Knowledge that Transforms

Marketers and consumers are rapidly embracing gender-fluid products that fundamentally challenge the conventional associations of masculinity and femininity. In theory, manifestations of gender fluidity in the marketplace respond to shifting gender norms toward more inclusivity. Accordingly, consumers believe that the representation of traditionally male and female styles in these trends should be even. In contrast with these balanced views, this research demonstrates that gender-fluid trends to date skew toward traditionally male styles and that the corresponding adoption of gender-fluid products is driven relatively more by female and nonbinary consumers. Using a multimethod approach (including trend analyses of over 100,000 baby names, deep learning on a dataset of 200,000 products, and a series of experiments), this research defines gender fluidity in marketing; distinguishes it from related constructs such as gender-bending, unisex, and androgyny; and reveals a skewness in gender-fluid trends to date. It further demonstrates that women’s and nonbinary individuals’ heightened awareness of male advantages in society and lower fear of negative evaluation drive their greater adoption of gender-fluid styles.

Consumers frequently use lists that were created by marketers, experts, or media platforms, such as a list of favorite restaurants. The authors refer to such lists as curated lists because they include items that appear to be endorsed or recommended by the list maker. Although these lists are typically ranked and numbered, marketers sometimes create lists that are not numbered, making it unclear whether the items have been ranked. Twelve studies (N = 5,530) reveal that when presented with an unnumbered curated list, consumers regularly assume that a fundamental characteristic of numbered lists—best-to-worst ordinality—applies. Specifically, the authors find that when a list contains an endorsement cue (e.g., superlative adjectives, markers of exclusivity, list qualification criteria), consumers rely on the conversational norm of best-to-worst ordinality. This inferential process leads consumers to prefer and choose items that are located vertically higher on the list. However, consumers are less likely to assume best-to-worst ordinality when an unnumbered list does not resemble a typical list: when endorsement cues are absent or conversational norms governing lists are weakened in other ways. This research advances knowledge of how consumers process curated lists in everyday consumption contexts, while also providing actionable recommendations for list makers.

Online shopping cart abandonment is widespread, causing major losses in potential revenues for e-commerce companies. We expand efforts to mitigate cart abandonment by investigating how the cart’s product composition affects abandonment and testing easy-to-implement interventions. We hypothesize that consumers are more likely to abandon carts containing a higher proportion of hedonic relative to utilitarian products. This cart composition effect arises because carts containing higher hedonic-to-utilitarian product ratios are perceived as more hedonic overall, increasing consumer guilt regarding cart purchase and the likelihood of cart abandonment. Analyses of two large-scale field datasets and four controlled experiments provide converging evidence for the cart composition effect (studies 1A to 3) and the mediating role of perceived hedonism and consumer guilt (studies 2, 4A and 4B). Substantively, we offer empirical support for a practical and easily implemented intervention: using e-commerce recommendation systems to reduce cart abandonment by suggesting utilitarian items (studies 4A and 4B). Our findings suggest that recommendation systems may serve as an effective tool for reducing cart abandonment and underscore the importance of incorporating hedonic value considerations into recommendation algorithms. We conclude by discussing the practical implications of our findings for the development of more effective marketing strategies and improving online conversion rates.

This article explores the interplay between company-based product recommendation and the product’s relative price. Eight studies demonstrate that consumers are sensitive to the relative price of the recommended option and are more likely to follow the recommendation as its relative price in the choice set decreases. We show that this occurs because consumers use the relative price of the recommended option as a cue for the company’s underlying motives. That is, because consumers generally believe that companies profit more from selling expensive products, they infer that when a company recommends a higher-priced product, its main motivation for doing so is to maximize its profit. Such skepticism about the company’s true motive reduces the likelihood that consumers follow the recommendation. The effect is observed across different types of product categories (hedonic or utilitarian), platforms (offline or online), and recommendations (human- or algorithm-based). Consistent with the proposed account, the effect attenuates when the recommendation comes from an independent and reliable source, when the price-profit link is weakened (i.e., when consumers learn the dissociation between price and profit), when the recommendation is believed to be a signal for popularity, and when consumers have a low innate tendency to question the company’s motivation.

Consumers increasingly seek spiritual satisfaction and existential meaning through brands. However, despite the rising prominence of secular forms of spirituality, consumer–brand relationship research largely overlooks the processes by which consumers initiate, develop, and maintain spiritual connections to brands. Using the concept of faith as a theoretical lens, this article explores how consumer–brand relationships take on spiritual dimensions. Drawing on an interpretive biographic analysis of in-depth interviews and netnographic data, the authors examine spiritual relationship development processes as they unfold between consumers and brands over time. Findings identify five phases of brand faith development (intuition, association, reflection, affirmation, and universalization), which progress from initial attraction to deep conviction. Consumers cultivate faith in brands across these phases through a process of believing in, valuing, and committing to a brand as a sacred entity that acts as a center of spiritual meaning. These findings offer a more nuanced understanding of spiritual relationships between consumers and secular brands than current literature provides. The analysis also examines factors that facilitate or inhibit brand faith development, contributing a contextual understanding of brand faith that accounts for influences arising from an interplay between personal, brand, and marketplace factors that affect consumer spirituality.

This research finds that products that have been produced using renewable (“green”) energy, and labeled as such, are perceived to be healthier and, consequently, are more likely to be purchased than otherwise identical products produced with non-green or conventional energy. The effect of green energy production on the perceived healthiness of food products is found to be driven via perceived contagion: Consumers believe that the “good for you” essence of green energy is transferred to the food product during the production process, thereby rendering it healthier and more preferred. Evidence for this relationship is found across eight studies (N = 1,762) using a variety of common food products. Alternative accounts are assessed and ruled out, and it is also found that the impact of green energy production on preferences is moderated by consumers’ health orientation. These findings contribute to the growing literature on the broader topic of sustainability initiatives and research examining the complexity and nuances of consumer responses to sustainable products and initiatives.

Attention checks have been touted as a means of excluding inattentive and careless responses from survey data. As a result, numerous approaches have been proposed, but relatively little attention has been paid to which ones are most helpful. The present article demonstrates that this blind spot has obscured vast differences in attention check efficacy. An initial survey of consumer-behavior and decision-making researchers revealed six commonly used attention check approaches (memory checks, questions with obvious answers, English comprehension, self-reported attentiveness, straight-lining, and variations on the instructional manipulation check). These were then paired with six effects, drawn from the Many Labs series of papers in social psychology (N > 22,000, all preregistered). The different checks varied substantially in reducing noise and increasing effect size. Follow-up studies suggest that participant attentiveness, as currently measured, may reflect a given participant’s general approach to completing studies, rather than momentary fatigue or boredom varying across time or within studies. We recommend that behavioral researchers focus their efforts on going beyond mere “pulse-checkers” and consider favoring the use of memory checks and obvious questions as attention checks in their research.

This research investigates how reviewers’ self-presentation strategies influence their posting behavior. We find reviewers are less likely to post negative reviews early in their review history due to concerns that doing so would make them appear as lacking warmth. This concern diminishes as the number of reviews associated with their profile increases, resulting in a discernable negative trend in ratings at the reviewer level. We document this trend across two well-known review platforms (Yelp and TripAdvisor). A series of controlled laboratory studies replicate the effect while demonstrating the role played by self-presentation concerns in explaining the downward trend of ratings. Specifically, we find that concerns about appearing to lack warmth influence reviewers’ initial reluctance to post negative (but not positive) reviews, whereas concerns about appearing competent do not. We identify two theoretically consistent managerial interventions that moderate the effect. Allowing reviewers to rate experiences without associating a review with their profile reduces the effect of the number of prior reviews on their likelihood to post, as does prompting them to mention one positive element in their written comments. Our findings underscore the common concern that online review platforms provide positively skewed ratings and offer insight into how to address this.

This article addresses a simple theoretical question of high substantive relevance: What makes a consumption experience special in a consumer’s mind? To answer this question, the authors report an extensive multimethod investigation involving a grounded theory analysis of numerous consumer narratives and in-depth interviews, a field survey, a scale development study, a natural language processing (NLP) analysis of more than 3 million Yelp reviews, a preregistered multifactor causal experiment (and its preregistered replication), a blind comparison of hundreds of matched visual Instagram posts by third-party observers, and several small application studies. The findings converge in identifying three major psychological pillars of what makes consumption experiences feel special to consumers, each pillar involving different facets: (a) uniqueness, which arises from the rarity, novelty, irreproducibility, personalization, exclusivity, ephemerality, and surpassing of expectations of the experience; (b) meaningfulness, which pertains to the personal significance of the experience in terms of symbolism, relationships, self-affirmation, and self-transformation; and (c) authenticity, which relates to the perceived genuineness and realness of the experience in terms of its psychological proximity to some original source, iconicity, human sincerity, and connection to nature. As illustrated in the General Discussion, the findings have important substantive implications for the engineering of hedonic consumption experiences.