Words prime semantic and conceptually related associates and concepts. This article documents a novel route of priming disparate meanings relevant to consumer behaviors. Reading processes use word sound, not spelling, to activate word meaning in memory. Reading a homophone (e.g., “bye”)—a word with identical pronunciation as another word but with different spelling and meaning—activates meanings and concepts related to the complementary homophone (e.g., “buy”). Homophone priming occurs when a secondary process fails to suppress activated meanings associated with the complementary homophone, which may influence meaning-relevant consumer behaviors downstream. Two experiments (with replications) demonstrate this effect occurs when consumers experience diminished cognitive resources, which reduces the ability to suppress complementary homophone meanings. This research identifies word sound as an associative link between otherwise unrelated concepts that can result in priming of judgments and behavior. Importantly, these results are difficult to predict from a purely semantic or associative priming perspective.
This article documents single-option aversion, an increase in consumers' desire to search when faced with a single option. This effect can lead to a product being chosen more often when competing alternatives are included in the choice set, contrary to various rational models of search, as well as to recent research on choice conflict showing that additional options can lead to higher deferral rates. A series of lab studies document this effect, differentiate it from other context effects, and test some of its boundary conditions. The results suggest that single-option aversion is not driven by the information provided by the additional options, that the desire to search is critical for this effect to occur, and that the effects of single-option aversion are not limited to the immediate choice set. These results have both practical and theoretical implications for the understanding of consumer search and choice deferral.
Consumers often need to decide if they want to reengage a goal, such as a goal of losing weight, a goal of saving money, or a goal of performing well on a video game. This research finds that consumers are more likely to reengage a goal when they have set a high-low range goal (e.g., lose 2–4 pounds this week) than when they have set a single number goal (e.g., lose 3 pounds this week). This effect is driven by the greater attainability and greater challenge of the high-low range goal, which then leads to a greater feeling of accomplishment. Thus, these findings suggest that in order to keep a consumer motivated over time to continue with an activity or continue using a product, that consumer should first set or be given a high-low range goal.
The use of advertised reference price promotions, such as “regularly $119.99, sale price $39.99,” is ubiquitous in the marketplace. Thirty years of research supports the conclusion that advertised reference prices (e.g., $119.99) exert an influence on consumers' responses to offer prices (e.g., $39.99) via their assimilative influence on consumers' internal reference prices. The present research provides an enriched account of this assimilation process. Specifically, three studies show that increasing the overlap in information made accessible by the advertised reference price and information made accessible by the offer price increases the influence of the information primed by the advertised reference price on the construction of the internal reference price. Consequently, the offer price is considered more attractive. The identification of this process provides insight into additional variables that moderate the influence of advertised reference prices on downstream deal evaluations. Implications for theory, practice, and public policy are discussed.
Across a series of studies conducted in both the field and the laboratory, the authors demonstrate that the presence of others (i.e., an entourage) alters a VIP's personal feelings of status. Specifically, the authors show that VIPs feel higher levels of status when they are able to experience preferential treatment with an entourage, even if this results in the rewards associated with the treatment becoming less scarce. We show that the effect is driven by an increase in feelings of connection with one's guests. Several alternative explanations for the entourage effect are ruled out, and implications for practice are discussed.
Arguably, all choice options involve three basic attributes: magnitude (outcome size), time (of occurrence), and probability (of occurrence) and are evaluated in one of two basic evaluation modes: JE (joint evaluation, involving comparison of multiple options) and SE (single evaluation, without comparison). This research explores how reactions to the three basic attributes (and their associated functions--utility, time discounting, and probability weighting) vary between the two basic evaluation modes. Nine studies, tapping diverse contexts, yield two general results: first, for all these attributes, people are more sensitive to variations near endpoints (zero magnitude, no delay, and 0% or 100% probability) than in other regions, and this differential sensitivity is more pronounced in SE than in JE. Second, when faced with options involving a trade-off between magnitude and time (delay) or between magnitude and probability (risk), people are both more delay averse and more risk averse in SE than in JE.
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Although materialism is linked to self-control failure, the underlying process remains unclear. By manipulating materialistic thoughts via state-sponsored lotteries, this research examines why materialism may undermine self-control. Across four studies, this research demonstrates that entering a lottery tends to activate materialistic thoughts and that these thoughts generally constitute low-level construal, which, in turn, results in self-control failure. This effect is moderated by the degree to which people are oriented toward extrinsic values. In addition, when materialistic thoughts are diverted, entering a lottery has no effect on self-control. In summary, this research highlights that materialism, although stable and enduring, can manifest itself in a burst of materialistic thoughts. The research provides important implications for research on materialism, self-control, and mental construal.
From a conventional standpoint, work is a domain of labor and economic production whereas consumption is a sphere of leisure and expenditure. The cultural turn in consumer research, however, has shown that practices of consumption are indeed productive ones. Through these practices, consumers deploy a gamut of marketplace resources to construct personal and collective identities that, in many cases, challenge social stigmas and limitations that emanate from ascribed categories of gender, class, ethnicity, religiosity, and nationality. And at this point, consumer identity work becomes a mode of identity politics. The term “identity politics” is most closely associated with the second wave feminist movement of the 1960s and its clarion call of the personal is the political, an aphorism which asserted that genderbased inequities of political power and socioeconomic opportunity were routinely manifested in conventional social roles, norms, mores, and status quo expectations (Bristor and Fischer 1993). Thus, challenges to and subversions of the conventional gender order were seen as a means of disrupting broader power structures. Long before the social tumult of the 1960s feminist movement, however, consumers who had little recourse through conventional political channels used consumption (and marketplace resources) as tools for socioeconomic mobilization, such as African Americans “don’t buy where you can’t work” boycotts of segregated stores and restaurants or the multi-ethnic coalition of working-class women who agitated for price controls on staple items during World War II (Cohen 2003). In all these cases, the construction of a collectively shared identity provides an ideological vehicle for organized political action. Within the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies, the politics of identity has emerged as a significant sphere of inquiry, as a plethora of articles and books have traced out how specific subaltern and socioeconomically marginalized groups seek to combat forces of stigmatization, discrimination, and disempowerment through the production of a collective identity (Kellner 2003). As McNay (2010) discusses, analyses of identity politics have tended to emphasize goals oriented toward recognition or redistribution. In the former case, consumers place their societally defining differences at the symbolic center of a collective identity—often enacted through fashion, music, art—and pursue social recognition and/or political legitimization from the broader society (Hebdige 1979; Kates 2004; Kjeldgaard and Askegaard 2006; Ustuner and Holt 2007). The second analytic path—redistribution—emphasizes marginalized groups’ struggles for more equitable distributions of cultural and economic resources and access to opportunities foreclosed by discriminatory constraints and institutional barriers (Adkins and Ozanne 2005; Dolan and Scott 2009; Penaloza 1994; Ustuner and Thompson 2012). In the cultural studies field, this analytic distinction between the identity politics of recognition and that of redistribution has also lent itself to a theoretical polemic, as theorists debate the respective realpolitik consequences and limitations of each orientation (Fraser 1998). In contrast, the consumer culture theory tradition of consumer research has shown that the goals of recognition and redistribution are often dialectically linked, most particularly when consumers’ identity work is directed toward transforming marketplace structures in ways that serve their collective interests (Barnhart and Penaloza 2013; Coskuner-Balli and Thompson 2013; Crockett and Wallendorf 2004; Giesler 2008; Holt 2002; Kozinets and Handelmann 2004; Varman and Belk 2009). This research curation profiles five JCR articles of recent vintage that advance this research stream on the intersections among consumer identity work, identity politics, and marketplace structures. These
Many hedonic experiences consist of a temporal sequence of episodes, such as viewing a series of paintings in an art gallery. These events may be shared with others (joint context) or experienced alone (solo context). However, past research has mostly studied solo contexts, finding that consumers evaluate experiences with an improving trend more positively than those with a declining trend, due to a recency effect in memory-based evaluations. The present research investigates the moderating role of social context on global evaluations of experiences. Participants instructed to undergo hedonic experiences presented as an improving or declining trend replicated the greater evaluation of improving sequences in solo contexts, but demonstrated an attenuation of this preference in joint contexts. These differences occur because joint experiences trigger a more holistic (less analytic) processing style, contributing to primacy-based assimilation, in which evaluations of later episodes assimilate to first impressions (i.e., evaluations of the start).