Browsing by Author "Weaver, Kimberlee"

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    Brand Communities and Well-being: Learning to Age in a Red Hat
    Moscato, Emily Marie (Virginia Tech, 2014-06-04)
    The older female segment plays a critical role in society's fabric, as women past retirement volunteer a significant amount in their communities and provide essential caregiving to family members and friends. Moreover, older females outnumber older males and with the baby boomer population aging over 65, this segment is becoming more influential. Yet there is surprisingly little marketing research that focuses on this older female segment, their lived experiences, and their well-being. Working within the tradition of consumer culture theory, this project is an ethnographic exploration of the Red Hat Society (RHS), a brand community which focuses on celebrating older women. This research adds to the theoretical understanding of older female consumers by exploring how older women negotiate the meaning of aging, gender, and identity. Extending on brand community literature, I suggest how the RHS manages to create a supportive, 'safe space' in which members are able to engage play and learning. Play performances, enacted in through costuming and other rituals within the brand community, are extended beyond the bounds of this 'safe space' to influence the identities and well-being of these women.
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    The Presenter's Paradox
    Weaver, Kimberlee; Garcia, Stephen M.; Schwarz, Norbert (University of Chicago Press, 2012-10)
    This analysis introduces the Presenter's Paradox. Robust findings in impression formation demonstrate that perceivers' judgments show a weighted averaging pattern, which results in less favorable evaluations when mildly favorable information is added to highly favorable information. Across seven studies, we show that presenters do not anticipate this averaging pattern on the part of evaluators and instead design presentations that include all of the favorable information available. This additive strategy ("more is better") hurts presenters in their perceivers' eyes because mildly favorable information dilutes the impact of highly favorable information. For example, presenters choose to spend more money to make a product bundle look more costly, even though doing so actually cheapened its value from the evaluators' perspective (study 1). Additional studies demonstrate the robustness of the effect, investigate the psychological processes underlying it, and examine its implications for a variety of marketing contexts.