This paper defines hedonic consumption as those facets of consumer behavior that relate to the multisensory, fantasy and emotive aspects of product usage experience. After delineating these concepts, their theoretical antecedents are traced, followed by a discussion of differences between the traditional and hedonic views, methodological implications of the latter approach, and behavioral propositions in four substantive areas relevant to hedonic consumption—mental constructs, product classes, product usage and individual differences. Conclusions concern the usefulness of the hedonic perspective in supplementing and extending marketing research on consumer behavior.
Why do some articles become building blocks for future scholars, whereas others remain unnoticed? The authors aim to answer this question by contrasting, synthesizing, and simultaneously testing three scientometric perspectives—universalism, social constructivism, and presentation—on the influence of article and author characteristics on article citations. They study all articles published in a sample of five major journals in marketing from 1990 to 2002 that are central to the discipline. They count the number of citations each of these articles has received and regress this count on an extensive set of characteristics of the article (i.e., article quality, article domain, title length, the use of attention grabbers, and expositional clarity) and the author (i.e., author visibility and author personal promotion). They find that the number of citations an article in the marketing discipline receives depends more on “what is said” (quality and domain) and “who says it” (author visibility and personal promotion) than on “how it is said” (title length, the use of attention grabbers, and expositional clarity). The insights gleaned from this analysis contribute to the marketing literature and are relevant to scientific stakeholders, such as the management of scientific journals and individual academic scholars, as they strive to maximize citations. They are also relevant to marketing practitioners; they inform practitioners on characteristics of the academic journals in marketing and their relevance to decisions they face. Conversely, the insights also raise challenges regarding how to make journals accessible and relevant to marketing practitioners: (1) Authors visible to academics are not necessarily visible to practitioners; (2) the readability of an article may hurt academic credibility and impact, but it may be instrumental in influencing practitioners; and (3) it remains questionable whether articles that academics assess to be of high quality are also managerially relevant.
In business-to-business settings, dyadic relationships between firms are of paramount interest. Recent developments in business practice strongly suggest that to understand these business relationships, greater attention must be directed to the embedded context within which dyadic business relationships take place. The authors provide a means for understanding the connectedness of these relationships. They then conduct a substantive validity assessment to furnish some empirical support that the constructs they propose are sufficiently well delineated and to generate some suggested measures for them. They conclude with a prospectus for research on business relationships within business networks.
Agency and related theories have proven useful as theoretical frameworks for examining relationships between principals and their agents in many disciplines. However, though marketing involves a wide array of agency relationships, agency-based research has only recently begun to be reported in the marketing literature. The authors therefore attempt to clarify the marketing implications of agency theory by describing its major constructs, the two different types of models embedded within the theory, and some closely related theoretical structures. They also critically review past and potential agency-based research in marketing and suggest ways in which marketers might contribute to improving its validity and usefulness.
This study examines frontline employee responses to corporate social responsibility (CSR) using a multisourced data set at a Global 500 financial services company. The authors find that frontline employees identify with the organization (i.e., organizational identification) and with customers (i.e., employee–customer identification) as a function of how much the employees perceive management and customers (respectively) to support the company's CSR activities. However, these respective effects are stronger among employees for whom CSR is already tied to their sense of self (i.e., CSR importance to the employee). In addition, both organizational identification and employee–customer identification are related to supervisor-rated job performance; however, only the effect of employee–customer identification is mediated by customer orientation, suggesting that these two targets of identification manifest through distinct mechanisms. The research empirically addresses the open questions of whether and when CSR can yield observable changes in employee behavior and alerts researchers to a novel target of identification for frontline employees.
While interest in customization is growing among consumers and academics, researchers have focused on consumers designing products for themselves. Many customization firms, however, are successfully positioning themselves as key sources for unique gifts. In this research, the authors examine whether factors under the firm's control (i.e., the level of design support provided and the presence of a strong brand) are differentially effective when consumers design products for themselves or as gifts for others. Using participants drawn from the relevant target market, they report two studies involving real customization tasks undertaken on fully functioning customization websites. The findings lead to the surprising conclusion that design support is less effective for consumers designing products intended as gifts rather than for themselves, raising expectations without a corresponding rise in evaluations. However, the results offer some good news to firms targeting gift-giving consumers. Both Studies 1 and 2 reveal that gift-givers place a higher value on their own time and effort and thus report a higher willingness to pay than those designing for themselves. This effect is diminished, however, when a strong brand is present and consumers share credit with the brand for the product's design.
This research documents how implicit theories regarding personality traits (whether they are deemed to be fixed or malleable) affect consumer inferences about the malleability of a brand's personality traits and, thus, its ability to extend into new categories. Study 1 documents that consumers who believe that traits are malleable (incremental theorists) are more accepting of brand extensions than consumers who believe that traits are fixed (entity theorists). These results hold whether implicit theories are measured or manipulated. Study 2 reveals how implicit theories affect consumers’ perceptions regarding the flexibility of a brand's personality traits and not its physical traits. Study 3 demonstrates that consumers primed with different implicit theory orientations respond differently to varying degrees of change within a single trait. This study tests the limits of the effect and demonstrates the impact of using primes embedded within standard marketing communication.
This research introduces “brand prominence,” a construct reflecting the conspicuousness of a brand's mark or logo on a product. The authors propose a taxonomy that assigns consumers to one of four groups according to their wealth and need for status, and they demonstrate how each group's preference for conspicuously or inconspicuously branded luxury goods corresponds predictably with their desire to associate or dissociate with members of their own and other groups. Wealthy consumers low in need for status want to associate with their own kind and pay a premium for quiet goods only they can recognize. Wealthy consumers high in need for status use loud luxury goods to signal to the less affluent that they are not one of them. Those who are high in need for status but cannot afford true luxury use loud counterfeits to emulate those they recognize to be wealthy. Field experiments along with analysis of market data (including counterfeits) support the proposed model of status signaling using brand prominence.
The authors report the results of three experiments that address the effects of health claims and nutrition information placed on restaurant menus and packaged food labels. The results indicate that when favorable nutrition information or health claims are presented, consumers have more favorable attitudes toward the product, nutrition attitudes, and purchase intentions, and they perceive risks of heart disease and stroke to be lower. The nutritional context in which a restaurant menu item is presented moderates the effects of both nutrition information and a health claim on consumer evaluations, which suggests that alternative (i.e., nontarget) menu items serve as a frame of reference against which the target menu item is evaluated.