Sascha Raithel

• Prof. Dr.
• Professor (Full) at Freie Universität Berlin

Superior corporate reputations can have strategic value for firms. Of the “multiple reputations” associated with each firm, we focus on the perceptions of the general public. The public represents the most widely defined stakeholder group but has attracted the least amount of research interest to date. Drawing on data for German firms, this study d...

Celebrity endorsers can cause negative publicity that can spill over to the endorsed brand. However, little is known about the economic effects of firm reactions to these events. This study fills this gap and estimates how announcements of firms’ reactions (yes versus no), timing (slow versus fast), and type (maintain/suspend versus no reaction) af...

Research Summary Prior crisis‐response literature outlines zones of conformity (i.e., response meets stakeholder expectations), underconformity (i.e., response falls short of expectations), and overconformity (i.e., response exceeds expectations). We utilize a mixed‐method approach to empirically test the impact of different response strategies on...

Firms struggle to respond to product recalls and manage post-recall customer satisfaction. In three studies, we examine the impact of firms’ remedy choice on satisfaction and provide evidence that firms’ post-recall remedy efforts are often not optimal. In Study 1 (field study), we estimate the longer-term effects of remedy on different satisfactio...

Firms struggle to respond to product recalls and achieve high recall effectiveness, i.e., the percentage of affected consumers who participate in corrective actions. We present the first comprehensive study of recall effectiveness that analyzes a broader set of product categories, identifies managerially relevant drivers, outlines boundary conditio...

The kickoff is not the beginning of the game. Long before the teams take the field there have been careful, data-driven analyses of the competitor, the strengths and weaknesses of the team relative to the competitor, and the opportunities for success. Such analyses identify specific objectives for play and gameplan. The first quarter provides an op...

The Super Bowl is a game, and the NFL is a league of teams, but it is also a business that seeks growth and new opportunities for expanding audiences and revenue. Some of these opportunities involve expansion into new markets, while others focus on new product offerings. This chapter examines NFL strategies for expansion and growth and identifies s...

Slowly the game is nearing its most exciting phase which Scott Hanson of NFL RedZone refers to as the “witching hour,” where anything can happen at any time, where wins become losses and losses become wins. For advertisers, this phase of the game plan is focused on getting the most out of their advertising investment, by designing and running ads t...

The game is well underway in the second quarter, and the teams are finding their rhythm and trying to disrupt their opponent’s game plan. Football teams must prepare extensively for different phases of the game, ensuring they have the best players on the field for any situation. Similar rules apply to advertisers, who need to allocate their ad budg...

The Super Bowl represents the pinnacle of advertising in the USA, where brands face immense pressure to stand out in a highly competitive, four-hour spectacle. Every year, prominent media outlets and market research firms scrutinize these ads, declaring “winners” and “losers.” Advertisers rely heavily on creative techniques like humor, celebrities,...

The Super Bowl has transcended from being a major sporting event to a cultural hallmark, showcasing some of the most iconic ads in advertising history. The pre-game is about understanding the history and development of the Super Bowl as a cultural event and the role advertising has played in shaping the broad appeal of the Super Bowl broadcast to t...

Overtime is rare in the Super Bowl game, but it is always present in the advertising game. Running the play, the commercial should set in motion a sequence of events and outcomes that extends well beyond the airing of the commercial in the Super Bowl. Media coverage, consumer buzz, internet searches, retail shopping, and purchasing are all objectiv...

This chapter highlights ten key insights for creating successful Super Bowl ads, offering insights into the complex playbook of advertising during the big game. Super Bowl ads tend to be highly effective, generating a strong ROI and enhancing both financial and non-financial metrics. To maximize impact, ads should communicate a unique brand message...

Advertising is a powerful yet complex tool for businesses. It not only informs consumers but also reinforces brand value, especially in competitive markets where it helps differentiate brands by fostering emotional connections. Global advertising spending reached $759 billion in 2021 and is projected to surpass $1 trillion by 2025, highlighting its...

In recent years, advertisers have increasingly embraced social responsibility, moving beyond profit maximization to address societal issues. This shift was catalyzed by events such as the Business Roundtable’s 2019 statement, emphasizing the importance of delivering value to all stakeholders. As consumer awareness grows, so has the demand for more...

This chapter presents our curated selection of the greatest Super Bowl ads of all time, accompanied by the reasoning behind each choice. These commercials are not just memorable—they’ve set new benchmarks for creativity, effectiveness, and cultural impact. Choosing the “best of the best” is no small task. Year after year, advertisers bring their A-...

This chapter explores the performance implications of product recalls, emphasizing legal, non-financial, and financial consequences. It discusses the financial burden of recalls, including direct costs such as reimbursement and indirect costs such as loss of trust. Legal implications are detailed, covering contractual, civil, regulatory, and crimin...

This brief chapter characterizes product recalls based on seven factors: legal weight, safety violations and compliance issues, initiation responsibilities, recall management process, motivations behind recall decisions, voluntary and mandated recalls, and recalls due to negligence and deliberate misconduct. It differentiates various types of produ...

This chapter explores the roles of different stakeholder groups, including customers, wholesalers and retailers, policymakers and regulators, suppliers, media, as well as investors and financial analysts. It highlights the significance of addressing each stakeholder group’s needs and demonstrating transparent management practices to maintain stakeh...

This chapter explains the relevance of product recalls across various industries worldwide. Countless high-profile product recalls highlight their profound impact on business performance and customer welfare. Product recalls are common across all sectors, as illustrated by a 52% increase in annual recalls from 2013 to 2023 in the automotive, food,...

This chapter delves into the specifics of product recall management across various industries, with a particular focus on the consumer products sector, the food industry, and the vehicle industry. It offers a comprehensive analysis of the common causes behind product recalls, detailing available remedial measures and effective communication strateg...

This chapter provides a detailed discussion of the product management cycle, delineating its phases: pre-recall, recall, and post-recall. Within the pre-recall phase, emphasis is placed on planning and recall readiness. This is facilitated by establishing a cross-functional product recall task force, formulating general product recall guidelines, i...

This chapter distills the core insights of the book into the Top 10 key takeaways, providing a detailed summary of essential strategies for managing product-harm crises and product recalls effectively. It underscores that product-harm crises and product recalls are unavoidable business risks, emphasizing the necessity for preparedness and vigilance...

This chapter elucidates the concept of the spillover effect and explores the underlying reasons behind its occurrence in the context of product recalls. It explains how product recalls can extend beyond the boundaries of the recalled items, impacting other products within the same brand or company. The discussion then delves into various factors th...

Belk’s ( Journal of Consumer Research, 15(2), 139–168, 1988, Journal of Consumer Research, 40(1), 477–500, 2013) seminal work on possessions and the extended self explains how possessions form and symbolize an individual’s extended self. According to the framework, material possessions play a significant role for the extended self. In recent decade...

This study reviews and compares the definitions and measurements of ‘corporate reputation’ used in 173 studies published in seven top-tier accounting and management journals between 1980 and 2020. Accounting scholars frequently fail to define ‘reputation,’ and if they do, definitions vary considerably between the accounting and management fields. W...

Research on voluntary disclosure highlights the role of informative financial reporting for capital markets. Information asymmetry impedes the efficient allocation of resources in capital markets while credible disclosure between managers and investors plays an important role in mitigating these problems. Existing research provides limited insight...

Financial reporting and disclosure are important means for management to communicate firm performance and governance to external stakeholders. Existing research provides limited insight into firms’ disclosure of information about their market-based assets such as brands, although brand is an important part of firms’ value proposition. Our research...

Prior research on creativity and the effectiveness of executional factors in advertising has focused on the impact of uniqueness and consistency in comparison to prior and competitive advertising. Relatively little is known about the specific impact of these variables and their relationship to each other, and few existing measures of consistency an...

Purpose There is limited insight concerning a firm’s remedy choice after a product recall. This study aims to propose that failure severity and brand equity are key antecedents of remedy choice and provides empirical evidence for a non-linear relationship between pre-recall brand equity and the firm’s remedy offer that is moderated by severity. De...

Purpose-Firms transforming from a product supplier into a solution provider need to develop entirely new organizational capabilities or re-configure existing ones. This paper aims to conceptualize solution business fitness (SBF) as a construct that captures comprehensively the capabilities necessary for a firm to operate successfully in solution bu...

Purpose Firms transforming from a product supplier into a solution provider need to develop entirely new organizational capabilities or re-configure existing ones. This paper aims to conceptualize solution business fitness (SBF) as a construct that captures comprehensively the capabilities necessary for a firm to operate successfully in solution bu...

Das Management von unternehmerischen Risiken ist eine fundamentale Voraussetzung erfolgreichen Handelns. Dennoch ist das Wissen über Risiken im Bereich des Marketing deutlich unterentwickelt. Dieser Beitrag führt daher den Begriff „Marketing-Risiko“ ein. Um die Basis für ein erfolgreiches Risikomanagement im Marketing legen zu können, werden Ursach...

Research on engagement has shifted to a systemic, rather than a dyadic, view that considers the engagement of multiple actors in complex business settings. Existing literature suggests that actor engagement in business settings is dependent on, and inextricably linked with, service ecosystems, platforms, and the value co-creation process. However,...

Research on portrayals of women and minorities in advertising has found that the overall representation of these groups has increased, some stereotypes persist.ls. This study examines portrayals of minorities and women in Super Bowl advertising. A content analysis of ten years of Super Bowl ads is conducted and a multinomial logit regression model...

IBM SPSS gehört zu den populärsten Statistikprogrammen im wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Studium und in der Praxis. Viele Anwender führen ihre Analysen ausschließlich mit Hilfe der grafischen Benutzeroberfläche durch, obwohl mit Hilfe der SPSS Syntax viele Analysen schneller realisiert sowie automatisiert werden könnten. Dieser Beitrag bietet eine E...

Purpose As crises are largely perceptual, the deeper the understanding is of how stakeholders perceive crisis situations, the more effectively corporations can target their crisis communication messages. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how different stakeholder groups process information during transgression-based corporate crises. De...

Firms struggle to respond to product recalls. In particular, choosing a remedy that has the ability to recover customer satisfaction remains a challenge. Our research focuses on firms' remedy choice and the impact of remedy on subsequent customer satisfaction recovery. Three studies using different empirical approaches quantify the impact of firms'...

This study investigates the distinct and joint effects of corporate social performance (CSP), firm size, and visibility on a company’s decision to disclose sustainability-related information through sustainability reports. It seeks to provide more nuanced explanations for why certain companies tend to extensively report on their sustainability perf...

Das Buch ist eine integrierte Einführung in die Steuersprache von IBM SPSS Statistics. Neben den notwendigen Syntax-Grundlagen behandelt es die Themengebiete Datenaufbereitung, Datentransformation und -modifikation sowie die Makro- und Matrixsprache, die in der 3. Auflage grundlegend überarbeitet wurden. Die Neuauflage wurde den Entwicklungen von S...

Customization of services comprises the activities and results of a customer-specific adaptation of a provider’s value-creation processes according to customers’ requirements. As customized service offerings are supposed to better meet specific customers’ needs, they should generate a higher willingness to pay and/or higher customer loyalty. Howeve...

Customization of services comprises the activities and results of a customer-specific adaptation of a provider’s value-creation processes according to customers’ requirements. As customized service offerings are supposed to better meet specific customers’ needs, they should generate a higher willingness to pay and/or higher customer loyalty. Howeve...

Prior research on the impact of marketing activities such as Super Bowl advertising on firm value has produced mixed results. Drawing on the marketing productivity chain, this study introduces hitherto neglected customer-based brand equity effects as indicator for investors’ expectations about future customer equity effects (i.e., expected future c...

Looking for sources of unique and imperfectly imitable competitive advantage both, researchers and practitioners, have turned in the last decade their focus towards the examination of intangible assets (Lehmann 2004). In the quest for achieving sustained superior financial performance management of corporate reputation as a strategic intangible ass...

Marketing profession is under considerable strain to provide empirical evidence of its contribution to shareholder value creation (e.g., Hanssens et al. 2009; Srinivasan and Hanssens 2009). In this context, customer satisfaction in particular has received significant attention. Especially, an intense debate has emerged from the fact that several st...

While the application of single items (SI) for construct measurement was generally accepted in the 1960s and 1970s, seminal works by Churchill (1979), Peter (1979), and Jacoby (1978) marked the start of a rethinking process by pointing out their deficits in terms of validity and reliability and by offering comprehensive guidelines for developing an...

This study posits that security analysts heed corporate social performance information and factor it into their recommendations to general investors. In particular, as corporate social Performance is often uncertain and ambiguous to general investors, analysts may serve as the informational pathway connecting corporate social performance to firm st...

Despite the increased cost of using a well-known personality as an endorser in an advertising or marketing campaign, the number of celebrity spokespeople has significantly increased over the past few decades. According to recent studies of world’s second largest market research organization Mill ward Brown (2006), one out of four commercials in the...

A growing body of research examines the formation of employer reputation. One potential driver is media coverage. Using content analysis data for media coverage and survey data, this study examines different dimensions of media coverage, namely, social and functional news and their impacts on employer reputation. Results show that in particular neg...

Vor ca. 30 Jahren sind erste wissenschaftliche Beiträge veröffentlicht worden, die sich dem Konstrukt der Unternehmensreputation aus Sicht der Management-Wissenschaften widmen. Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt zunächst Konzeptualisierungen und Operationalisierungen die-ses immateriellen Vermögensgegenstands vor und diskutiert diese kritisch. Daran an...

Globalization has substantially transformed the fashion industry. Firms that conduct innovative marketing campaigns for SPA brands, also known as fast fashion, are operating worldwide. Because SPA brands tend to have short trend cycles, corporate profitability is sensitive to consumers' attitudinal changes. The authors of this study establish a the...

With economic considerations exerting an ever-increasing influence on soccer club activities, fan satisfaction has become an essential focus for these organizations. Despite the relevance of this topic, the literature has paid little attention to the measurement of fan satisfaction. Based on a thorough literature review and an empirical study of so...

Despite its importance in the corporate world, management literature has largely ignored the rising trend of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting. Our study attempts to analyze the underlying motives behind companies’ decisions to voluntarily disclose CSR information. We hypothesize that while some companies disclose CSR information in o...

The article considers marketing management and product management. Strategies are discussed for benefiting from brand dispersion, when a product's brand image is polarized between strongly positive and negative consumer opinions. An advertising campaign for Miracle Whip salad dressing created by Kraft Foods is used to illustrate how a company can u...

This study examines brand dispersion—variance in brand Ratings across consumers—and its role in the translation of brand assets into firm value. Dispersion captures the covert heterogeneity in brand evaluations among consumers who like or dislike the brands, which would affect an investor’s decision to buy or sell a stock. The higher the dispersion...

In the quest to achieve sustained superior financial performance, the management of corporate reputation can be crucial for the performance and long-term success of a corporation because corporate reputation is a strategic intangible asset that promises sustainable competitive advantage. For example, corporate reputation can serve investors as a si...

With economic considerations exerting an ever-increasing influence on soccer clubs’ activities, fan satisfaction becomes an essential strategic management objective for these institutions. Despite this topic’s obvious relevance, the literature has paid little attention to the measurement of fan satisfaction. Based on a thorough literature review, a...

Purpose – Marketers are under increasing pressure to demonstrate the financial return associated with marketing expenditures. Concurrently, more attempts at measuring return on investment from marketing as well as achieving other long-term goals such as building brand equity and increasing shareholder value have been made. As a result of this empha...

Existing research implicitly assumes that all factors known to influence customer satisfaction are likewise important for investor behavior. However, if investors do not equally value activities targeting different satisfaction drivers, managers focusing on short-term stock returns might over- or under-emphasize certain satisfaction drivers to the...

Die Wertrelevanz der durch das Marketing getriebenen immateriellen Vermögensgegenstände ist in der Forschung unbestritten. In der Konsequenz sollte die Unternehmensberichterstattung marketingspezifische Informationen einbeziehen, um Informationsasymmetrien bei externen Stakeholdern abzubauen. Eine Analyse für die 30 DAX-Unternehmen zeigt jedoch, da...

From academia to business community, corporate reputation radiates strong appeals. Corporate reputation is one of the most valuable intangible assets, and it is extremely hard to imitate by competitors. An effective reputation management concept therefore helps firms to achieve sustainable competitive advantages. Due to the topic’s significance and...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the value‐relevance of corporate reputation during times of crisis. The paper seeks to extend the view beyond the traditional focus on the cognitive component of reputation, shed light on its affective component, and integrate the perceptions of different stakeholder groups. Design/methodology/approa...

Even in times of financial crisis a large percentage of a company’s market value is determined by intangible assets, among which corporate reputation is frequently quoted as the most important one. While some research has been done lately on the correlation between reputation and customer behaviour, we focus on the effects of a good reputation on f...

Zusammenfassung Wie kann man zuverlässige Methoden entwickeln, um die Erfolgswirkungen von Marketingmaßnahmen auf den Unternehmenswert zu messen? Am Anfang steht dabei die Frage, was Marketingerfolg eigentlich ist. Eine reine Fokussierung auf die Stakeholdergruppe der Kunden reicht hier nicht aus. Andere, durch Marketing ebenfalls erreichte Interes...