Research Seminar Marketing - "Developing Strengths or Remedying Weaknesses? How Perceived Social Mobility Affects Parents’ Purchase Preferences for Children’s Educational Products" - Yajin WANG, CEIBS, China

Although the market for children’s educational products is expanding rapidly, the factors that underlie parents’ choices of children’s educational products remain understudied in the marketing literature. This research provides novel insights into the status motivations behind parents’ purchases of children’s educational products. Specifically, we find that when parents perceive higher social mobility (i.e., society provides enough opportunities for upward mobility through hard work), they prioritize the status advancement goal relative to the status maintenance goal and thus display a greater intention to purchase products that maximize a child’s strength over products that remedy a child’s weakness. Furthermore, we demonstrate two theoretically relevant and practically important moderators of this effect: successful individuals’ prototypes and the status relevance of children’s strengths and weaknesses. Across seven studies, we implement a multimethod approach and examinations in different contexts (with both incentive-compatible and actual expenditure measures) to provide converging evidence for our propositions.