Jia, Jessie Zhisui, Maferima Touré-Tillery, and Lili Wang. "Better than All the Rest: How Being Part of a Large Audience Influences Personal Goal Adherence," revising for 2nd round of review at Journal of Consumer Research
Consumers often find themselves making goal-related decisions online as part of audiences of various sizes (e.g., how long to work out when following an exercise livestream). In these settings, consumers typically have information about the size of the audiences to which they belong (e.g., number of people viewing a livestream). The present research investigates how the size of an audience influences audience members’ personal choices, specifically their likelihood to adhere to personal goals. Seven studies utilizing experiments and secondary data show that consumers are more likely to workout harder (study 1), have better performance on cognitive tasks (study 2), curb their spending (study 3), and choose healthier food (study 6) when they are part of a large (vs. small) audience. This effect occurs because being the best among a large (vs. small) group is more self-enhancing (study 4). Finally, this effect is moderated by self-diagnosticity of behavior and goal importance, with the influence of audience size on goal adherence attenuating when the behavior is not diagnostic of consumers’ self-concept (study 5) or when the goal is less important to the consumer (study 6).
Jia, Jessie Zhisui and Maferima Touré-Tillery. "Is This How You See Me? When Personalized Ads Reduce Self-esteem and Brand Attitude," under review at Journal of Consumer Research
Personalized advertising is frequently used by marketers to increase ad effectiveness, but it also implicitly communicates the identity the brand thinks consumers have. We test the hypothesis that when this implied identity is undesirable, consumers will feel more offended by a personalized (vs. non-personalized) ad, leading to more negative views about both the self and the brand, with downstream consequences for brand engagement. Five studies demonstrate that personalized (vs. non-personalized) ads implying undesirable identities such as an opposing political identity (study 1), low creditworthiness (studies 2, 4, and 5), and excess weight (study 3) decrease self-esteem and brand attitudes. Using moderation (studies 1 and 5) and mediation approaches (studies 2, 3, and 4), we show that the effects of ad personalization on self-esteem and brand attitude are both mediated by perceived ad offensiveness. The effects hold regardless of the accuracy of personalization (studies 1 and 3), the blaming tone of the ad messages (study 4), the nature of the firm (for-profit and non-profit; study 4), and whether the personalization is attributed to algorithms or human marketers (study 5). Finally, we identify a boundary condition: the effects attenuate when ad personalization is not salient (study 5).