The Success Formula for Hedonic Media

• Applicant: Professor Dr. André Marchand
• Subject Area: Accounting and Finance
• Term: from 2019 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 417478986

Hedonic media industries are characterized by substantial economic impacts and growth — as well as by other unique factors, such as their high degree of digital innovations, dynamism, and vast cultural impacts. A major challenge of hedonic media is that not all media products are economically successful. Managers face substantial, on-going uncertainty and risk regarding their revenue potential. Such a scenario suggests the need to understand marketing efforts that can increase the chances of success and mitigate uncertainty. Extant research is limited in two ways. First, it has not investigated long-term effects, over several decades, of a sufficiently wide variety of hedonic media brands. Second, it has not addressed the real-world simultaneous relevance of many hedonic media brands for various hedonic media types or how they interrelate (e.g. spillover effects of brand extensions). To address these research gaps and achieve six proposed research milestones, this project will investigate which factors generally influence demand for hedonic media and how they might differ over time and across hedonic media types. It will focus on the most popular hedonic media types (movies, video games, television series, music, novels) and also investigate hedonic media type–specific success factors (e.g. network effects for video games). To answer these fundamental questions, this project will include comprehensive data sets and multimethod approaches, such as meta-analyses, actual field data with most hedonic media brands from recent decades, social media data from millions of consumers, and experimental and survey data. Finally, it will leverage insights from multiple disciplines (e.g. marketing, economics, psychology, media studies) to ensure substantial research progress and increased clarity regarding the fundamental question of what makes hedonic media successful, which has great importance for both research and practice.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants