Despite the prevalence of both chronic and transient loneliness and the detrimental consequences associated with them, as a negatively valenced response to social exclusion, loneliness has received surprisingly little attention in the marketing literature. Drawing on research showing that lonely people often lack meaning in their life, the authors propose that ritualistic behavior that involves consumer products may reduce loneliness by increasing meaning in life. Specifically, a series of studies finds that engaging in even minimal, unfamiliar rituals reduces loneliness among lonely consumers. The results support the important role of meaningfulness. The authors find that the effect of rituals on loneliness is mediated by meaning in life via perceived product meaningfulness. They also find that ritualistic behavior no longer affects loneliness when the experience of meaningfulness can be derived incidentally.

Opportunities for the shared consumption of publicly available products that once might have been considered personal-use only, such as hand sanitizers and shampoos, are proliferating in the consumer environment. This work explores shared product consumption in these underresearched, but now ubiquitous, contexts. The authors suggest and find, over a series of five studies and across a variety of product domains, that sharing a product with strangers (i.e., sharing-out) engenders a lower sense of identification with the product, which leads to lower perceived product efficacy. They further show that the dampening effect of sharing-out on efficacy perceptions is limited to consumers high in self–brand connection.

Surprisingly, little research has examined how consumer responses to specific flavor characteristics of food are formed or how they may fluctuate situationally. We address this lacuna in the literature on the hedonic appreciation of food by demonstrating that enjoyment along one important gustatory dimension, flavor complexity, varies with the degree to which consumers are mentally depleted. Specifically, showing that gustatory sensations are more cognitively demanding than previously thought, findings from three studies evince that cognitive depletion reduces consumer enjoyment of complex‐flavored (but not simple‐flavored) foods via a reduction in pleasure that otherwise can be derived from complex flavors. We establish this effect across three different food categories and provide preliminary evidence for consumers’ ability to identify flavors as the underlying process. Our findings offer theoretical contributions and avenues for future research.