The assistant professor of marketing also presented research she co-authored with Elon student Rani Hecht ’21.
Prachi Gala, assistant professor of marketing in the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business, and Elon Business Fellow Rani Hecht ’21 were invited to present their research at the Association of Collegiate Marketing Educators (ACME) Annual Conference, held March 11-14 in San Antonio.
Gala presented and received the 2020 Federation of Business Disciplines Distinguished Paper Award for “CEOs’ Level of Confidence, Marketing Outcomes and Role of Marketing Power.”
In the paper, Gala and co-author Saim Kashmiri, University of Mississippi, focused on how CEOs with high levels of confidence succeed in overcoming the problem of myopic marketing management by investing more in advertising, R&D as well as corporate social responsibility. The co-authors also tried to find a solution on how to encourage under confident CEOs to overcome the problem of myopic management by changing the composition of the top management team.
The co-authors share in the paper’s abstract, “The results on a sample of U.S. publicly listed firms reveal that firms with confident CEOs, on average, outperform those with under confident CEOs on a key forward looking metric – hubris, however the great investments of such firms tend to come with an important cost – product harm crisis. These differences in strategic and marketing decisions seem to be driven by highly confident CEOs’ higher risk-taking personality which is biased towards gains and accomplishments compared to under confident CEOs’ vigilant focus for duty and responsibility as well as short term profits.”
Additionally, Gala presented the paper, “Stressed and Relaxed Behavior and Impact on Purchase Intentions Through Menu Labeling,” which she co-authored with Hecht, a marketing major from Carmel, Indiana. The co-authors looked at the presence of calorie information as well as food images to test how stress or relaxed minds select types of food depending on how they are presented in menus. Their research found that “although stress is associated with the biological changes that could be expected to reduce food intake, it works in the opposite way because of how individuals respond and cope with the stress.”