Knowledge that Transforms

The consequences of overconsumption and the recent popularity of simple living point to consumer interest in reducing belongings. They also raise an interesting question—what is a useful approach to downsizing and decluttering? We investigate how dis/order (messy vs. tidy items) affects downsizing and find, across nine focal studies, that (a) consumers retain fewer items when choosing from a disordered set because (b) order facilitates the comparisons within category that underlie the tendency to retain items. The impact of dis/order is altered by consumers’ comparison tendencies, waste aversion, and decision strategy (selection vs. rejection), which serve as theoretically and pragmatically relevant moderators. Though consumers’ lay beliefs favor rejecting from order (i.e., choosing what to get rid of from tidy items), our findings point to the usefulness of selecting from disorder (i.e., choosing what to keep from messy items) as a downsizing strategy. Together, this research has implications for consumer downsizing activities, the burgeoning home organization and storage industries, as well as sustainability.

This research investigates reviewing experts on online review platforms. The main hypothesis is that greater expertise in generating reviews leads to greater restraint from extreme summary evaluations. The authors argue that greater experience generating reviews facilitates processing and elaboration and enhances the number of attributes implicitly considered in evaluations, which reduces the likelihood of assigning extreme summary ratings. This restraint-of-expertise hypothesis is tested across different review platforms (TripAdvisor, Qunar, and Yelp), shown for both assigned ratings and review text sentiment, and demonstrated both between (experts vs. novices) and within reviewers (expert vs. pre-expert). Two experiments replicate the main effect and provide support for the attribute-based explanation. Field studies demonstrate two major consequences of the restraint-of-expertise effect. (i) Reviewing experts (vs. novices), as a whole, have less impact on the aggregate valence metric, which is known to affect page-rank and consumer consideration. (ii) Experts systematically benefit and harm service providers with their ratings. For service providers that generally provide mediocre (excellent) experiences, reviewing experts assign significantly higher (lower) ratings than novices. This research provides important caveats to the existing marketing practice of service providers incentivizing reviewing experts and provides strategic implications for how platforms should adopt rating scales and aggregate ratings.

At work, at school, at the gym club, or even at home, consumers often face challenging situations in which they are motivated to perform their best. This research demonstrates that activating performance goals, whether in cognitive or physical domains, leads to an increase in the consumption of high-calorie foods at the expense of good nutrition. This effect derives from beliefs that the function of food is to provide energy for the body (food as fuel) coupled with poor nutrition literacy, leading consumers to overgeneralize the instrumental role of calories for performance. Indeed, nutrition experts choose very different foods (lower in calorie, higher in nutritional value) than lay consumers in response to performance goals. Also, performance goals no longer increase calorie intake when emphasizing the hedonic function of food (food for pleasure). Hence, while consumer research often interprets the overconsumption of pleasurable and unhealthy high-calorie foods as a consequence of hedonic goals and self-control failures, our research suggests that this overconsumption may also be explained by a maladaptive motivation to manage energy intake.

While budgeting in advance is seen as a good practice to control spending, this research shows that budgeting too early for a specific purchase may increase spending. We argue that as the temporal separation between budget setting and actual purchase increases, consumers become more willing to overspend because of what we term “budget depreciation.” Consumers adapt to the reference point set by the budget such that, over time, the budgeted level becomes the status-quo spending. Thus, as more time passes, pain of payment from the budgeted amount decreases, and the willingness-to-spend increases. Across a secondary dataset of real estate purchases, one field study, and three experiments, we find evidence that consumers who set a budget in the distant (vs. near) past are more likely to overspend relative to their budget. The effect emerges for single purchase occasions rather than a category of purchases over multiple occasions. It emerges because of the hypothesized pain-of-payment process (e.g., effect is stronger among tightwads, who feel greater pain from spending; effect is mitigated under budget reassessment, which prevents pain adaptation). Our work contributes to the mental budgeting literature by invoking a role for temporal separation and draws a novel connection to prior work on payment depreciation.

Drawing on cultural branding research, we examine how brands can craft national identity. We do so with reference to how brands enabled New Zealand’s displaced Pākehā (white) majority to carve out a sense of we-ness against the backdrop of globalization and resurgent indigenous identity claims. Using multiple sources of ethnographic data, we develop a process model of how brands create national identity through we-ness. We find that marketplace actors deployed brands to create and renew perceptions of we-ness through four-stages: reification, lumping, splitting, and horizon expansion. From this, we make three primary contributions to the consumer research literature: we develop a four-part process model of how brands become national identity resources, explore the characteristics of the brands that enable the emergence of and evolution of we-ness, and explore how our processes can address a sense of dispossession among displaced-majorities in similarly defined contexts.

Previous research in consumer behavior and decision-making has explored many important aspects of social observation. However, the effect of social observation during the specific time wherein consumers construct their preferences remains relatively understudied. The present work seeks to fill this knowledge gap and adds to this literature by studying how consumers react to being observed during the preference-construction stage (i.e., prior to reaching their decision). While existing research on social observation focuses on accountability and self-presentation concerns, the present study uncovers an additional unique concern. Specifically, eight studies (three additional studies reported in the web appendix) find that being observed prior to reaching the decision threatens consumers’ sense of autonomy in making the decision, resulting in an aversion to being observed. Furthermore, we find that such threats lead consumers to terminate their decision by avoiding purchase or by choosing default options. Given the extent to which consumers are observed in the marketplace by other individuals and by online platforms, and given the rise in consumers’ privacy concerns associated with such practices, understanding consumer reactions to being observed in the pre-decisional stage is an important topic with practical implications.

How might religion influence consumer behavior in the marketplace? The present research proposes that failure and subsequent firm recovery efforts represent a domain that may be particularly sensitive to religion. Specifically, we demonstrate that religion salience promotes a more positive response to failure when accompanied by recovery. This effect is due to heightened forgiveness, a religious value held by many major world religions, which is triggered by signals of firm repentance. In a series of eight studies, theorizing is extended to the moderating roles of both religiosity (with implications for the religion–forgiveness discrepancy) and recovery content (comparing apology vs. compensation) and evidence of generalizability across several major religious affiliations is provided. This research highlights the importance of religion salience to marketers operating in failure–recovery contexts.

Prior research has established that status threat leads consumers to display status-related products such as luxury brands. While compensatory consumption within the domain of the status threat (e.g., products associated with financial and professional success) is the most straightforward way to cope with comparisons to high-status individuals, we examine when, why, and how consumers cope with status threat by choosing to “pivot” and display success and achievements in alternative domains. Using a mixed-method approach combining field and lab experiments, incentive-compatible designs, netnographic analysis, observational study, and qualitative interviews, we show that consumers cope with status threat by signaling their status and success in alternative domains. We conceptualize this behavior as “status pivoting” and show that it occurs because experiencing status threat motivates consumers to adopt beliefs about tradeoffs across domains; that is, to believe that status acquisition requires tradeoffs and hence others’ success in one domain comes at the cost of success in another domain. We compare the prevalence and appeal of status pivoting to restoring status within the domain of the threat. We further examine when consumers are likely to engage in status pivoting and show that this effect is attenuated when high status within the domain of the threat is attainable.

Despite being a basic food property, food temperature has been largely neglected by consumer research thus far. This research proposes that consumers spontaneously infer that warm foods contain more calories, an unexplored lay belief we named the “warm is calorie-rich” intuition. Eight studies reveal that this deep-seated intuition has powerful implications in terms of guiding (and often biasing) product judgments and consumption decisions. Temperature-induced calorie inferences are rooted in perceptions that warm foods are more filling and tastier than cold ones, which enhance warm foods’ desirability and affect consumer choices. The preference for warm products is mitigated when food energy does not provide utility to consumers though, such as when consumers have a health goal active, and it reverses when consumers purposefully aim to reduce their calorie intake. The “warm is calorie-rich” intuition is important for marketers and managers because warm food temperatures can increase willingness to pay (by 25%) and amount served (+27%), as well as influence consumer preferences. This intuition also has important public policy implications: consumers tend to underestimate the nutritional value of cold foods, resulting in increased consumption of calories (+31%) and fat (+37%).

Although consumers put substantial effort toward their appearance, engaging in beauty work is often seen as inauthentic, posing challenges for beauty companies that increasingly rely on social media-driven product promotion where authenticity perceptions are consequential. This article draws on existentialist notions of authenticity (wherein the true self is created rather than innate) to explore how framing beauty work as self-expression alters others’ perceptions and, in turn, marketing outcomes. First, an archival analysis of Instagram posts demonstrates that rebranding beauty work as self-expression is positively associated with word-of-mouth about beauty products. Six studies then test how motivational information alters perceptions of people who engage in beauty work. Lowered authenticity perceptions arise from observers’ default assumption that beauty work is motivated by self-enhancement and serves primarily to conceal appearances. By contrast, self-expression enhances authenticity by leading others to see beauty work as a form of creation rather than concealment. This pattern extends to when people engage in a variety of beauty work transformations but not when beauty work is designed to restore appearances or is framed as connected to the innate self. These findings provide insight into judgments of authenticity and the management of a stigma associated with product use.