Knowledge that Transforms

Stigma, as a process of shame, fosters social exclusion and diminishes bodily competences. Thus, stigmatized consumers often turn to the marketplace for respite. Based on an ethnographic study of drag artists, this study proposes a new understanding of the body that emerges from the mastery of creative consumption practices to combat shame. We theorize a novel “body-in-practice” framework to examine how consumers transform from an imagined persona to an accomplished body to embody pride. Six novel stigma resistance strategies emerged—experimenting, guarding, risk-taking, spatial reconfiguring, self-affirming, and integrating. Body-in-practice thus explains how shame weakens, pride strengthens, emotions stabilize, and self-confidence grows. This research contributes by explaining the hard work of identity repair, exploring stigma resistance across safe and hostile social spaces, and highlighting the emancipatory potential of embodied mastery.

Morality, appraisals of right and wrong, is central to consumers’ identities and decisions. Even everyday consumption choices can be subject to moral judgments and require moral justifications. When and how do consumers moralize formerly taken-for-granted consumption practices? Considering self-care consumption in the United States, which includes practices that range from bathing to dieting to meditating to vacationing, this article examines the moralization of everyday consumption practices. This research reveals that consumption is likely to be moralized when there are culturally contested meanings of its core constructs, like “self” and “care,” leading cultural authorities to prescribe alternative ways to pursue the same consumption goal (i.e., cultural scripts). Exposure to cultural scripts that clash with consumers’ moral intuitions about self-care consumption triggers moral introspection, an evaluation and re-calibration of those intuitions. Consumers then set moral boundaries of acceptable self-care consumption by (1) denouncing, such that they assume a position of moral righteousness; (2) positioning, to indicate moral inclusivity; (3) balancing, which implies moral licensing; or (4) ritualizing, in which case they express moral autonomy. This study advances consumer research by establishing that moral considerations intertwine with consumers’ identities and underlie the symbolic meanings of everyday consumption practices.

Nature affords transformations to consumers’ social, embodied, and temporal experiences. Yet, consumer research has yet to consider how wild species contribute to and are affected by experiential consumption in nature. With data from an ethnography of fly fishing, we theorize human–fish interactions as encounters in interspecies contact zones. Our findings explain how these encounters are established, engendering processes of interspecies becoming that transform both species. We discuss how these transformations are ordered by power relationships that classify roles for entities enrolled in consumption assemblages. Often, humans exert power over other living entities by classifying them as resources for consumption. Yet, we also discover more reciprocal expressions of power between humans and other species. With consumption as a major contributor to the decline of wild species populations, we discuss theoretical and practical implications of our work that are intended to stimulate further research.

Over the past 50 years, consumer researchers have presented extensive evidence that consumer preference can be swayed by the decision context, particularly the configuration of the choice set. Importantly, behavioral research on context effects has inspired prominent quantitative research on multialternative decision-making published in leading psychology, management, economics, and general interest journals. While both streams of research seem to agree that context effects are an important research area, there has been relatively limited interaction, communication, and collaboration between the two research camps. In this article, we seek to initiate an active dialogue between the two sides. We begin by providing a critical overview of the two literatures on context effects, discussing both their strengths and weaknesses, as well as disparities and complementarities. Here, we place particular emphasis on deepening consumer researchers’ understanding of context effects by drawing on prominent quantitative research published in non-marketing journals over the last decades. Importantly, we provide a roadmap for the future that can inspire further research and potential collaborations between the two camps, overcoming silos in knowledge creation.

With its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the United Nations (UN) developed 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a “blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet.” This initiative raises the question: how has the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) shed light on the SDGs? This research analyzes 50 years of consumer research through the lens of the SDG and makes four contributions. First, the authors provide a content analysis of articles in JCR and how it relates to the SDGs over time; they also analyze the Journal of Consumer Psychology (JCP) and Journal of Public Policy & Marketing (JPP&M) with regard to the SDGs. Second, this research reveals where JCR has made progress and achieved impact (via Altmetric) but also identifies gaps in the literature. Thus, the analyses shed light on what research in JCR, JCP, and JPP&M understands (and does not understand) about consumer behavior and points the way to future SDG-oriented research. Finally, based on insights from interviews with thought leaders, sociology of science, UN data dashboards, and an exploratory survey in three countries (the U.S., France, and Singapore), the authors provide recommendations on how the field can (better) incorporate the SDGs in research, teaching, and service.

Why, how, and when can logos with a blue positive space communicate competence versus sadness? Why, how, and when might logos with a red positive space evoke impressions of liveliness versus aggressiveness? As the current research establishes, a black background strengthens the negative meanings associated with the hue of a logo’s positive space and weakens its positive meanings. Conversely, a white background strengthens its positive meanings and weakens its negative meanings. These automatic effects occur because the hue of the positive space interacts with the color of the negative space to determine whether logos communicate positive or negative brand impressions more vividly. These effects are broadly applicable to both well-known and unknown brands, yet they are attenuated for meaningful logos and filled-frame logos. With these novel findings, this article identifies specific factors that can alter the meanings of logo hues, provides a theoretical lens for understanding the interplay of the background color and the hue of the positive space, and offers guidelines for crafting effective logos. This article also reveals which brands can benefit most from conveying negative impressions through their logos: logos with a black (white) background enhance evaluations of brands that possess negatively (positively) valenced personality traits.

Digital advertising platforms have emerged as a widely utilized data source in consumer research; yet, the interpretation of such data remains a source of confusion for many researchers. This article aims to address this issue by offering a comprehensive and accessible review of four prominent data collection methods proposed in the marketing literature: “informal studies,” “multiple-ad studies without holdout,” “single-ad studies with holdout,” and “multiple-ad studies with holdout.” By outlining the strengths and limitations of each method, we aim to enhance understanding regarding the inferences that can and cannot be drawn from the collected data. Furthermore, we present seven recommendations to effectively leverage these tools for programmatic consumer research. These recommendations provide guidance on how to use these tools to obtain causal and non-causal evidence for the effects of marketing interventions, and the associated psychological processes, in a digital environment regulated by targeting algorithms. We also give recommendations for how to describe the testing tools and the data they generate and urge platforms to be more transparent on how these tools work.

Trust is one of the highly important concepts of consumer research; yet it is characterized by a striking lack of generalizations and consensus regarding the relative strength of its antecedents, consequences, and moderators. To close this important gap, the current research reports a comprehensive large-scale meta-analysis shedding light on a wide variety of the antecedents, consequences, and moderators of the individual consumer’s trust and their relative importance. Empirical generalizations are based on 2,147 effect sizes from 549 studies across 469 manuscripts in numerous disciplines, representing a total of 324,834 respondents in 71 countries over a five-decade span (1970–2020). The key findings are thus that (1) integrity-based (vs. reliability-based) antecedents are more effective in driving trust, and (2) trust is more effective in improving primarily attitudinal (vs. primarily behavioral) outcomes. Moderation analyses unpack further heterogeneity. Notably, both integrity-based and reliability-based antecedents have become stronger drivers of consumer trust in recent years. Theoretical and practical contributions are discussed in addition to advancing important future directions.

High-profile instances of brands accused of cultural appropriation suggest that even the most prominent brands fail to fully understand the complexities of this phenomenon. This work experimentally unpacks consumer perceptions of cultural appropriation and its impact on brand attitudes and purchase interest. The authors begin by developing and validating a scale for measuring perceptions of cultural appropriation. Next, a series of studies demonstrates that viewing this phenomenon through a historical lens can help determine when and why the use of cultural elements is viewed as appropriative. Specifically, an emphasis on historical power imbalance explains why liberal consumers are more likely to recognize cultural appropriation and why commercializing disadvantaged cultures is considered appropriation, whereas using elements from advantaged cultures may be more acceptable. The conceptualization further identifies brand actions and interventions that influence perceptions of cultural appropriation, including externally emphasizing historical power imbalance, how brands obtain cultural elements, and how brands represent the culture in their product offerings and marketing. These findings help marketers (1) avoid launching products that can be damaging to the brand and offensive to consumers and (2) understand how to better promote products in a way that prevents rather than amplifies these negative perceptions.

The current research examines how the knowledge that a product is made using a traditional method influences perceptions of its quality. We propose that consumers believe that a brand using traditional methods is beneficial for society because it is concerned about cultural preservation and this belief has a positive effect on perceived quality. Six experimental studies show that consumers evaluate products produced with a method described as traditional to be higher in quality than similar products that are not described as traditionally made and this effect is mediated by the belief that the brand is beneficial for society. Consistent with this theory, the positive effect of traditional production on perceived quality is attenuated when consumers view the brand to be unconcerned about cultural preservation, such as when the use of a traditional method is framed as a follower strategy (i.e., it imitates the actions of other brands) or when the brand is a multinational company. By showing that the mere mention of a traditional method can be another subtle way to position a brand as a moral actor, these findings contribute to the understanding of the link between perceived social responsibility and product evaluations.