Transformative Stories: A Framework for Crafting Stories for Social Impact Organizations

This paper provides a framework to guide the construction of transformative stories by Social Impact Organizations (SIOs) including nonprofit organizations, public policy entities, and for-profit social benefit enterprises. This framework is built from the integration of the academic literature on narratives and narrative construction relevant to SIO story construction. In this transformative story construction framework, we outline how SIOs can assemble and craft authentic and effective stories that convey an SIO's impact, engage audiences, and call those audiences to action as well as develop and manage a portfolio of such stories. The framework also puts forth recommendations to guide the marketplace practice of transformative story construction by SIOs. Finally, the paper outlines questions to engage SIOs in collaborative research to refine the practice of constructing stories with the power transform

Stock Market Reaction to Unexpected Growth in Marketing Expenditure: Negative for Sales Force, Contingent on Spending Level for Advertising

Because firms do not publicly report marketing expenditures, most studies of the link between firm value and marketing consider advertising (which is publicly reported for many firms) a proxy for marketing. The authors extend those studies in two ways. First, they broaden the proxy for marketing by considering both advertising and sales force. Second, they offer an explanation for the fact that some studies linking advertising to firm value find a positive relationship, whereas others find a negative relationship. The accounting literature suggests that the link to firm value for both unexpected growth in sales force expenditures and unexpected growth in advertising expenditures should be negative. The authors confirm the hypothesized accounting relationship for sales force expenditures but find a contingent relationship for advertising expenditures. Firm value and unexpected growth in advertising expenditures are negatively related for firms that advertise below the advertising response threshold, but they are positively related for firms that advertise above that threshold. Perhaps because this contingent relationship is difficult for analysts to learn through observation of the stock market, analysts ignore value-relevant advertising expenditure information when they forecast firm valueclos