Insights from EMAC 2024

The annual European Marketing Academy Conference (EMAC) took place from May 28th to 31st in the capital of Romania, Bucharest. As the largest academic marketing conference in Europe, it attracted around 1,000 academics worldwide. DVJ was represented by three colleagues – Jelle Quak, Mark Vroegrijk, and Lisette Kruizinga – to catch up with all that is happening in the academic world, to meet up with academics we cooperate with, get to know new people, present and host our own special session (more on that in another blog), and be inspired.

Written by Lisette Kruizinga – de Vries & Mark Vroegrijk

Academic network and relations

Already at the airport, it was nice catching up with old colleagues and acquaintances (note: Lisette & Mark both worked in academia before joining DVJ), which was continued during the welcoming reception on Tuesday evening. From Wednesday until Friday the days were full of presentations, and here is a summary of what we thought was striking and worth sharing.

It has to be noted that everything presented at the conference is still a work in progress with the aim of receiving feedback and further input on how to proceed. Hence, as unpublished work was presented, we cannot give away too many details. Topics that were discussed most and are also relevant for us can be grouped around social and environmental responsibility, retailing, influencer marketing, and AI.

Social and environmental responsibility

In the past years social and environmental responsibility has been a hot topic, and it again was an important part of many EMAC presentations. Part of those were consumer studies, such as on how to reduce the use of plastic bottles and food waste, drivers for healthy food choices (such as consuming less sugar-filled soda, eating plant-based instead of meat), which role packaging can play in changing behaviour, etc.

But also the firm side of social and environmental responsibility has also been studied a lot, such as how firms can persuade consumers to make more sustainable choices, whether their promotion policies are actually consistent with such goals (are the right products currently promoted?), how brands’ (timing of) activism on social justice and diversity can impact their brand equity, and how communication on CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility)-related issues impacts consumer behaviour in general.

Retailing

Moving to the topic of retailing, many presentations were centred around how the retail landscape is evolving and how retailers can adjust to that. Physical retailers do have to offer something distinct and have to re-imagine their physical store (see also this special issue of the Journal of Retailing) in order to remain competitive in this evolving landscape.

The utilisation of retail media (advertising space offered to brands by retailers) is receiving more and more attention, both in the academic world and in practice as can be observed by its increased spending levels (see Figure 1). Although research on retail media is still emerging, first insights certainly found positive sales effects from in-store video commercials.

Figure 1: Retail media ad spending worldwide, eMarketer

Another theme around retailing was how macro events affect shoppers. The past years were full of extreme macro events, that led to interesting situations worth studying. For example, in Belgium, there was a ban on promotions in the supermarkets during the first Covid lockdown. This situation is a perfect „natural experiment“ to study what the effects on purchases are if there are no promotions at all. The results showed that effects are differentiated; some brands win from the ban, and some brands lose.

Then, another topic that is often mentioned in the popular press as well, is times of economic trouble. A recent study examined the effects of inflation on grocery purchases and showed that those who have the lowest incomes suffer the most from price inflation. Another study analysed how consumers’ price sensitivity evolves during a recession and revealed that while consumers initially may become more price-conscious, this is followed by periods in which they (unjustly?) perceive they can „loosen up a bit“ – before tightening their budgets again.

Influencer marketing/campaigns

A lot of sessions were devoted to influencer marketing and campaigns and touched upon a variety of topics, such as the effectiveness of live streaming on consumer purchase behaviour towards featured products. Interestingly, micro-influencers appear to have higher conversion rates, but as they reach fewer people, macro-influencers generate more sales in the end. Another presentation showed that while influencers can „experiment“ with their own organic content, their sponsored content is best received by followers when it doesn’t stray too far from the content the influencer is typically known for.

Moreover, the role of the social platform influencers are active on was also explored, Not only can platforms’ algorithms make or break influencers, they also differ from one another in terms of what stage within the consumer journey they are of most impact.

AI

Finally, how to use AI in an effective but also responsible way? How can it be used in teaching and research? Which „traditional“ machine learning methods vs. LLMs (large language models) are more effective? These are only a few of the questions that were being discussed.

Several presentations also covered the role AI can play in advertising. One study uses machine learning to classify pre-roll ads on (among others) emotional arousal and shows that congruence between the ad’s emotionality and the online context it’s played in reduces skipping behaviour and improves attitudes towards the ad.

Other studies then examined how well AI works in generating ads by itself. To be short, overall, AI can outperform humans – but this is only true when no text is involved, which is generally a substantial part of an ad.

Listening to each other

All in all, it was a fruitful conference, containing lots of interactions with academics who are as passionate about research as we are. The current „hot topics“ in the academic world align closely with topics that are talked about a lot in practice. We went home with lots of new learnings and inspiration on a diverse range of topics.