Relative Advertising- Antecedents and Consequences

Agnihotri, A; Bhattacharya, S

Relative Advertising- Antecedents and Consequences

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Saurabh Bhattacharya ORCiD

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This is the authors' accepted manuscript of a conference proceedings (inc. abstract) that has been published in its final definitive form by American Marketing Association, 2022.

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Abstract

Marketing scholars have urged for upper echelons theory to be extended to the field of marketing and to explore how CEOs’ traits influence marketing and advertising outcomes (Whitler, Lee, Krause, and Morgan, 2020). Despite these calls for research, only scant literature explores the influence of CEOs’ traits on advertising intensity and related outcomes (Kashmiri, Gala, and Nicol, 2019). Responding to these calls, we explore whether relative advertising intensity (i.e., advertising intensity relative to competitors) varies with CEO competitive aggressiveness under the boundary conditions of the CEO’s marketing background. We further explore whether relative advertising intensity mediates the relationship between a CEO’s competitive aggressiveness and a firm’s market performance under the moderating effect of the CEO’s marketing function background. We have received evidence supporting our hypothesis based on a sample of 287 Indian firms from 2008 to 2014. Our findings have significant implications for boards of directors and leadership development institutes that could coach and counsel CEOs to be more competitively aggressive and invest more in advertising than their competitors to enhance their firms’ market valuation.