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Research on market orientation finds that market-driven firms succeed by identifying and appealing to consumer needs. Yet many technologically innovative firms achieve remarkable success by taking a market-driving approach. The ways that firms drive markets without disruptive innovation, however, remain unclear. Adopting a market-systems perspective, the authors conduct an ethnographic analysis of producers, distributors, retailers, critics, and consumers in the U.S. wine market. They find that firms drive the market by playing a status game. Firms pursue a vision and advance that vision among influencers inside and outside the industry to gain recognition. Winners of the status game influence and drive social consensus by setting benchmarks and shaping consumer preferences to the firm's advantage. High status is difficult to imitate, creating an advantage that can endure for years or decades.

Consumers sometimes treat trivial attributes as though they were critically important in the sense that they have a significant impact on choice. We propose a reasons‐based account to explain the valuation of trivial attributes and in particular why valuation is in some cases positive and in others negative. We suggest that consumers treat trivial attributes as though they had value when such valuation is instrumental, that is, helps accomplish a task goal. The valence of the effect can depend on whether a positive or negative reason provides a clearer justification for preferring a single brand over its competitors. Thus the same trivial attribute can generate a positive or negative valuation depending on the choice setting. Such valuation is not always driven by inferences about the attribute itself but can reflect transitory reasoning about the brand as a whole, based on the way it is differentiated from its competitors. Results from two experiments support the reasons‐based model and help resolve some apparently conflicting effects previously reported for trivial attributes.

Large players in the consumer goods industry might see better returns from their R&D if they copied their smaller competitors. Here, the authors examine two consumer goods companies with starkly different levels of investment in R&D: P&G and Reckitt Benckiser. At many large consumer goods companies, a reflexive approach to innovation -- just spend more! -- is failing to generate sales and growth. Making smaller and more-focused bets, buying in ideas, and aligning R&D and marketing can produce better outcomes for big and small spenders alike.

For too long, marketers have not been held accountable for showing how marketing expenditures add to shareholder value. As time has gone by, this lack of accountability has undermined marketers' credibility, threatened the standing of the marketing function within the firm, and even threatened marketing's existence as a distinct capability within the firm. This article proposes a broad framework for assessing marketing productivity, cataloging what is already known, and suggesting areas for further research. The authors conclude that it is possible to show how marketing expenditures add to shareholder value. The effective dissemination of new methods of assessing marketing productivity to the business community will be a major step toward raising marketing's vitality in the firm and, more important, toward raising the performance of the firm itself. The authors also suggest many areas in which further research is essential to making methods of evaluating marketing productivity increasingly valid, reliable, and practical.

Unlike many other brands, luxury brands can enjoy remarkably enduring success. This paper presents an interview with a senior executive responsible for marketing Maison Louis Roederer’s champagnes, including the legendary Cristal, in the United States for the last 20 years. We explore the differences between luxury and mass-market brands, the role of creative vision, how brands remain relevant through innovation while remaining faithful to their history, and how luxury brands create passionate buyers who seek to be a part of the brand, not simply consumers of the brand. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for market orientation, understanding consumers as fans, and other future research topics.

For years, market orientation remained an appealing concept that was, in practice, less favored than other approaches to management. A surge of research on market orientation helped clarify the concept and provide needed logical structure, creating a foundation for the further research and for adoption in practice. Among the most influential papers in that surge is Kohli and Jaworski ( Journal of Marketing, 54, 1–18, 1990 ). In this paper, we comment on Jaworski and Kohli’s essay, exploring the process for field-based, discovery-oriented research, drawing comparisons with experimental, analytical or empirical approaches. We explore how one formulates and poses questions differently, the process of choosing collaborators, differences in the data collection, analysis, and differences in crafting papers. Illustrating these differences with Kohli and Jaworksi ( Journal of Marketing, 54, 1–18, 1990 ), we explore more recent advances in market orientation and propose directions for future work.

This article provides a high-level overview of marketing strategy research and offers a number of suggestions of areas ripe for future research. We discuss the most fundamental concepts that continue to drive current marketing strategy research and examine how these concepts have shaped marketing strategy and the role of the marketing function. In addition, we highlight the developments in marketing accountability, marketing’s influence within the firm, and alternatives to a market-driven approach in generating sustainable competitive advantage. Finally, we identify directions for future research in the light of recent developments, availability of new data, and emerging issues.

The authors examine consumer inferences about product attributes that are unobservable at the time of the decision. Extant research predicts that in the absence of an explicit correlation between product attributes, consumers will infer that the brand that is superior on the observable attributes is also superior on the unobservable attributes. The authors propose an alternative inference strategy that makes the counterintuitive prediction that the apparently superior brand is inferior on the unobservable attributes. The authors refer to these inferences as \"compensatory inferences\" and assert that they are associated with consumers' intuitive theories about the competitive nature of a market. In a series of four experiments, the authors examine the occurrence of compensatory inferences and compare them with other inference strategies.

Although pioneers outsell late movers in many markets, in some cases innovative late entry has produced some remarkably successful brands that outsell pioneers. The mechanisms through which innovative late movers outsell pioneers are unclear. To identify these mechanisms, the authors develop a brand-level model in which brand sales are decomposed into trials and repeat purchases. The model captures diffusion and marketing mix effects on brand trials and includes the differential impacts of innovative and noninnovative competitors' diffusion on these effects. The authors develop hypotheses on how the diffusion and marketing mix parameters of the brands differ by market entry strategy (pioneering, innovative late entry, and noninnovative late entry). The authors test these hypotheses using data from 13 brands in two pharmaceutical product categories. The results show that an innovative late mover can create a sustainable advantage by enjoying a higher market potential and a higher repeat purchase rate than either the pioneer or noninnovative late movers, growing faster than the pioneer, slowing the pioneer's diffusion, and reducing the pioneer's marketing spending effectiveness. Innovative late movers are advantaged asymmetrically in that their diffusion can hurt the sales of other brands, but their sales are not affected by competitors' diffusion. In contrast, noninnovative late movers face smaller potential markets, lower repeat rates, and less marketing effectiveness compared with the pioneer.