An introduction should be very short — about two pages double spaced.
An introduction follows a very clear order:
Here, your only job is to convince the reader that this paper matters and is interesting. You want to highlight the practical importance of your work by stating things like:
| Way to do it | Example |
|---|---|
| The phenomenon you study is very common | Goal setting is ubiquitous. People set goals for how much weight to lose before summer, how many steps to take in a day, and how much money to set aside for a special vacation, for emergencies, or for retirement. Organizations set goals too, such as sales targets or earnings goals for workers, fundraising goals for charitable organizations, and even goals for an entire state or nation to reduce its environmental impact (Wallace & Etkin, 2024) |
| That the phenomenon you study has important (often financial but could be wellbeing/health) consequences for businesses, individual consumers or governments | Perceived social support is the belief that others will be there for you, as needed, for future life events (Barrera 1986; Cohen 1988). It has been consistently and reliably shown to be associated with many positive physical and mental health outcomes, including better coping with disease (Edens, Larkin, and Abel 1992; Fong et al. 2017) and reduced symptoms of depression (Rueger et al. 2016). Conversely, a lack of perceived social support or feelings of loneliness have been associated with increased drug and alcohol use, high blood pressure, stress, and even premature death (Cacioppo and Patrick 2008; House, Landis, and Umberson 1988; Pieters 2013)… |
| A salient or interesting example of your phenomena | In 2018, Wendy’s launched a Twitter campaign (#NationalRoastDay) designed to make fun of their followers. For 24 hours, the Wendy’s Twitter account teased any consumer or brand who engaged with them. Highlights included Wendy’s congratulating Planters Peanuts on being the “worst part of trail mix” and telling a young consumer to “quit trying to model for Teen Vogue.” #NationalRoastDay went viral, spawning an abundance of positive media coverage and netting Wendy’s 350,000 new Twitter followers (Oba, Howe & Fitzsimons, 2024) |
You do not need to do this. Many successful papers do not. You only need to do this to avoid reader counterarguments (traps), here are some examples:
| “Hey, don’t we already know this?”
state why your idea is new and merits study | One reason is that leisure often conflicts with work. Work and leisure compete for a limited pool of time. Consumers only have 24 hours a day to accomplish all that they wish to do. This constraint makes time a scarce resource (Etkin 2019; Spiller 2019), requiring people to make trade-offs in how they allocate their time across activities (Fernbach, Kan, and Lynch 2015; Memmi and Etkin 2020; Spiller 2011; Zauberman and Lynch 2005)…Because work tends to be easier to justify and leisure harder to justify (Giner-Sorolla 2001; Hsee, Yang, and Wang 2010; Kivetz and Simonson 2002; Okada 2005; Southerton and Tomlinson 2005), when spending time on leisure conflicts with work, people tend to prioritize work (Gershuny 2005; Hsee et al. 2013). But while direct conflict between work and leisure may indeed favor work …, could goal conflict influence how consumers allocate time to work and leisure more generally? Might perceiving greater conflict between one’s personal goals (e.g., conflict between goals to be fit and to socialize with friends, goals to perform well at work and to travel, goals to save for retirement and pay down debt) affect how much time people subsequently spend on unrelated work and leisure activities? (Wallace & Etkin, 2024) | | --- | --- | | “I have no idea what you’re talking about”
define your key terms if they are not common | In the present research, we posit and provide initial evidence for one way in which individuals may increase perceived social support: through celebrations. Celebrations can be defined as the action of marking an important event or occasion. They play an integral role in culture and society, with their many traditions serving as a “social glue” to bind social groups (Etzioni and Bloom 2004). Celebrations can therefore be thought of as contributing to the health of a society through connection and cohesion…(Brick, Gullo-Wight & Fitzsimons, 2022) | | “Hey, all the other academic literature says something other than what you’re saying”
we agree but it conflicts with practical examples | The success of these campaigns conflicts with extant marketing literature, which suggests that teasing is an ineffective, and perhaps even counterproductive, way to engage consumers (Roehm and Roehm 2014)... teasing, by definition, highlights the target’s flaws rather than accepting them. At best, prior work has found brand teasing to be unrelated to brand attitudes (Roehm and Roehm 2014). At worst, brand teasing poses a serious risk of offending the consumer (Warren and McGraw 2016b) or making the brand seem overly aggressive (Ning et al. 2022; Thomas and Fowler 2021), resulting in negative affect and lower brand attitudes (Warren and McGraw 2016b). Yet, observations of Wendy’s, Postmates’, RyanAir, and Roomkey’s teasing campaigns suggest a largely positive response, from both consumers (Beltis 2018) and industry experts (Bryan 2019). How might these opposing viewpoints be reconciled? (Oba, Howe & Fitzsimons, 2024) |
Using two or three paragraphs, provide a summary of what you find in your paper
In summary, we argue that regardless of the content of the tease, teasing is a uniquely human form of communication and, as a result, brand teasing causes consumers to anthropomorphize a teasing brand. However, we suggest that the effect of anthropomorphism on engagement with and connection to the brand is not uniform among pro- and antisocial teases. While prosocial teases evoke a positive human schema and thus increase engagement and self-brand connection, antisocial teases evoke a negative human schema that decreases engagement and self-brand connection. (source: Oba, Howe & Fitzsimons, 2024)
A contribution identifies how your research furthers or extends or builds upon the literature. Your research could contribute via its findings, its empirical approach (a new model, a new experimental paradigm, a new way of measuring something), or its integration of the literature (bridging previously siloed disciplines)
Your findings/empirical approach, on their own, are NOT a contribution. You should draw the connection for why your finding/empirical approach, or the implication of your findings/empirical approach, furthers research.
<aside> 📌
Your contribution cannot be “no one has looked at this before.”
That is not a contribution. This is the pet peeve of most professors reading student projects. You must know the field well enough to understand how your project can make a contribution that changes how researchers and consumers think about this topic, and lead to changes in future academic work and marketer behaviour.
</aside>
Two of these contributions should be theoretical (we contribute to the literature on X by showing Y) and one of them should be practical (with effects on consumers). Depending on how much you have to say, this can be three separate paragraphs or one big paragraph.
This is the most important part of your introduction. Everything else is either repeated in more detail elsewhere or not important. So, spend some time thinking about this.