With Guang Zhu 

While organizations often communicate strategic positions in categories, audiences may not always perceive these positions as intended. How do these misalignments influence organizational performance? Drawing on organizational theory and strategy, we conceptualize two types of misalignments based on the typicality of an organization’s intended categorical position. Opportunistic misalignment arises when an organization intends to be typical but is perceived as deviating from category expectations, whereas innovative misalignment involves a low-typicality positioning that, though initially confusing, invites audiences to appreciate novel elements. We propose that organizations with innovative misalignment perform better than those with opportunistic misalignment, as novelty-seeking audiences embrace unpredictability in offerings that defy established expectations. We test our theory using data on 7,790 video games from the Steam platform, leveraging Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to capture intended positions and relying on user-assigned tags to quantify perceived positions. Our findings lend support to the hypotheses and contribute to research on strategic positioning, category theory, and social evaluation in creative markets.

With Guang Zhu and Tao Wang

RESEARCH SUMMARY

How close should the framing of a creative product be vis-à-vis its peers?  We propose a “sleeping beauty effect” in creative markets: while less-typical-framing products face early-stage disadvantages when consumers rely on existing category systems, they become more appealing in the later stage under updated evaluative schemas. We theorize a collective consecration mechanism; consumers gradually engage with a product and develop new judgment devices that facilitate novelty appreciation. We test our arguments using synopses and consumer reviews on the largest online videogame distribution platform Steam. Findings show that games with less typical framings underperform initially but surpass those with more typical framings later, driven by the collective consecration mechanism in the form of emerging themes in gameplayers’ discussion and engagement.  

MANAGERIAL SUMMARY

The market appeal of creative products is difficult to predict because of uncertainty and complexity. To stand out in the marketplace, producers use framings to tell their stories and place products in relation to peers. While some products are appealing in early stage upon release, others may only experience late blooming. By looking at video games on Steam we suggest that consumers navigate creative markets using two devices at different time points: they use existing category systems to understand new offerings initially, yet they engage more deeply with products later in a community that generates new knowledge and updates their interpretation frameworks. We explain the sleeping beauty effect through collective consecration by capturing and analyzing framings’ typicality and emerging themes in consumer reviews.

With Alicia Barroso and Samira Reis 

This paper investigates how consumers evaluate organizations that publicly communicate their stance on politically polarized social causes. Focusing on women-owned businesses that advocate for gender equality, we consider how different consumer groups—supporters, opponents, and nonparticipants—respond to such messaging, with particular attention to nonparticipants, individuals who remain uninvolved with social causes. We argue that while such messaging fosters loyalty among aligned consumers, it also risks alienating opponents and discouraging nonparticipants. In highly polarized contexts, however, differences in consumer responses diminish as nonparticipants face increasing pressure to take sides. This polarization amplifies biases across all groups, reinforcing stereotypes and resulting in homogenized perceptions of women-owned businesses, regardless of whether these organizations communicate their stance on gender equality. Using the 2019 introduction of the "Women-Owned Business" (WOB) attribute—designed to promote female entrepreneurship and reduce the gender gap—as a quasi-experimental setting, we analyze Yelp data to assess how the adoption of this attribute by women-owned businesses influences consumer ratings and reviews. Our findings support our arguments.

With Alicia Barroso and Samira Reis