Knowledge that Transforms

Past research suggests that offering customers a probabilistic promotion, such as an X% chance to get a product for free, is often more effective than providing a sure discount of equal expected value. In five studies (N = 8,969), we find that probabilistic price promotions are more effective than equivalent sure discounts only when those sure discounts are or seem trivial. Specifically, we find that probabilistic promotions are relatively more effective (1) when the sure discounts are actually smaller, (2) when the sure discounts are made to feel smaller by presenting them alongside a larger discount, and (3) when the sure discounts are made to feel smaller by framing them as a percentage discount rather than a dollar amount. These findings are inconsistent with two leading explanations of consumers’ preferences for probabilistic promotions—diminishing sensitivity and the overweighting of small probabilities—and suggest that people’s preferences for uncertainty are more strongly tethered to their perceptions of the size of the sure outcome than they are to their perceptions of the probability of getting the uncertain reward.

Consumers have increasing access to more holistic information about the providers they consider working with and hiring (e.g., realtors, designers), including how they spend their free time. This research examines how a professional’s disclosure of their leisure activities impacts consumer choice. While the way people spend their leisure time should be unrelated to their professional aptitude, across an online field study and four lab studies, the authors demonstrate that disclosing leisure activities associated with eudaimonic well-being (i.e., meaning, fulfillment), such as hiking or cooking, can positively impact consumer choice. Such disclosures, relative to either not disclosing leisure or disclosing less eudaimonic activities such as relaxing or watching television, increase perceptions of competence, and in turn, interest in choosing, hiring, and supporting these individuals. Notably, the effects of eudaimonic leisure on competence and hiring intentions are attenuated if other diagnostic competence cues are present, such as a job-related award, and among those who value productivity less (i.e., have a low productivity orientation). Thus, the authors show how seemingly irrelevant personal information about professionals can inform consumer choice. Moreover, by manipulating eudaimonic well-being via leisure disclosures, they demonstrate how such cues impact person perception, integrating research on well-being, self-disclosure, and social perceptions.

Marketing materials often create difficulties for consumers through elements like unconventional fonts or distracting background images, leading to perceptual disfluency—a sense of difficulty encoding information. During choices, consumers can mistake perceptual disfluency for choice difficulty, a feeling of indecision. Building on this idea, 11 preregistered experiments (N = 9,042) show that when making choices, perceptual disfluency can lead consumers to rely on information that feels more intuitively appealing to them, such as a familiar brand, a preferred country of origin, or a recommendation, rather than on information they must carefully consider like numerical product specifications. Differing from the effect of perceptual disfluency in other situations, during choices, this effect occurs because consumers process information less deeply, engaging in relatively more intuitive and less analytical processing. This effect is amplified when consumers endorse a “fast-is-accurate” lay theory. In contrast, it does not occur when consumers do not mistake perceptual disfluency for choice difficulty, as when prompted to consider the actual reason for the disfluency, or when not making a choice.

Conventional wisdom and past research converge on the notion that product messages are more effective when they use a persuasive frame that directly addresses the product’s target customers to indicate a preference match (e.g., “If you like dark coffee, this is the coffee for you!”). In contrast, the current research identifies scenarios where consumers respond more favorably to dissuasive frames—that is, to messages that address the consumers not targeted by the product to indicate a preference mismatch (e.g., “If you don’t like dark coffee, this is not the coffee for you!”). Eight experiments using mixed methods demonstrate that the impact of dissuasive framing on consumer response is positive for target customers and negative for nontarget customers. This occurs because dissuasive framing increases perceptions of the product as a specialized offering intended for a more narrowly defined target segment (i.e., target specificity). Target specificity, in turn, increases (vs. decreases) the perceived fit between the product and target (vs. nontarget) customers, which drives their response. This research sheds light on a novel form of framing and introduces target specificity as a construct with important implications for consumers’ perceptions of fit with a product and their downstream responses.

Sustaining sustainable practices in a market whose infrastructure continues to prioritize unsustainable options is not easy. It becomes even more challenging when living sustainably involves interwoven practices that are deeply embedded and interconnected. We focus on one such system of sustainable practices and explore consumers’ journey toward Zero Waste lifestyle—a system of practices that is not yet institutionalized. Using a qualitative multimethod approach and a practice-theoretical lens, this research uncovers the iterative process through which this system of practices develops around the Zero Waste meta-meaning, a driving force common to all associated practices. Our analysis reveals a set of adaptive capabilities that enable carriers of these practices to gradually develop and stabilize the interwoven system that scaffolds the Zero Waste lifestyle. The gradual institutionalization of this system of practices requires a mutualization of capabilities among carriers who share a common meta-meaning. By examining the maintenance of sustainable practices through a practice-theoretical lens, this research offers new ways to encourage and promote the transition toward more sustainable lifestyles.

In light of recent social and political movements advocating for racial equity and calls for more research on interracial marketplace interactions, this research explores the role racial identity plays in the consumption domain. Specifically, we investigate the marketplace consequences of U.S.-based White consumers’ feelings about their own racial identity by measuring and manipulating white guilt, defined as the sense of guilt and remorse experienced by White consumers who hold their racial ingroup responsible for historical and ongoing racial injustices and perceive that Whites, as a racial group, benefit from unearned privileges. Consistent with the reparation-oriented action profile of guilt, six studies (all pre-registered, two with incentive-compatible designs) show that white guilt motivates reparative behaviors toward Black-owned businesses in various service contexts: Consumers with high white guilt express greater willingness to patronize and promote a business when it is Black-owned (vs. White-owned, family-owned, or when there is no information on ownership) and feel more moral for doing so, whereas this effect is non-existent, or sometimes reversed, for those low in white guilt. Our findings reveal the complex dynamics of race, identity, and intergroup relations in the marketplace, and demonstrate a contemporary exception to ingroup favoritism among some White consumers.

Targeted acts of violence in the marketplace disrupt the status quo and unravel the very fabric of community and consumption spaces. Despite the growing frequency of these shocking events, they remain underexplored in consumer research, particularly regarding their impact on consumer well-being and collective welfare. This research explores how individual reactions and choices in the face of incomprehensible violence can pave the way for consumer healing and collective regeneration through the re-establishment of community ties and marketplace exchanges. Our ethnographic inquiry grounds these findings in the consumer response and solidarity that occurred in one community directly affected by the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. Our findings highlight how market spaces provide the scaffolding for communities to develop and foster interdependence through exchanges and shared moments. We also delineate cultural trauma as a subset of collective trauma. While both occur when a community one identifies with faces an existential threat, cultural trauma goes further by irrevocably altering the collective identity and transforming the community members. Furthermore, we investigate cultural violence in a marketplace setting, when violent acts target culturally significant consumption practices and communal spaces.

Consumer researchers often prize relevance but overlook how narrow assumptions about good theory limit it. Much work focuses on construct-to-construct theorizing, which involves introducing new constructs or new links among them. Far less valued is phenomenon-to-construct theorizing, which begins with real-world patterns and seeks to explain them by identifying the underlying active ingredient constructs. Examples include why GMO labels reduce demand or why drip pricing leads people to choose higher-cost options. Our survey of authors in four leading journals shows that most believe only construct-to-construct work counts as theory. We argue that this view is too narrow. Drawing on a Bayesian framework for updating beliefs within a theoretical network, we show that phenomenon-to-construct theorizing follows the same logic of scientific inference. Both approaches rely on established links in the nomological network to draw stronger conclusions about the focal link of interest. Using well-supported construct-to-construct mechanisms to explain real-world phenomena is therefore a strength, not a weakness. We clarify how phenomenon-to-construct theorizing differs from both “mere application” and “empirics-first” research. Embracing this form of theorizing can broaden the reach of consumer research by connecting abstract ideas to meaningful, actionable phenomena that matter to scholars, practitioners, and policymakers.

Explorations of Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) have moved to the forefront of consumer research, as scholars examine its implications for ideation and conceptualization, data collection and analysis, and writing and publishing. Introducing this special section of the Journal of Consumer Research on GenAI and consumer research, the author calls for a critical—and self-critical—engagement with GenAI, calling on researchers to embrace its potential while remaining mindful of both its constraints and their own biases. The author concludes that, given GenAI’s rapid evolution, the insights in this special section remain provisional and may require reconsideration as the technology advances.

People spend a large portion of their day interacting with vibrating mobile devices, yet how consumers psychologically respond to haptic feedback from these devices and their effect on consumer decision-making is largely unknown. Integrating recent work on human–computer interaction and reward processing, the current research examines: (1) the relationship between vibration duration and reward response, (2) to what extent rewarding vibrations influence consumer choice, (3) the process by which this effect occurs, and (4) how the effect differs compared to other forms of feedback (visual and audio). We find that mobile vibrations evoke a reward response that is distinct from other forms of feedback, which in turn boosts purchasing in online shopping environments (increased item adds and higher basket totals), and that impulsive consumers tend to be more responsive to mobile vibrations. We examine the impact of mobile vibrations on consumer decision-making in a variety of experimental settings, drawing on a diverse participant pool, leveraging both controlled experiments, and a country-wide field experiment to assess important boundary conditions. These findings have important implications for the ethical design of haptic interfaces in the marketplace and the role of mobile vibrations as a novel form of reward.