more demanding manuscript requirements and peer reviews, are problematic because they are beatable and excessively burden researchers. Thus, they are poor...

Purpose This study examines how informal business networks achieve marketing goals in socially uncertain contexts. Drawing from multiple historical sources, Shangbangs, a type of business network that thrived in pre-1949 China, are analyzed. Design/methodology/approach The Critical Historical Research Method (CHRM) undergirds a study of Shangbangs...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical historical analysis of the business (mis)behaviors and influencing factors that discourage enduring cooperation between principals and agents, to introduce strategies that embrace the social values, economic motivation and institutional designs historically adopted to curtail dishonest acts...

Call for submissions to a special issue of the Journal of Macromarketing

Marketing regulations are warranted when unfettered marketing practices compromise many people's positive and negative liberties. We elucidate these liberties’ multifaceted but interdependent connotations for societally justified marketing regulations from a novel framework integrating the social sciences, philosophy, history, and marketing. The li...

Data from a 1990s study of North Texas consumers.

The generally small but touted as "statistically significant" correlation coefficients in the social sciences jeopardize theory testing and prediction. To investigate these small coefficients' underlying causes, traditional equations such as Spearman's (1904) classic attenuation formula, Cronbach's (1951) alpha, and Guilford and Fruchter's (1973) e...

Purpose This special issue explores how marketing thought and practice have contributed to systemic racism but could alleviate racially insensitive and biased practices. An introductory historical overview briefly discusses coloniality, capitalism, eugenics, modernism, transhumanism, neo-liberalism, and liquid racism. Then, the special issue articl...

Consumer research about interruptions either assumes interruption homogeneity or single‐product evaluations. To remedy these problematic assumptions, this research explores the interplay between different interruption features (i.e., timing, frequency, and duration) and information processing modes (i.e., on‐line versus memory‐based) through the le...

In their introductory marketing, management, and social psychology courses, undergraduates learn that correlation coefficients provide weak evidence for causal conclusions. Nonetheless, researchers conclude causally from correlation coefficients by drawing causal arrows in their structural equation models (SEMs). Although most researchers avoid des...

Political legitimacy-building and tourism studies help to explain how and why China’s governing regime advanced Red Tourism to justify and reinforce its governance and legitimacy. A historical analysis of multilevel Chinese sources shows that the expressivity and value-ladenness that characterize visits to select historical sites permit governing r...

Web-based businesses create various product recommendation labels to facilitate online decision-making. Across three studies, this research demonstrates that relative to non-ranking-based recommendation labels, ranking-based recommendation labels increase e-shoppers' quality assessment belief and elicit a higher willingness to pay. Consistency amon...

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors in chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialogue around the theme The Ethics and Politics of Academic Knowledge Production. Qu...

The COVID-19 pandemic illustrates that standard assessments of human well-being fail in the face of substantial social disruptions. To overcome this problem, we focused on two human flourishing frameworks: the Shultz et al. (Handbook of community well-being research (pp. 403–421). Springer, 2017) macromarketing framework and the Shabbir et al. (Jou...

Purpose Responding to a recent editorial call for sustainable development (Truong and Saunders, 2021), this study aims to explore the persuasiveness of climate-change-related appeals. Design/methodology/approach Three scenario-based experiments were conducted to test the effect of climate-change-related appeals on persuasion, the underlying mechan...

Artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly affected business strategy in emerging markets. To understand how firms should adopt, utilize, integrate, and implement AI to gain a competitive advantage, we posit a conceptual model for developing AI-driven strategies. By identifying the primary drivers of AI-related institutions, firms can understan...

An outline for preparing a dissertation.

Marketing scholars often compare groups that occur naturally (e.g., socioeconomic status) or due to random assignment of participants to study conditions. These scholars often report group means, standard deviations, and effect sizes. Although such summary information can be helpful, it can misinform marketing practitioners’ decisions. To avoid thi...

Consumer autonomy is a fundamental topic for marketing ethics scholars. Nonetheless, autonomy’s philosophical treatment may have compromised its conceptual clarity. After reviewing the relevant ethics literature on consumer autonomy, the benefits of formally defining consumer autonomy are illustrated, and a novel formalization is adapted from poten...

Keywords: Definition of marketing, Futurology, Marketing theory, Marketing ethics Note: For more complete treatment, see Hyman, Michael R. and Alena Kostyk (2019), “Guest Editorial: A Prospectus on Marketing Futurology,” European Journal of Marketing, 53 (8), 1485-1503. DOI: 10.1108/EJM-08-2019-968

Although relevant to the study of consumer responses to advertising, researchers have largely overlooked the effect of positive psychology’s mindsets, such as belief in good luck, happiness, and flourishing, on attitude-toward-advertising-in-general (AG). Two path models tested with 247 U.S. adults (Study #1) and 680 U.S. undergraduate students (St...

Because ever-shifting socio-historical contexts compel their construction, distribution, and interpretation, visual stereotypes (VSs) in ads may have multiple meanings and changing connotations, making them challenging to detect and minimize via government regulation. To meet this challenge, VSs in ads are posited as a societal problem needing soci...

Marketing scholars often compare groups that occur naturally (e.g., socioeconomic status) or due to random assignment of participants to study conditions. These scholars often report group means, standard deviations, and effect sizes. Although such summary information can be helpful, it can misinform marketing practitioners’ decisions. To avoid thi...

Student interactivity and engagement are fundamental to creating an effective student-learning-centered in-class experience. This meta-essay presents a novel pedagogical approach to non-experiential in-class sessions for core undergraduate business courses. The proposed a priori customizable and spontaneously adaptable approach, which organizes in-...

After highlighting the primary purposes and quality considerations of survey research, we briefly discuss previously recommended approaches for ensuring and improving data quality. Then, we introduce the articles in this special issue that feature novel solutions for improvement.

Purpose – The rich primary and secondary data sources for studying historical Chinese marketing theory and practice are discussed. Possible challenges (and their solutions) to using these sources are briefly addressed. Design/methodology/approach – A bibliographic review is used to analyze historical sources pertaining to Chinese marketing theory...

Researchers typically treat fear‐of‐missing‐out (FOMO) as a personality trait or a general sense of anxiety about “missing out on” activities with others. If messages with FOMO‐laden appeals can induce context‐specific FOMO responses, FOMO is crucial to consumer behaviour scholars and marketing practitioners. Also, certain emotions may moderate the...

This essay discusses social disruptions, social discontinuities, and associated interventions by social marketers and public policymakers. Prescriptive touchpoints for such interventions are (1) mitigating social disruptions via phronetic marketing, (2) foreseeing and anticipating social disruptions and discontinuities via marketing futurology.

If conservative ideology encourages resistance to social distancing orders meant to mitigate a pandemic's spread, then under what conditions could this ideology cause people to obey such orders? We posit that community logic (i.e., community commitment, collective belief, and reciprocity) promotes compliance with public health policies in conservat...

Contextualized in the current pandemic, this essay discusses social marketing and public policy efforts from a ‘social solidarity and care ethics’ perspective. It presents a prototypical inclusivity-based approach for managing pandemics, with adaptive and maladaptive examples to show how the ‘social solidarity and care ethics nexus’ can and should...

Through self-customizable online courses, students can design more satisfying learning experiences that are more compatible with their needs and preferences. By choosing an assignment mix that provides more focused and personally relevant course content, students can balance their diverse interests and learning goals against course/program-specific...

The organized course readings and related discussion/examination questions for a doctoral seminar on marketing theory.

The organized course readings and related discussion/examination questions for a doctoral seminar on marketing research methods.

Contextualized in the current pandemic, this essay discusses social marketing and public policy efforts from a 'social solidarity and care ethics' perspective. It presents a prototypical inclusivity-based approach for managing pandemics , with adaptive and maladaptive examples to show how the 'social solidarity and care ethics nexus' can and should...

Purpose: To summarize the important contextual influences East Asian philosophy may have on marketing strategy and consumerism. Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative approach is used to deconstruct (1) the literature on marketing as a contextual discipline, (2) East Asian philosophical underpinnings and their personal and institutional manifes...

This essay discusses social disruptions, social discontinuities, and associated interventions by social marketers and public policymakers. Prescriptive touchpoints for such interventions are (1) mitigating social disruptions via phronetic marketing, (2) foreseeing and anticipating social disruptions and discontinuities via marketing futurology.

Null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) has had and continues to have an adverse effect on marketing research. The most recent American Statistical Association (ASA) statement recognized NHST’s invalidity and thus recommended abandoning it in 2019. Instead of revisiting the ASA’s reasoning, this research note focuses on NHST’s pernicious periph...

Purpose: To achieve targeted economic goals, companies adopt nationalistic campaigns. The ‘Buy-American’ and ‘Buy Chinese National Products’ campaigns are two examples. Here, pre-1949 nationalistic appeals used by Chinese and non-Chinese companies are explored. The interrelationships among nationalistic appeals, emotional marketing, framing events,...

Call for papers for a special issue of the Journal of Consumer Marketing. Submission deadline 31 March 2021.

To explore the best structure for a dedicated marketing ethics course, two field experiments were conducted in which two case types (i.e., small business/personal decision-making versus corporate-wrongdoing) and the timing of logic and critical thinking instruction were manipulated. Results show undergraduates can identify and apply ethical theorie...

Because the sharing economy compels firm-stakeholder dynamics towards a multi-stakeholder market orientation (MSMO), the structures and power dynamics of sharing-economy firms differ markedly from traditional-economy firms. In this vein, we explore sharing-economy firms’ dependence on stakeholders (new power), the continual threat of new entrants (...

Purpose — To apply Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) to brick-and-mortar salespeople’s responses to customers’ fear appeals. Design/methodology/approach — To develop a conceptual model for the effect of customers’ fear appeals on brick-and-mortar salespeople. Findings — PMT relates to the influence of customers’ fear appeals on brick-and-mortar sa...

‘Fear of missing out’ (FOMO) is a recent but widely recognized phenomenon. Some emotional antecedents of FOMO, such as anticipated elation and anticipated envy from other people, can boost FOMO. Other emotional antecedents, such as comforting rationalizations, can decrease FOMO. Because FOMO can influence consumers’ experience-related attitudes and...

The articles comprising this thematic symposium suggest options for exploring the nexus between freedom and unfreedom, as exemplified by the British abolitionists’ anti-slavery campaign and the paradox of freedom. Each article has implications for how these abolitionists achieved their goals, social activists’ efforts to secure reparations for slav...

Call for papers to be published in Basic and Applied Social Psychology. Submission deadline: 30 November 2020. See https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/consumer-psychology-pandemics/?utm_source=Author_Services&utm_medium=cms&utm_campaign=JPD14343 for more detail.

(Note: For a full copy until 2 June 2020, go to https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1auVAXj-jVZng.) Knowing related empirical facts as precisely as possible is crucial to knowledge development. Does the sampling precision of published consumer research ensure it contributes meaningfully to marketing science? To answer this question, the sampling precis...

Call for special issue papers

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate masculinity in Chinese social media marketing for global luxury fashion brands through two studies. Design/methodology/approach Study 1 compares physical characteristics of males in visually oriented US (Instagram) and Chinese (Weibo) social media posts promoting global luxury fashion magazine br...

Purpose Studies on cross-culture marketing often focus on either localization or globalization strategies. Based on data from pre-communist China (1912–1949), product hybridization – defined as a process or strategy that generates symbols, designs, behaviors and cultural identities that blend local and global elements – emerges as a popular interme...

Due to the pandemic, the deadline for submissions to this special issue has been extended to 28 February 2021.

Psychologists and pedagogy researchers suggest the way people process information has changed dramatically in recent decades. Multitasking habits may be the primary cause for some college students’ self-reports about boredom in face-to-face classes (Barnes et al. 2007; Robinson and Stubberud 2012). Similarly, students may struggle when asked to res...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the means for enhancing the image and business legitimacy of a socially discredited industry – pawnbroking in pre-1949 China – are explored. Previous studies suggest companies operating within such industries cannot solely rely on hard marketing strategies “to maximize sales and profits as they do wit...

One continuing problem for survey researchers is self-reports submitted by inattentive, disengaged, or mischievous respondents. Embedding entertainment based interruptions--surveytainment--into a questionnaire may improve data quality. After proposing affect regulation and process interruption as the theoretical basis for surveytainment's efficacy,...

One continuing problem for survey researchers is self-reports submitted by inattentive, disengaged, or mischievous respondents. Embedding entertainment-based interruptions—surveytainment—into a questionnaire may improve data quality. After proposing affect regulation and process interruption as the theoretical basis for surveytainment's efficacy, f...

During the last half century, the theory-in-isolation (TiI) approach-within which scholars develop theories by first formulating quantitative models meant to approximate stakeholders' behavior and then testing those models with data acquired for that purpose-has remained the gold standard for publishable marketing scholarship. Unfortunately, the al...

Purpose: Given likely structural, technological, economic, and social shifts, we urge marketers to recognize, support, and advocate for marketing's role in identifying and manifesting a desirable future. Design/methodology/approach: A content analysis of Futures, a leading multidisciplinary futures studies journal, provides preliminary evidence reg...

Although social scientists have identified diverse behavioral patterns among children from dissimilarly structured families, scholars have progressed little in relating modern family processes to consumption-related decisions. Based on gaps and limitations identified in a review of the existing consumer decision-making literature, this study examin...

During the last half-century, the theory-in-isolation (TiI) approach--within which scholars develop theories by first formulating quantitative models meant to approximate stakeholders' behavior and then testing those models with data acquired for that purpose--has remained the gold standard for publishable marketing scholarship. Unfortunately , the...

Two studies grounded in experiential consumption theory – law of apparent reality and model of emotion-driven choice – test path models exploring determinants and outcomes of superstitious beliefs. Based on a survey of 218 US undergraduates, Study#1 suggests yearning-for-the-past as an antecedent of superstitious beliefs, which in turn relates posi...

As a research toolkit grounded in the philosophy and practice of critical analysis, critical ‘historical research method’ (critical HRM) can help explain marketing-related phenomena that shape and are shaped by social context and human agency. The value to marketing scholarship of critical HRM, which relies on critical realism (CR) and abductive re...

We explore the concept of a personal internet shopping agent (PISA) that can be automated to perform shopping tasks online. PISAs, which can operate in either manual or fully automated mode, are inevitable due to increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence applications in retailing and ongoing consumer acceptance of advanced technologies. Af...

This chapter reviews research on the emergence of big data and its influence on marketing research. Big data is defined as datasets that could not be perceived, acquired, managed, and processed by traditional IT and software/hardware tools within a tolerable time. Examples of tools used in big data marketing research are cloud computing, machine le...

As a research toolkit grounded in the philosophy and practice of critical analysis, critical ‘historical research method’ (critical HRM) can help explain marketing-related phenomena that shape and are shaped by social context and human agency. The value to marketing scholarship of critical HRM, which relies on critical realism (CR) and abductive re...

Purpose: The means for enhancing the image and business legitimacy of a socially discredited industry—pawnbroking in pre-1949 China—are explored. Previous studies suggest companies operating within such industries cannot solely rely on hard marketing strategies “to maximize sales and profits as they do with soaps and shoes” (Davidson, 2003, p.7). I...

Many people espouse superstition, whether individually (e.g., wearing a lucky charm) or collectively (e.g., applying feng shui to the home) as a means for generating favorable life outcomes. Although psychologists acknowledge the value of studying superstition at the personal level (Marques, Leite, & Benvenuti, 2012), marketing scholars have yet to...

Guanxi, defined as a close and pervasive interpersonal relationship, is a key component of buyer-seller transactions in China (Fan, 2002; Ou, Pavlou, & Davison, 2014). Guanxi facilitates positive business outcomes by lubricating business relationships with personal social connections. The unique role of guanxi in China’s social and business life is...

Textbook chapter

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop, test, and validate a model in a specialty retail environment to assess the influence of a salesperson’s sales- or customer-orientation and customer characteristics related to buy/no-buy decisions. Design/methodology/approach Backward stepwise discriminant analysis was used to identify variables th...

To stimulate debate, the following commentary discusses the limitations of Dr. Locascio’s results blind manuscript proposal evaluation.

Double-Eleven' Day (aka 11.11 [November 11 th ], Singles Day, and Bachelors Day) is an e-commerce shopping spree celebrated by millions of Chinese e-shoppers. Since 2013, Chinese e-tailers have experienced record one-day sales on that date. Qualitative secondary data about 'Double-Eleven' Day e-shoppers suggests they are short-term oriented and ind...

Leaning on the theoretical tenets of experiential consumption and attitude process literatures, this cross-cultural research uses path analysis to examine antecedents and consequences of superstitious beliefs. For the Korean data, attitude toward finales fully mediates the relationship between intrinsic religiosity and superstitious beliefs. For th...

Within the context of a transformative learning field experiment, the ethical ideologies of marketing majors, logistics majors, and non-business majors were found to differ. Based on this finding, a field experiment was conducted to determine the effect (if any) ethics instruction has on marketing and logistics majors versus non-business majors. St...

Many people espouse superstition, whether individually (e.g., wearing a lucky charm) or collectively (e.g., applying feng shui to the workplace) as a mechanism for garnering preferred life outcomes. Psychologists acknowledge the value of studying superstition at the personal level; yet our understanding of how superstitious beliefs influence risk-s...

Considered an “irrational belief that an object, action, or circumstance that is not logically related to a course of events influences the outcome” (Damisch et al. 2010, p. 1014), people often hope their superstitions will induce propitious outcomes. Calls for cross-cultural attitude-based research on consumers’ superstitious beliefs continue. To...

“Double-Eleven” Day (aka 11.11 [November 11th], Singles Day, and Bachelors Day) is an e-commerce shopping spree celebrated by millions of Chinese e-shoppers. Since 2013, Chinese e-tailers have experienced record 1-day sales on that date. Qualitative secondary data about ‘Double-Eleven’ Day e-shoppers suggests they are short-term oriented and indivi...

We focus on virtue ethics measures for business academicians and practitioners. Despite virtue ethics' long history, virtue ethics scale development is a somewhat new field. Here, we introduce conceptualizations of virtue ethics and the attributes that define it, including three challenges to developing virtue ethics scales: subjectivity (virtues a...

Although marketing and allied social science research has examined the effect of emotional intelligence (EI) on sales performance and customer satisfaction in buyer-seller exchange relationships, it has attended little to the timing, psychological attributes, and contextual boundaries underlying associations among emotional intelligence, sales perf...

Survey research techniques might have become less efficient due to the changes in information processing in younger generations (Millennials). Preliminary findings suggest integrating entertainment-based interruptions into a questionnaire might improve data quality.

Conjoint Analysis Conjoint analysis can determine how people value a product's various components. Toothpastes have different features, such as teeth-whitening and breath-freshening. Hotels offer various amenities, such as free continental breakfast, free newspaper, or pay-per-view television programming. To design the profit-maximizing version of...

We introduce you to ten data analysis methods your marketing research consultant might use on your data. About each method, we provide a basic description, several examples of suitable research questions, and warnings about possible misuse. Independent Samples t-test Use an independent samples t-test to examine mean differences between two exclusiv...