Arts and Marketing: Insights from Secondary Data and Experiments
(A2024-118865)

AUTHORS

Aulona Ulqinaku, Leeds University Business School; Verdiana Giannetti, Leeds University Business School; Alessandro Biraglia, Leeds University Business School; Anastasia Nanni, Aalto Business School

ABSTRACT

The literature at the intersection of arts and marketing is a rich field that explores how artistic endeavors and creative expressions intersect with marketing strategies, consumer behavior, and branding. This special session contributes to extant research in marketing by focusing on four distinct, yet interrelated, topics, each of them filling a specific gap in the literature. Specifically, the four studies investigate (i) the impact of posthumous artistic releases on consumer preferences, (ii) the impact of cross-country co-production on movies’ box-office performance in China, (iii) preferences for AI- vs. user-generated suggestions in movie choices, and (iv) the creative origins of consumer favorites in the context of chart-topping musical hits. Each of the studies addresses a real-world marketing problem and provides findings of significant managerial relevance. The first study titled “The “Lazarus Effect”: Creative Symbolic Immortality and Consumers’ Evaluation of Posthumous Artistic Releases” by Alessandro Biraglia, Aulona Ulqinaku, Verdiana Giannetti, and Josko Brakus uses secondary data studies, surveys, and experiments conducted across the music, literature, movies, and TV-series domains to examine whether and why consumers prefer posthumous artistic releases over non-posthumous ones. The second study titled “Sino-foreign Co-productions: An Investigation of Their Impact on Movies’ Box-Office Performance in China” by Jieke Chen, Verdiana Giannetti, and Yunlu Zhao uses secondary data on movies released in China to examine the effect of Sino-foreign co-production (vs. not) on movies’ box-office performance. The third study titled “Could You Please Decide for Us? Algorithms Versus Humans in Joint Decision-Making” by Aylin Cakanlar, Gülen Sarial-Abi, and Aulona Ulqinaku uses experiments to investigate how consumers' willingness to use algorithms may vary depending on the specific decision-making context. Across four studies, the authors demonstrate that individuals are more likely to use algorithms in the joint decision-making context relative to the individual decision-making context, including when it comes to movie choices. The fourth study titled “What Makes a Favorite? Authorship and Authenticity in Music” by Anastasia Nanni, Joseph Nunes and Andrea Ordanini investigates the creative origins of consumer favorites in the context of chart-topping musical hits focusing on the roles of authorship and authenticity.