Description
Marketers continually learn about new tactics for influencing consumers, for example, through executive education, LinkedIn posts, interactions with colleagues, or practitioner-oriented articles and books (Cialdini, 2021). The present research examines how marketers form intuitions about the effectiveness of these tactics for their specific target consumers. Across three studies with experienced marketers, we find that these intuitions are highly self-referential—that is, marketers infer their target consumers’ susceptibility to influence tactics from their own perceived susceptibility to these tactics (“influence projection”). Study 1 shows that marketers project their self-perceived susceptibility to various tactics onto target consumers, which in turn affects the likelihood that they use these tactics in practice. Study 2 manipulates marketers’ self-perceived susceptibility and provides causal evidence for influence projection. Specifically, marketers’ predictions shift with experimentally induced self-perceptions, even though target consumers’ true susceptibility remains unchanged. Thus, influence projection introduces unsystematic variance in marketers’ predictions (Kahn, Luce, & Nowlis, 2006), and our results suggest that this effect is substantial (R2 range: 23-43%). Finally, study 3 shows that informing marketers about influence projection increases their willingness to question their intuitions and to test them empirically (e.g., through field experiments). This finding is important because only a minority of marketers routinely conduct such tests, with estimates ranging between 1% and 29% (Runge, Geinitz, & Ejdemyr, 2020; Koning, Hasan, & Chatterji, 2022). Overall, our research suggests that marketers’ intuitions about influence tactics are highly self-referential and that raising awareness of this finding can promote more objective, data-based evaluations of these tactics.| Period | 12 Jun 2026 |
|---|---|
| Event title | 2026 ISMS Marketing Science Conference |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Carcavelos, PortugalShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |