Despite evidence that consumers appreciate freedom of choice, they also enjoy recommendation systems, subscription services, and marketplace encounters that seemingly occur by chance. This paper proposes that enjoyment can, in some contexts, be higher than that in contexts involving choice. This occurs as a result of feelings of serendipity that arise when a marketplace encounter is positive, unexpected, and attributed to some degree of chance. A series of studies shows that feelings of serendipity positively influence an array of consumer outcomes, including satisfaction and enjoyment, perceptions of meaningfulness of an experience, likelihood of recommending a company, and likelihood of purchasing additional products from the company. The findings show that strategies based on serendipity are even more effective when consumers perceive that randomness played a role in how an encounter occurred, and not effective when the encounter is negative, the encounter occurs deterministically (i.e., planned by marketers to target consumers), and consumers perceive that they have enough knowledge to make their own choices. Altogether, this research suggests that marketers can influence customer satisfaction by structuring marketplace encounters to appear more serendipitous, as opposed to expected or entirely chosen by the consumer.

According to existing research, ad persuasiveness decreases as advertising skepticism (i.e., the tendency to disbelieve advertising claims) increases. What remains unclear, however, is whether or not this effect extends to brand extension appeals. We suggest that the effect may vary according to brand extension similarity. Three studies test this assertion while providing process evidence and boundary conditions for the proposed effect. According to the findings, consumers automatically transfer associations from parent brands to highly similar extensions or automatically block these associations in the case of highly dissimilar extensions—reducing the impact of advertising skepticism on ad persuasiveness. At moderate levels, however, extension similarity is less predictive of the transfer process, increasing the negative effect of advertising skepticism on persuasion. Consistent with this account, the results identify brand transfer (i.e., the ability of the parent brand to make the extension) as the underlying mechanism explaining the advertising skepticism effect for moderately similar brand extension appeals. Furthermore, the results show how marketers can reduce these effects, and increase extension success, by emphasizing extension attributes that are shared with the parent brand. Collectively, these results provide a unique theoretical view, improving our understanding of advertising skepticism and the drivers of brand extension success.

The impact of decision difficulty on search behavior depends on the relative accessibility of maximize accuracy and minimize effort goals in memory. The default assumption, derived from constructive choice theory, is that maximize accuracy and minimize effort goals are both accessible. Thus, the two goals compete to influence a decision process. When this is the case, an increase in decision difficulty discourages search and the opportunity to make an accurate decision suffers. The alternative assumption, derived from goal systems theory, is that maximize accuracy and minimize effort goals can be differentially accessible. When one of these goals is more accessible, decision difficulty signals poor goal progress and reduces goal pursuit. That is, when a maximize accuracy (minimize effort) goal is more accessible, decision difficulty reduces (increases) search. Six studies show that goal systems theory holds when a maximize accuracy or minimize effort goal is more accessible, that is, is deliberately pursued. The results have implications for how decision difficulty influences information search, satisficing, and choice quality.

Visual marketing communications consist of two components: (1) semantic content (e.g., headings, images, copy) that communicates a brand’s positioning, benefits, and personality and (2) visual design (e.g., font selection, image size, the organization of the content) that encourages inferences about brand claims. We investigate how visual design can be used to encourage inferences that support brand claims and improve brand performance. We find that brands with a utilitarian positioning perform better when the visual design of their marketing communications encourages structured perceptions, whereas brands with a hedonic positioning perform better when the visual design of their marketing communications encourages unstructured perceptions. In both cases, (un)structured perceptions encourage inferences that reinforce brand claims and, consequently, improve brand performance. This research offers actionable insights into how marketing communication specialists can coordinate logo design, product design, package design, visual merchandising, and retail environments to reinforce brand claims.

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