Knowledge that Transforms

Journal Article A Word of Thanks Get access Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 45, Issue 6, April 2019, Pages i1–i3, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucz007 Published: 18 March 2019

The present research proposes that luxury consumption can be a double-edged sword: while luxury consumption yields status benefits, it can also make consumers feel inauthentic, producing what we call the impostor syndrome from luxury consumption. As a result, paradoxically, luxury consumption may backfire and lead consumers to behave less confidently due to their undermined feelings of self-authenticity. Feelings of inauthenticity from luxury consumption may arise because consumers perceive luxury as an undue privilege. These feelings are less pronounced among consumers with high levels of chronic psychological entitlement, and they are reduced when consumers’ sense of entitlement is temporarily boosted. The effects are robust across studies conducted in the lab and in field settings such as the Metropolitan Opera, Martha’s Vineyard, a luxury shopping center, and the Upper East Side in New York, featuring relevant participant populations including luxury target segments and consumption contexts including consumers’ reflections on their actual past luxury purchases.

Consumers routinely make decisions about the timing of their consumption, making tradeoffs between consuming now or later. Most of the literature examining impatience considers monetary outcomes (i.e., delaying dollars), implicitly assuming that how the money is spent does not systematically alter impatience levels and patterns. The authors propose an impatience asymmetry for material and experiential purchases based on utility duration. Five studies provide evidence that consumers are more impatient toward experiential purchases compared to material purchases and that this increased impatience is driven by whether the value is extracted over a shorter utility duration (often associated with experiential purchases) or a longer utility duration (often associated with material purchases). Thus, when an experience is consumed over a longer period of time, the results show that impatience can be diminished. Additional results show that the effect holds in both delay and expedite frames and suggest that the results cannot be explained by differences in scheduling, time sensitivity, affect, ownership, future time perspective, or future connectedness.

Consumers’ response to mass media can be difficult to assess because individuals choose for themselves the amount of media they consume, and that choice may be correlated with their other consumption decisions. To avoid this selection problem, this article examines the introduction of television to the US, during which some cities gained access to television years before others. This natural experiment makes it possible to estimate the causal impact of television on the decision to start smoking, a consumer behavior with important public health implications. Difference-in-differences analyses of television’s introduction indicate that (1) television did cause people to start smoking, (2) 16- to 21-year-olds were particularly affected by television, and (3) much of the response to television occurred within a couple of years of its introduction. Our preferred estimates suggest that television increased the share of smokers in the population by 5–15 percentage points, generating roughly 11 million additional smokers between 1946 and 1970. More broadly, these results offer causal evidence that (1) mass media can have a large influence on consumers, potentially affecting their health, (2) media exerts an especially strong influence on teens, and (3) mass media can influence consumers more than typical changes in prices.

Company apologies require apologizers, which can take the form of one person or multiple people. Does the number of apologizers influence how consumers interpret and respond to that apology? The current research suggests that a single apologizer proves more effective than multiple apologizers because consumers tend to have a stronger empathic response towards one person than towards multiple people. Across one archival study and four experiments, a single apologizer (relative to multiple apologizers) garners higher stock returns (study 1), elicits a higher rate of behavior indicative of acceptance of the apology (study 2), and more readily facilitates consumer forgiveness of the company, perceived company integrity, and satisfaction with the apology (studies 3-5). This effect is mediated by empathy for the apologizer (studies 4 and 5), and the benefit for a single apologizer dissipates when consumers perceive multiple apologizers as entitative, united members (study 5). Contributions and implications are discussed.