Johannes David Hattula
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Dr. oec.
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Hattula
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Johannes David
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+41 71 224 2876
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  • Publication
    Managerial Empathy Facilitates Egocentric Predictions of Consumer Preferences
    (American Marketing Association, 2015-04-01)
    Hattula, Johannes
    ;
    Herzog, Walter
    ;
    Dahl, Darren W.
    ;
    Reinecke, Sven
    Common wisdom suggests that managerial empathy (i.e., the mental process of taking a consumer perspective) helps executives separate their personal consumption preferences from those of consumers, thereby preventing egocentric preference predictions. The results of the present investigation, however, show exactly the opposite. First, the authors find that managerial empathy ironically accelerates self-reference in predictions of consumer preferences. Second, managers' self-referential tendencies increase with empathy because taking a consumer perspective activates managers' private consumer identity and, thus, their personal consumption preferences. Third, empathic managers' self-referential preference predictions make them less likely to use market research results. Fourth, the findings imply that when explicitly instructed to do so, managers are capable of suppressing their private consumer identity in the process of perspective taking, which helps them reduce self-referential preference predictions. To support their conclusions, the authors present four empirical studies with 480 experienced marketing managers and show that incautiously taking the perspective of consumers causes self-referential decisions in four contexts: product development, communication management, pricing, and celebrity endorsement
    Type: journal article
    Journal: Journal of Marketing Research
    Volume: 52
    Issue: 2
    DOI: 10.1509/jmr.13.0296
    URI: https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/handle/20.500.14171/106578
    Scopus© Citations 30
  • Publication
    Ihr wollt, was ich will
    (Manager-Magazin-Verl.-Ges., 2015-07)
    Reinecke, Sven
    ;
    Hattula, Johannes
    ;
    Herzog, Walter
    ;
    Dahl, Darren
    Type: journal article
    Journal: Harvard Business Manager
    URI: https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/handle/20.500.14171/106226
  • Publication
    When Empathic Managers Become Consumers: A Self-referential Bias
    (ARC Association for Consumer Research, 2012-10-04)
    Hattula, Johannes
    ;
    Herzog, Walter
    ;
    Dahl, Darren W.
    ;
    Reinecke, Sven
    This research implies that cognitive empathy, the mental process of putting oneself into the shoes of consumers, activates managers' consumer identity and increases the influence of their personal consumption preferences on predicted consumer preferences. Two studies are presented in suppport of this self-referential bias.
    Type: conference paper
    URL: http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/v40/acr_v40_12808.pdf
    URI: https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/handle/20.500.14171/90909
  • Publication
    When Empathic Managers Misunderstand Their Customers : Evidence for a Self-Referential Bias
    (INFORMS, 2012-06-07)
    Hattula, Johannes
    ;
    Herzog, Walter
    ;
    Dahl, Darren W.
    ;
    Reinecke, Sven
    A core managerial task is forming accurate predictions about customer preferences. This investigation adds to the scarce research on this topic in two ways. First, our results suggest that managers use their own preferences as a cue for their customers' preferences. We label this tendency self-referential ‘bias' because managers' individual tastes are questionable predictors of customer preferences. Second, we examine how cognitive empathy, that is, the mental process of putting oneself into the shoes of customers to understand their needs, influences the bias. Although common wisdom suggests that empathy is associated with an increased customer focus and a decreased emphasis on one's own perspective, our results indicate the contrary, that is, the self-referential bias increases with the amount of empathy. This finding is in line with recent social psychological work according to which (a) empathy increases the perceived social closeness between observers (i.e., managers) and targets (i.e., customers) and (b) observers tend to assume that close others share their own preferences. In an initial experiment, marketing managers completed a case study on a product development process in the automotive industry. They were asked to steer the product development process by assigning importance weights to six product features (e.g., engine power) which were then correlated with their personal importance ratings of the features when buying a new car (as a consumer). For all product features, we find that (a) there is a positive correlation between managers' personal importance ratings and the importance weights in the management task and (b) the correlation significantly increases as managers exhibit greater cognitive empathy. Further results and implications are discussed.
    Type: conference paper
    URI: https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/handle/20.500.14171/91488