Date of Award

6-26-2026

Date Published

August 2026

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Marketing

Advisor(s)

Guiyang Xiong

Keywords

Marketing Capabilities;Marketing Communication;Marketing Strategy;Spillover Effects

Abstract

This dissertation comprises two essays examining how external pressures and internal firm characteristics jointly determine marketing decisions and their consequences for firms, stakeholders, and society at large. The first essay investigates the heterogeneous spillover effects of product quality crises on rival firms’ market value and rivals’ subsequent strategic adjustments in recruitment. Three concurrent mechanisms, the consumer switching effect, the industry demand effect, and the remedial cost effect, are proposed to derive and empirically test a nonlinear relationship between firm similarity and net spillover outcomes. Using event study methodology across 102 product quality crises among Chinese listed firms from 2017 to 2019, the essay shows that marketing capability buffers negative spillovers in a U-shaped pattern across the similarity spectrum while the buffering effect of R&D capability increases linearly with similarity. Rivals penalized by the stock market subsequently shift their recruitment emphasis toward marketing-related over R&D-related positions, with this effect amplified in more competitive industries. The second essay examines the firm-level antecedents and consumer engagement consequences of female representation in firms’ marketing communication. It develops a framework around two countervailing mechanisms: a momentum effect, in which historical female brand image drives continued representation through self-reinforcing routines, and a complacency effect, in which accumulated representation generates moral licensing that reduces the perceived need for further signaling. Applying automated facial recognition via DeepFace to more than 400,000 Instagram posts from S&P 500 firms, the essay finds an inverted U-shaped relationship between brand image and female representation, moderated by female staff representation, female leadership representation, performance below aspiration, and feminist advocacy events. Female representation generates significantly greater engagement during feminist advocacy periods. Together, both essays advance a forced-and-driven view of marketing decision-making, showing that the consequences of marketing decisions depend on both the firm characteristics that drive them and the competitive and institutional contexts in which they unfold.

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Open Access

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