Journal of Consumer Affairs最新文献

Sustainable mindful consumption has positive impacts on the environment and on people's health and well-being. However, consumption circumstances and social contexts make it difficult for consumers to engage in sustainable mindful behavior. To explore the role of consumer networks in fostering mindful consumption, sustainable behavior, and health and well-being, interviews and focus groups with consumers, producers, and experts were conducted and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Specifically, this paper contributes in three ways. First, it broadens the focus from individual mindfulness to collective mindfulness in consumption behavior. Second, it explores consumer networks as a way to overcome existing barriers to sustainable consumption and promote mindful consumption. Third, it explores the long-term benefits of consumer-producer collaboration to bring about top-down and bottom-up approaches to sustainable consumption change, beyond short-term mindfulness interventions at the individual level.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending is referred to as lending money to unknown borrowers directly through online platforms without using traditional financial intermediaries. We leverage insights from the literature on psychological distancing and affective intensity to argue that linguistic styles, as the manifestation of social psychological distance, have a negative impact on P2P funding success. Testing our arguments with data from a major Chinese P2P platform, we find that using too many “you” and negations (proxies for social psychological distance) in the borrower's description will dampen a lender's willingness to support a funding campaign. Moreover, when the social psychological distance is large, language intensity can be perceived as desperate, making a lender even less willing to support the funding campaign. Our research shed new light on the role of language in P2P funding success and has practical implications for lenders, borrowers and regulators in overcoming barriers in P2P lending.

Decades of intentional cultivation of consumerism, materialism, affluence, and hedonism, fueled by advertising messages, have created a consumption culture that is not sustainable anymore. In addition to the problems of climate change, there are also significant social costs associated with overconsumption and harmful consumption. We identify the causes of the consumption problem and why individual consumers must take responsibility to avoid harmful consumption for their own and societal well-being. Although multi-faceted action by governments, marketers, and civil societies is essential, a bottom-up transformational movement is also required to drive the mindful consumption mindset. Top-down measures of technology-led efficient product solutions and consumer nudging strategies have had limited success compared to the rate at which the problem is compounding. Thus, we suggest four critical interventions to socialize the bottom-up mindful consumption movement—education for transformative social learning; alternative hedonism; advertising, tv, and social media messaging; and creating an engagement forum for all like-minded people devoted to the cause. Through socializing the bottom-up mindful consumption movement, these interventions will encourage a cultural shift toward alternative lifestyle conceptions of well-being, leading to increased sustainable consumption behavior and eudaimonia.

The authors review the marketing practices likely to make customers feel excluded (ignored or rejected) and analyze the potency of retail exclusion in the transforming service encounters due to the infusion of artificial intelligence (AI), robots, and other new technologies. Synthesizing the findings of prior studies, the authors propose an integrative theoretical framework for understanding different perspectives, psychological mechanisms, and outcomes of retail exclusion, and highlight research opportunities for retail exclusion in two contexts of service encounters: interpersonal and technology-powered. The review aims to provide implications on proactive strategies to minimize the adverse effects of retail exclusions and promote inclusive customer experiences.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, much focus has been placed on the healthcare benefits of wearing face masks, yet some people resist wearing them. Though mask mandates may enhance face mask adoption in the short run, the effectiveness of such mandates, in the long run, remains questionable. Thus, understanding of psychological and sociological mechanisms behind wearing face masks becomes pertinent. This study by examining these underlying mechanisms, tends to answer two research questions: (1) How does regulatory focus impact one's behavior to wear face masks? (2) How does the impact of regulatory focus on this behavior vary under different cultural orientations? Drawing on the theory of regulatory fit, we found that people with a prevention focus will have fewer concerns about wearing face masks than people with a promotion focus. In addition, we also found that prevention-focused people who exhibited a cultural orientation with higher levels of collectivism, masculinity, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance had fewer concerns about face mask wearing perception and were more likely to wear face masks than did promotion-focused people with the same cultural orientation. The implications of these findings on the relevant literature and practice are also discussed.

The present paper systematically investigated the effectiveness of utilizing severe or disgusting, imagery, and the moderating effect of social closeness within non-profit health charity advertising appeals. Across three experiments, we found an interaction effect, whereby donations increased when severe images were shown, but only when high social closeness was also highlighted. Conversely, severe imagery reduced donations in the low social closeness condition, when participants were not prompted to think of their family. Despite the popularity of using severe imagery within charity advertising, our findings suggest that severe images should be used with caution in health charity marketing. Investigating the underlying mechanisms, we found that empathy (disgust) underlies the increase (decrease) of donation when severe imagery was used in a high (low) social closeness condition. Furthermore, we ruled out anger and perceived responsibility as competing moderators for these effects to verify whether other positive and negative emotions had similar effects.

This paper is an examination of identity narratives of a small group of trans-national transpeople in Australia. We reveal the complex identity journey undertaken by this group. Transpeople of Sub-continental origin consume a temporarily transformational journey negotiating, resisting and subverting the dominant discourses that construct heterosexuality, gayness, whiteness and femininity. They carve out temporary liminal spaces of resistance within which to perform as “weekend women.” We identify transforming, transitioning, transcending across gender and ethnic boundaries, and see being enabled by specific transnational consumption imaginaries in liminal spaces meshed by intersectional of race/ethnicity and gender. We follow intertwined discourses that forms a “matrix of domination” and the way liminal thirdspaces create temporarily decolonized spaces that enable them to escape this matrix and perform a (trans)formative, movement back and forth between their weekday/weekend differently gendered/cultured selves. Ultimately, these decolonized thirdspaces bring only temporary release with inevitable return to their weekday male identity.

The payday lending industry has been characterized as predatory, which has led to tougher government interventions. However, research on how stricter consumer protection regulations affect actual vulnerable consumers' lived experiences remains seriously underdeveloped. Following in-depth interviews with financially excluded and therefore vulnerable payday loan consumers, this study finds that increased payday loan industry regulations are perceived by consumers as either empowering, disempowering, or simultaneously (dis)empowering. Accordingly, practical implications are developed to help public policy makers navigate vulnerable consumers' ambivalent relationship with consumer protection regulations.