Theodore J. Noseworthy

Researchers have increasingly turned to crowdfunding platforms to gain insights into entrepreneurial activity and dynamics. While previous studies have explored various factors influencing crowdfunding success, such as technology, communication, and marketing strategies, the role of visual elements that can be automatically extracted from images has received less attention. This is surprising, considering that crowdfunding platforms emphasize the importance of attention‐grabbing and high‐resolution images, and previous research has shown that image characteristics can significantly impact product evaluations. Indeed, a comprehensive review of empirical articles (n = 202) utilized Kickstarter data, focusing on the incorporation of visual information in their analyses. Our findings reveal that only 29.70% controlled for the number of images, and less than 12% considered any image details. In this manuscript, we contribute to the existing literature by emphasizing the significance of visual characteristics as essential variables in empirical investigations of crowdfunding success. We review the literature on image processing and its relevance to the business domain, highlighting two types of visual variables: visual counts (number of pictures and number of videos) and image details. Building upon previous work that discussed the role of color, composition, and figure–ground relationships, we introduce visual scene elements that have not yet been explored in crowdfunding, including the number of faces, the number of concepts depicted, and the ease of identifying those concepts. To demonstrate the predictive value of visual counts and image details, we analyze Kickstarter data using flexible machine learning models (Lasso, Ridge, Bayesian additive regression trees, and eXtreme Gradient Boosting). Our results highlight that visual count features are two of the top three predictors of success and highlight the ease at which researchers can incorporate some information about visual information. Our results also show that simple image detail features such as color matter a lot, and our proposed measures of visual scene elements can also be useful. By supplementing our article with R and Python codes that help authors extract image details (https://osf.io/ujnzp/), we hope to stimulate scholars in various disciplines to consider visual information data in their empirical research and enhance the impact of visual cues on crowdfunding success.

Brands are increasingly engaging in social marketing campaigns that take stances on important social issues. Such campaigns can garner considerable awareness and effectively encourage consumers to purchase the focal brand. However, they can also outrage other consumer segments who disapprove of the brand’s social stance. While social campaigns that outrage consumer groups would normally be undesirable, our research investigates how they can alternatively have a positive impact for brands that support the attacked value. This prediction is based on the premise that outrage expressed towards a social campaign threatens the value involved, causing consumers who want to defend that value to engage in symbolic protective responses by strengthening self-brand connections and increasing purchase intentions. Five experiments validate this theorizing, and further show that these social threat effects are moderated by the type of outgroup that expressed the outrage and the level of viral support the expressed outrage received. Implications for the social marketing and brand relationship literatures are discussed.

The most popular ways of holding wealth include tangible investments such as real estate and gold, and intangible investments such as stocks and mutual funds. Five experiments revealed a tangibility bias whereby the tangibility of an investment or tangibility cues linked to an investment provides a false sense of financial safety. When focusing on avoiding risk, investors indicated a higher willingness to sell the stocks of companies that invest in intangible versus tangible assets (Study 1). The greater perceived permanence of tangible versus intangible assets appeared to underlie the difference in market risk assessments. Respondents judged the same asset as riskier when it was framed as intangible (Study 2), and differences in perceived permanence mediated this effect. Increasing perceived permanence independently of tangibility led to lower market risk assessments of commodity futures (Study 3). Tangibility prompts that leave asset tangibility unchanged were sufficient to lower risk judgments (studies 4 and 5). The differences in market risk assessments were not due to a general preference for tangible assets (Study 4) or differences in familiarity, complexity, or understanding of the asset types (studies 2 and 5).

What motivates people to consume and engage with food media on social networks? We adopt an evolutionary lens to suggest that the valence of people’s affective state varies by the implied caloric density of food media, which has a direct impact on social media engagement. First, we analyze a catalog of Buzzfeed’s Tasty videos based on nutritional content derived from the dish’s ingredients and find that visualizing caloric density (i.e., calories per serving) positively influences likes, comments, and shares on Facebook. We then replicate this phenomenon in an experiment, providing preliminary evidence for the role of affect as an explanatory mechanism. We conclude by isolating the role of affect with a classic misattribution task, which attenuates the elevated engagement resulting from exposure to calorie‐dense food media. These findings contribute to the dialogue on the antecedents of social media engagement and offer implications for content developers, advertisers, consumer health advocates, and policy makers.

Food sharing has become quite popular over the last decade, with companies offering food options specifically designed to be shared. As the popularity has grown, so too has concerns over the potential negative impact on consumer health. Despite companies’ explicit claims to the contrary, critics maintain that food sharing may be encouraging excessive caloric intake. The current article provides the first systematic exploration of why this may be happening. Three main and two supplementary studies suggest that food sharing reduces perceived ownership, which, in turn, leads people to mentally decouple calories from their consequence. Thus, sharing can reduce the perceived fattening potential of a consumption episode without biasing caloric estimates. This phenomenon persists even when explicit caloric information is provided, and it applies to both healthy and unhealthy foods. Importantly, we establish a relevant downstream consequence by illustrating that people tend to subsequently select calorie‐dense foods after underestimating the fattening potential of a shared consumption episode. A roadmap for future research and practical implications are discussed.

Food waste is a significant problem and consumers’ tendency to reject misshapen produce has been identified as a key contributing factor. The current work investigates the implications of consumers incorporating aesthetic beauty into their prototypes—mental renderings—of fruits and vegetables. It is proposed that consumers have idealized prototypes for produce and this impacts the aversion to misshapen produce. The authors draw on prototype theory to predict that consumers’ personal experiences will influence the extent to which their prototypes for these foods have been biased towards aesthetic beauty and, consequently, how they respond to produce that is misshapen. Across three studies, the authors demonstrate that consumers who have direct experience with produce cultivation view produce that is low in aesthetic beauty as more prototypical, less disgusting, and more desirable. This work contributes to the food waste literature by offering novel insights into the psychological basis of the aversion to misshapen produce. These findings also present important implications for food policy.

New products are often extremely incongruent with expectations. The inability to make sense of these prod-ucts elevates anxiety and leads to negative evaluations. Although scholars have predominantly focused oncombating the negative response to extreme incongruity, we propose that extreme incongruity may haveimplications that extend beyond the category. We base our predictions on the concept of fluid compensation,which suggests that when people struggle to make sense of something, they will nonconsciously reinforcehighly accessible schemas in unrelated domains. Four studies confirm that extreme incongruity encouragesfluid compensation, such that it elevates preference for dominant brands (study 1), green consumption (studies 2and 4), and ethnocentric products (study 3). We isolate the causal role of anxiety using moderation tasks andbiometric feedback. Furthermore, we demonstrate that compensation has an immediate dampening effect onarousal intensity. Thus, if consumers can compensate before explicitly evaluating an extremely incongruentproduct, their evaluations tend not to be negative. Taken together, we document that extreme innovationsencourage compensation, and in compensating, consumers can become more receptive to extreme innovations.

Promotional lotteries offer consumers a chance to win one of many prizes along with their purchase. Critically, as is often the case, these campaigns not only include an assortment of prizes but also an assortment of offerings that one can buy to enter the lottery—such as a small or an extra‐large coffee. While companies regularly advertise that the objective odds of winning do not vary by the size of their product offerings, recent anecdotal evidence suggest that consumers behave as if it does. The net result is that consumers seem to be supersizing during promotional lotteries, and thus purchasing larger sized items. Eight studies (four core and four supplementary in Supporting information) and a single‐paper meta‐analysis confirm that the supersizing phenomenon is indeed real and provides evidence that this behavior is the manifestation of consumers elevating their sense of control. Specifically, supersizing serves to gain psychological control over the pursuit of a desirable, but seemingly unobtainable, outcome.

We suggest that text readability plays an important role in driving consumer engagement on social media.Consistent with a processing fluency account, we find that easy-to-read posts are more liked, commented on,and shared on social media. We analyze over 4,000 Facebook posts from Humans of New York, a popular pho-tography blog on social media, over a 3-year period to see how readability shapes social media engagement.The results hold when controlling for photo features, story valence, and other content-related characteristics.Experimental findings further demonstrate the causal impact of readability and the processing fluency mecha-nism in the context of a fictitious brand community. This research articulates the impact of processing fluencyon brief word-of-mouth transmissions in the real world while empirically demonstrating that readability as amessage feature matters. It also extends the impact of processing fluency to a novel behavioral outcome:commenting and sharing actions.

Evidence from four studies suggests that the moral opposition toward genetically modified (GM) foods impedes the perception of their benefits, and critically, marketers can circumvent this moral opposition by employing subtle cues to position these products as being “man-made.” Specifically, if consumers view the GM food as man-made, and if they understand why it was created, moral opposition to the product diminishes, and the GM food’s perceived benefits increase, which subsequently increases purchase intentions for the product. This effect is replicated in the field (in both controlled and naturalistic settings), in a laboratory experiment, and with an online consumer panel. The results suggest that marketers can help consumers better consider all information when assessing the merits of GM foods by using packaging and promotion strategies to cue consumers to view the GM food for what it is (i.e., a man-made object created with intent). The findings have implications for the recent GM food labeling debate.

The success of new incongruent products hinges largely on whether consumers can efficiently make sense of the product. One of the most efficient ways that people make sense of new objects is through feature-based association. Such associations often incorporate an enabler (e.g., the colour green) to help make sense of a semantically related feature (e.g., vitamin enriched). Evidence from three studies suggests that marketers can strategically incorporate enablers in product design to help consumers make sense of an extremely incongruent feature. As a result, consumers tend to reflect more favorably on the product. Furthermore, the authors find that even if the enabler itself is incongruent and leads to lower evaluations on its own, when combined with an atypical feature the effect can still be positive. Thus, a small but semantically meaningful adjustment in design can help marketers successfully introduce extremely incongruent innovations.

The current work examines how cues traditionally used to signal environmental friendliness, specifically the color green and eco-labels, and influence product efficacy perceptions and subsequent purchase intentions. Across three experiments, we find that environmental cues used in isolation (i.e., green color without an environmental label or an environmental label without green color) reduce perceptions of product efficacy. We argue that this efficacy discounting effect occurs because the isolated use of an environmental cue introduces category ambiguity by activating competing functionality and environmentally friendly schemas during evaluation. We discuss the implications of our findings for research on environmental consumption as well as offer insight into the effective use of environmental cues on product packaging.

Drawing on recent evidence suggesting that beliefs about contagion underlie the market for celebrity‐contaminated objects, the current work investigates how people can make biased dispositional judgments about consumers who own such objects. Results from four experiments indicate that when a consumer comes in contact with a celebrity‐contaminated object and behaves in a manner that is inconsistent with the traits associated with that celebrity, people tend to make more extreme judgments of them. For instance, if the celebrity excels at a particular task, but the target who has come into contact with the celebrity‐contaminated object performs poorly, people reflect more harshly on the target. This occurs because observers implicitly expect that a consumer will behave in a way that is consistent with the traits associated with the source of contamination. Consistent with the law of contagion, these expectations only emerge when contact occurs. Our findings suggest that owning celebrity‐contaminated objects signals information about how one might behave in the future, which consequently has social implications for consumers who own such objects.

Despite recent interest in examining the impact of dirty money on consumption-related behavior, researchers have yet to look at the influence of dirty money on the consumable itself. Evidence from two studies suggest that the documented effects of dirty money on spending may have more to do with dirty money contaminating the purchase, as opposed to the current belief that consumers merely want to rid themselves of disgusting things. The authors find that people indeed spend more with dirty money, but only when the bills lower product valuations. This does not occur when people purchase products with inherent properties that cannot be contaminated; in fact, dirty money can increase valuations and preference for these products. The results suggest that the physical appearance of money plays a much larger, more nuanced role in consumption than previously thought, and this effect may not be entirely positive for the consumer.

Across four studies, the authors demonstrate that consumers intuitively link disconfirmation, specifically sensory disconfirmation (when touch disconfirms expectations by sight), to a brand’s personality. Negative disconfirmation is often associated with negative posttrial evaluations. However, the authors find that when negative sensory disconfirmation is introduced by an exciting brand, the source of disconfirmation can sometimes be perceived positively. This occurs because consumers intuitively view disconfirmation as more authentic of an exciting personality. Similarly, despite the wealth of literature linking positive disconfirmation to positive posttrial evaluations, the authors find that sensory confirmation is more preferred for sincere brands because consumers intuitively view confirmation as more authentic of a sincere personality. The authors conclude by demonstrating the intuitive nature of this phenomenon by showing that the lay belief linking brand personality to disconfirmation does not activate in a context where sensory disconfirmation encourages a more deliberative assessment of the product.

A cognitive level account of when and why radical innovations impact category representations of competing brands is developed and tested. The results suggest that competing brands are affected only when a dominant brand introduces a radical innovation that alters a core category attribute. Such an innovation leads consumers to see competing brands as less typical of the category with diminished evaluations. Crucially, neither core radical innovations introduced by a non-dominant brand nor equally radical innovations that alter peripheral (non-core) attributes have any impact on consumers’ perceptions of competing brands. Implications for consumer preference formation and competition in the context of radical innovation are drawn.

New products are often incongruent with consumer expectations. Researchers have shown that consumers prefer moderately incongruent products, while being adverse to extremely incongruent products. Evidence from three studies suggests that this phenomenon is highly influenced by a consumer’s state of arousal. Specifically, low arousal decreases preference for moderate incongruity while increasing preference for extreme incongruity, whereas high arousal decreases preference for any form of incongruity. Underlying these effects are discrete emotional states brought on by a physiological response to incongruity. Varying arousal subsequently varies the severity of the emotion, be it negative (anxiety) or positive (curiosity), which in turn varies evaluations for the product. This suggests that creating excitement around a product launch may be good for incremental innovation, but it may not be a good idea for something truly innovative.

Across three studies, this research examines how marketers can capitalize on their brand’s standing in the marketplace through strategic logo placement on their packaging. Using a conceptual metaphor framework, the authors find that consumers prefer powerful brands more when the brand logo is featured high rather than low on the brand’s packaging, whereas they prefer less powerful brands more when the brand logo is featured low rather than high on the brand’s packaging. Furthermore, the authors confirm that the underlying mechanism for this shift in preference is a fluency effect derived from consumers intuitively linking the concept of power with height. Given this finding, the authors then demonstrate an important boundary condition by varying a person’s state of power to be at odds with the metaphoric link. The results demonstrate when and how marketers can capitalize on consumers’ latent associations through package design.

Despite evidence that currency denomination can influence spending, researchers have yet to examine whether the physical appearance of money can do the same. This is important because smaller denomination bills tend to suffer greater wear than larger denomination bills. Using real money in the context of real purchases, this article demonstrates that the physical appearance of money can override the influence of denomination. The reason being, people want to rid themselves of worn bills because they are disgusted by the contamination from others, whereas people put a premium on crisp currency because they take pride in owning bills that can be spent around others. This suggests that the physical appearance of money matters more than traditionally thought, and like most things in life, it too is inextricably linked to the social context. The results suggest that money may be less fungible than people think.

Why do otherwise well-intentioned managers make decisions that have negative social or environmental consequences? To answer this question, the authors combine the literature on construal level theory with the compromise effect to explore the circumstances that lead to seemingly unethical decision-making. The results of two studies suggest that the degree to which managers make high-risk tradeoffs is highly influenced by how they mentally represent the decision context. The authors find that managers are more likely to make seemingly unethical tradeoffs when psychological distance is high (rather than low) and when they are forced to choose between competing alternatives. However, when given the option not to choose, managers better reflect on the consequences of each alternative, and thus become more likely to choose options with less risk of negative consequences. The results suggest that simply offering managers the option not to choose may reduce psychological distance and help organizations avoid seemingly unethical decision-making.

Extant research suggests that when marketers introduce products with functions that span multiple categories, consumers tend to generate beliefs in line with only a single category. This has been regarded as a major marketing challenge because it leads consumers to ignore key attributes from the product’s supplementary category. Contrary to this prediction, the authors find that because consumers tend to classify new hybrid products by contrasting them against the competitive context, attributes from the supplementary category become more salient and thus contribute greater utility in choice. The authors pit the strength of this effect against several of the most dominant and favored category cues. The results confirm that classification inferences and attribute preference for new hybrid products are highly contextual, and as such, single category inferences need not translate directly into attribute preference.