Professors Jingjing Li and Amar Cheema were named as finalists by the American Marketing Association’s Journal of Marketing for its Shelby D. Hunt/Harold H. Maynard Award for 2020.
The Journal of Marketing’s annual award is given to papers that have made the most significant contributions to marketing theory in the past calendar year. Li and Cheema’s “Path to Purpose? How Online Customer Journeys Differ for Hedonic Versus Utilitarian Purchases” (co-written with Ahmed Abbasi and Linda B. Abraham) examines how consumers use information channels during the customer journey. Though the paper did not win, it was only one of five runners-up named for its meaningful findings.
Li and Cheema’s research utilizes “a hedonic and utilitarian (H/U) perspective, an important categorization of consumption purpose.” The paper, which measures H/U characteristics of 20 product categories at 40 different retailers, reveals that when making hedonic purchases (e.g., toys), consumers make use of social media and on-site product pages as early as two weeks before the final purchase. Their research also reveals that, by contrast, “consumers utilize third-party reviews up to two weeks before the final purchase and make relatively greater usage of search engines, deals, and competitors’ product pages closer to the time of purchase,” when making utilitarian purchases, such as office supplies.
