Marketing Strategy in Action: Disclosure, Spillovers, Strategic Differentiation, and Brand Refreshment
(A2026-133185)

AUTHORS

Larisa Kovalenko, University of Texas at San Antonio; Nooshin Warren, University of Arizona; Stefan Wuyts, Penn State University; Amirhossein Sabooni Asrehazer, Ivey Business School; Kersi Antia, Ivey Business School at Western University; Yashoda Bhagwat, Texas Christian University; Shekhar Misra, University of Galway; Ben Lee, Pennsylvania State University, Behrend; Saurabh Mishra, George Mason University; Sudha Mani, Monash University; Kenneth Wathne, University of Stavanger/University of Stavanger & BI Norwegian Business School

ABSTRACT

This session brings together marketing scholars from Australia, Canada, Ireland, Norway, and the U.S. to explore four distinct facets of firms’ strategic efforts: Competitive spillovers arising from corporate sociopolitical activism; how firms sequence and bundle negative corporate announcements; the performance implications of within-industry board ties for strategic differentiation; and brand portfolio refreshment and safeguarding in franchise systems. The studies provide a theory-grounded overview of current strategic marketing thought. Each presentation relies on large databases with thousands of observations to link strategic marketing decisions to firm-level financial results, yielding novel and generalizable academic and managerial insights that are likely to attract EMAC 2026 attendees. They employ novel methods—large-scale event studies, press-release sentiment analysis, board-network analysis, and trademark imagery scoring. The first presentation by Kovalenko explains how firms communicate negative news using 594,232 press releases over nearly two decades. Coupling negative news with a positive announcement improves market reactions, whereas pairing it with neutral information or additional negative news worsens them. When firms bundle positive and negative disclosures, leading with the positive announcement yields stronger investor responses. The results offer practical direction on how managers should bundle and sequence announcements when conveying sensitive or adverse news. The second presentation by Warren and Bhagwat examines competitive spillovers from corporate sociopolitical activism (CSA). Using 439 activism events and 26,000 peer-firm observations, they show that activism affects not only the focal firm but also silent competitors—sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. Spillover direction depends on firms’ strategic emphasis and their prior silence on the issue, highlighting when silence helps, when it harms, and how strategic agility shapes investor reactions in polarized markets. The third presentation by Misra, Lee, Mishra, and Wuyts examines whether within-industry board ties help or hinder strategic differentiation. Using interviews with 40+ board members and data on 3,763 firms, they show that indirect board ties reduce differentiation by fostering institutional mimicry, lowering shareholder returns and raising firms’ cost of capital. Their contingency framework identifies when these risks intensify or weaken, including conditions such as sales volatility, peer performance, market orientation, long-term orientation, and marketing-experienced board members. The last presentation by Sabooni Asrehazer, Mani, Antia, and Wathne examines brand refreshment and safeguarding in business-format franchising. Analyzing over 21,000 USPTO trademark filings from 150 publicly traded franchises owning 250 brands (2000–2024), the authors introduce a brand refreshment metric, and assess how refreshment shapes firm value and how governance and legal safeguards condition these effects using Compustat, SEC filings, and PACER data. This study provides the first large-scale empirical analysis of brand refreshment’s effects. Each research team will present for 20 minutes (with questions), followed by audience Q&A and a general discussion. We expect the session to appeal widely to scholars of better world marketing, strategic marketing, communication, governance, and firm performance.