Label Mismatch Makes Change Hard

Aside from using their personal experience of an author’s previous work to decide if they want to read a new book, avid readers also rely on category labels, with genres such as science fiction, romance, mystery, and fantasy guiding their purchase decisions.

“When considering buying any product, the first thing people typically do is try to categorize it,” says Amanda Sharkey, associate professor of management and entrepreneurship. “It’s human nature.” And not to be overlooked: Categories and labels help guide sales.

But what happens when there is a label mismatch—when a producer’s offerings are labeled by consumers differently from what the producer intended?

These mismatches often occur when a company or individual wants to veer from familiar offerings to try something new.

Many studies highlight the tangible barriers experienced when producers seek to reposition. They might need to learn new skills, acquire new resources, or attract financial support.

But Sharkey wanted to explore a less-studied obstacle: typecasting penalties, the cognitive barriers producers can face when consumers devalue products that deviate from what they expected of the producer based on their past creations, seeing the new products instead as inferior.

Along with Balázs Kovács of Yale University and Greta Hsu of the University of California-Davis, Sharkey focused on the ways people are constrained from making changes. They tested their theories in the book-publishing industry, focusing on Goodreads.com, an online community where readers discuss, organize, and evaluate books they’ve read or plan to read.

The team assessed readers’ genre categorization, consumption, and evaluation decisions for more than 500,000 books written by nearly 200,000 authors. Some of these books were by authors who, after writing in one genre, switched to another.

To measure an author’s intended book positioning, the team developed an algorithm that analyzed the book synopses provided by publishers to predict the genre in which it was most likely to be classified. To capture label mismatch, those genre classifications were compared with the actual genre’s readers assigned to the same books.

The findings were captured in the paper, “The Stickiness of Category Labels, Audience Perception and Evaluation of Producer Repositioning in Creative Markets,” which is forthcoming in Management Science.

“If an author known for horror, for example, suddenly writes romance, her new romance is likely to be mislabeled as horror, especially by readers who have read her work before,” says Sharkey. Why? Because the reader often applies old genre labels and expectations to the new book.

The more a new book departs from previous books’ content, the more likely the new one will be labeled differently from the author’s intended positioning.

The impact of a mislabeled book can have grave consequences for its success. Repeat readers have strong expectations based on familiarity with the author’s previous work. When those expectations aren’t met, they react accordingly. The result is fewer five-star ratings, lower average ratings, and fewer readers.

In some ways, labels and categories are like fables—they carry across time. And they often affect how an author’s distinctively different work will be perceived and interpreted, most often negatively if the author has repositioned.

“The mislabeling dynamic is also likely to operate in other settings beyond books,” says Sharkey. “Our study suggests that if an author—or any firm or producer—wants to ensure that consumers properly recognize a product that is very different from what they’ve created in the past, there needs to be a strong marketing push to educate them.”

— Melissa Crytzer Fry