JAR Inside the Research Podcast
This podcast gives listeners a look at the latest research articles published in the Journal of Advertising Research. Listen to authors describe their work and what motivated it, explore challenges they faced in the research process, and describe what they'd like to researched next.
JAR Inside the Research Podcast
Grit in Advertising: How a Promotion Focus Influences Consumer Variety-Seeking
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In this episode, we speak with Logan Pant (Western Michigan University) to discuss his article, "Grit in Advertising: How a Promotion Focus Influences Consumer Variety-Seeking," coauthored with Blair Kidwell (University of North Texas) and Mark R. Gleim (Auburn University), published in the June 2026 issue of JAR. Logan explains how the team treated grit not as a stable personality trait but as something advertising can switch on in the moment, the way a Nike spot or Samsung's "It Takes Grit" campaign does. The evidence runs across a field pilot and three experiments including a coffee shop study where customers scanned a QR code while waiting in line and reported what they ordered today versus what they usually order. The key finding runs against intuition: grit is usually understood as sticking with something, but gritty advertising makes consumers more likely to try something new, and it does so by activating a promotion focus, where people see benefits rather than costs.
The practical takeaway is that gritty appeals are a tool for getting people to explore rather than persist. Logan sees the clearest fit for challenger brands and new entrants, the ones who cannot outspend Nike or Apple and need consumers to consider an alternative at all. Fitness and wellness already use this language, but he points to less obvious cases like financial advisors encouraging portfolio diversification. Notably, priming grit produces results similar to priming promotion directly, which matters for brands that have already built grit into their identity. Our discussion also gets into the making of the paper, including the fact that only two of the original dissertation studies survived, the wellness company study came out of the review process, and Logan's candid account of learning how to read reviewer comments as a first-time lead author. On future directions, he discusses brand loyalty and product category as the obvious boundary conditions, since some consumers will not leave Apple or their preferred cereal no matter what the ad says.
Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1080/00218499.2025.2576965
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