Journal of Consumer Behaviour最新文献

This special issue of the Journal of Consumer Behaviour engages in a scholarly debate on the association between environmental values and sustainable consumption using 16 studies that examine a range of exciting phenomena relevant to the debate. The special issue provides insights into three key areas of scholarly conversations in the field of study. First, it provides recent accounts of the literature on the role of environmental values in sustainable consumption. Given that the association between the two areas has been widely debated for decades, adding novel insights into the phenomenon in the context of recent environmental issues significantly contributes to the field of study. It should be noted that the novel insights cover several mediating and moderating factors of the association, which add new research directions to the field of study. Second, the special issue examines the recent discourse on environmental values considering the more specific behaviours (collaborative consumption, disposal behaviour, consumer engagement in circular economy) that are related to sustainable consumption. This discourse provides insight into environmentally conscious marketing practitioners. Third, the special issue highlights diverse consumer perspectives on sustainable consumption, especially those from diverse consumer generations, both local and international consumers. They inform global initiatives such as the UN sustainable development goals. Overall, engaging in a collective dialogue to understand recent developments in the field of study, the special issue informs environmental policies and fosters sustainable consumption and marketing practices that tackle climate change-related environmental and social issues.

Despite firms' long reliance on geographic place origin branding, such as country-of-origin (COO), region-of-origin (ROO), and terroir, to sell their products in international markets, little theoretical and empirical work has been carried out to investigate which level of geographic specificity stimulates greater premium price when entering new markets. An experiment was conducted in India and Saudi Arabia manipulating place origin as a 3 factorial design (COO vs. ROO vs. terroir) using Australia as the country context, and honey as the product context. Results suggest that COO, ROO, and terroir prompt different place construal, which interacts with psychic distance to people (individual consumer difference), resulting in varying premium price. The study explains under which conditions which of the three place origins benefit companies and which ones backfire.

This research uses a multi-method approach to validate the prominence of soft-sell themes to advertise e-cigarettes and to test how this advertising theme influences consumers' attitudes and behaviors. First, the study presents a content analysis identifying the prevalence of soft-sell themes used as marketing stimuli to advertise e-cigarettes. Second, a quasi-experiment tests the effects of a soft-sell theme ad on consumers' attitudes toward vaping, their intention to try e-cigarettes, their attitude toward smoking, and maladaptive intentions. This latter effect is relevant to e-cigarette marketing literature, as it suggests how consumers lose temporal distance of the harmful effects of vaping. Theoretical and practical contributions of these findings are discussed.

Consumer complaints play a crucial role for companies in understanding customer needs and spotting possible areas of improvement. In the digital era, online platforms have become popular venues for users to voice their concerns. According to Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) and recipient design, consumers may have different recipients in mind when writing a complaint and tailor their language accordingly. This study aims to examine language variations in consumer complaints on an independent platform and a corporate platform, exploring how consumers adjust their language based on the intended recipients of their complaints. Comments under complaint posts from Reddit's dedicated subreddit, r/Spotify, and from the Spotify Community were extracted and analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), a text analysis tool. This comparative analysis identified and compared various linguistic categories within the consumer complaints from the perspectives of formality, emotion, and assertion. The results showed that complaints on the corporate platform (1) used more formal language, (2) contained more negative emotional tones and emotion words, and (3) exhibited more assertiveness compared to those on the independent platform. Understanding the distinct linguistic features in consumer complaints on different platforms can help companies tailor their responses and address customer concerns effectively. This research contributes to the growing field of online consumer complaining behavior by uncovering how language is employed within different online communities depending on the message recipient. Furthermore, it demonstrates the potential of LIWC as a valuable tool for analyzing unstructured consumer-generated content across diverse digital platforms, offering insights into user sentiment and experiences.

In online settings, firms have rapidly adopted emojis in their marketing messages. Thus, marketing research and practice have begun to examine emojis in recent years. However, while prior work has examined the impact of emojis that depict facial expressions and body movements (i.e., kinesic emojis), research into emojis that represent objects (i.e., artifact emojis) is scarce. The present research fills this void by showing that artifact emojis can negatively influence consumer response. Specifically, the authors demonstrate that the presence (vs. absence) of artifact emojis in broadcast marketing messages increases skepticism, as consumers infer the brand has ulterior motives for emoji use. Subsequently, they show decreased response to the brand's broadcast message on multiple marketing outcomes. Moderators that strengthen or weaken the observed effects are also examined: when emojis are less (vs. more) relevant to the text and when artifact emojis substitute (vs. supplement) the word they represent.

Stigma is a discrediting attribute that emerges in social interactions, playing different roles in different contexts. Several fields (e.g., sociology and psychology) have dedicated special attention to this phenomenon as it significantly impacts people's lives. Although there is some interest in the idiosyncrasies of stigma in marketing and consumer behavior, the literature investigating such a concept is still fragmented. This systematic literature review addresses the stigma concept in marketing and consumer behavior studies by analyzing 82 articles directly approaching stigma in empirical studies. As to the contributions of our study: (1) it synthesizes the literature on stigma in marketing and consumer research, presenting the state-of-the-art in this domain; (2) our two-step thematic analyses combine a descriptive assessment of our sample by using consolidated models from socio-psychology and an examination of the articles from the perspective of the dynamic nature of stigma in the marketplace and the processes of stigmatization and destigmatization; (3) it put forward a future research agenda suggesting research avenues worth exploring by marketing and consumer behavior researchers to advance knowledge on marketplace stigma. We found that stigma is a topic that fits in a wide range of theories, contexts, and methods in marketing and consumer behavior literature.

This paper focuses on the economic and psychological vulnerabilities that are intensified due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals' health, education and living standards. The deteriorating mental and financial conditions of individuals, called psychological and economic vulnerability, have made an impact on consumers' consumption patterns and habits. This study has proposed that when consumer vulnerabilities increase, consumers will be more likely to express prosocial behaviours and assume higher social capital change that may influence their consumption regulations. The findings are based on a panel survey of 786 individuals via CATI in two waves of data collection in Türkiye (Wave I: 20 July–10 August 2020; Wave II: 20 November–10 December 2020). In Wave I, it is found that when individuals face economic and psychological vulnerability, their tendency to show prosocial behaviour is negatively affected. In Wave II, when the COVID-19 cases peaked, while economic vulnerability still leads to lower prosocial behaviour, psychological vulnerability gets reversed and results in higher prosocial behaviour. Interestingly, in both waves, when consumers perceive positive social capital change due to increased prosocial behaviour, they are less likely to show consumption regulation.

Live streaming commerce has seen significant growth in recent years. While the interaction style of streamers with consumers is crucial in influencing engagement behaviour, there is limited understanding of how a streamer's interaction style affects consumer engagement. This study, based on epistemic vigilance mechanisms, explores the effect of streamers' interaction styles (social-oriented versus task-oriented) on consumer engagement. It also investigates the mediating role of epistemic vigilance and the moderating role of consumer expertise. The study's findings, derived from three experiments, are as follows. First, social-oriented interaction styles, compared with task-oriented styles, are more likely to boost consumer engagement. Second, task-oriented interaction styles lead to increased consumer epistemic vigilance, which subsequently decreases their engagement. Third, social-oriented interaction styles enhance engagement intentions among consumers with high expertise compared to those with low expertise. These insights will provide live streaming commerce managers with a better understanding of consumers' psychological activities, enabling them to effectively design streamers' interaction strategies for marketing activities.

Fueled by the rise of social media, internet celebrities (or influencers) are a subgroup of public figures who have gained extreme public attention in recent years. In this study, we examined the qualities of finance knowledge influencers to elucidate the impact that investment discussions or tutorials posted by influencers have on followers' and audiences' investment willingness. We adopted attractiveness, expertise, and trustworthiness as the independent variables, followers' risk tolerance as the moderator, and followers' investment willingness as the dependent variable. For data collection, respondents were instructed to watch three different influencer videos and complete a questionnaire. A total of 327 valid questionnaires were collected and analyzed. The questionnaire survey results showed that influencers' attractiveness expertise, and trustworthiness positively affected followers' investment willingness. Furthermore, followers' risk tolerance negatively moderates the relationship between influencer attractiveness and investment willingness, but it positively moderates the relationship between influencer trustworthiness and investment willingness. The empirical findings of this study theoretically contribute to academics and have practical implications in the real world. We propose several suggestions for future research.

Recent studies explain how to detect fake reviews and their impacts on consumers and businesses. Despite the prevalence and significance of fake reviews, prior research has yet to fully explore the motivations and psychological mechanisms behind voluntary participation in writing fake reviews, especially in incentivized campaigns. This paper explains why consumers engage in the immoral act of writing fake reviews in return for free products. We investigate the interactive role of individuals' self-focused motivations and cognitive reappraisal ability in diminishing consumers' moral emotions of guilt, subsequently influencing their intention to write incentivized reviews. Built on three studies, the findings reveal that customers' self-focused motivations coupled with their ability to regulate emotions dissuade their feelings of guilt. Consequently, customers who experience downregulated emotions of guilt show a higher intention to write incentivized fake reviews. This study contributes to the existing literature by illustrating the driving factors toward writing incentivized fake reviews, especially by depicting the negative role of cognitive reappraisal. The study also has managerial implications indicating that such customer behavior can be avoided by fostering a sense of consideration toward others by making them aware about the impact of their actions.