International Journal of Consumer Studies最新文献

The outsourcing of housework is broadly recognized as providing an impetus for increasing women's participation in the labor market and relieving the burdens of households with children and dual earners. Despite an objective need, demand for paid domestic services is low, even for households with sufficient financial resources. By drawing on a German survey of cohabiting couples aged between 30 and 60, we analyze households that have, to date, not used domestic services (N = 1479). Based on items about attitudes toward domestic services, we identify five distinct attitude profiles defined by diverse combinations and levels of sociocultural barriers to outsourcing housework, including gendered expectations, privacy concerns, aversion toward a servant culture, and trust and control issues. Our results establish that half of the sample exhibits scarcely any sociocultural aversion to the employment of domestic help. While some of these households report preferring to do housework within the family, households of higher social strata, in particular, express a need for external support, but are hindered by an insufficient supply of and access to appropriate paid domestic services. In contrast, the other half of the sample consists of subgroups of rejectors, revealing different levels of disapproval and normative-moral profiles concerning outsourcing. Interestingly, complete rejectors are often found in low-income households, indicating a strong connection between socioeconomic and sociocultural characteristics. The results highlight the potential for future developments within the domestic service sector to meet customers' normative and moral concerns.

Embarrassment plays a crucial role in shaping the consumer landscape by influencing perceptions, choices, and experiences. In a marketplace, customers get embarrassed when personally implicated in transgressions, and also vicariously, while observing the predicament of others. Vicarious embarrassment, though ubiquitous and detrimental for firms, has received limited attention in marketing scholarship. This article offers a comprehensive review of consumers' personal and vicarious embarrassment by incorporating content and bibliometric analysis methodologies. The bibliometric study comprises a review of 203 articles published from 1900 to 2022. Techniques of citation analysis and co-citation analysis reveal the prominent authors, journals, and articles and trace the intellectual structures of thoughts contributing to the domain. Additionally, social network analysis delineates the centrality features of the leading studies in the consumer embarrassment domain. Further, the article provides a comprehensive content analysis of 109 studies relevant to the purchase and consumption contexts. A review of the extant findings on major theoretical perspectives, triggers, coping strategies, moderators, and desirable and adverse outcomes of personal and vicarious embarrassment is presented. The article offers actionable future research directions for theoretical advancement of the phenomenon of consumer embarrassment. This research will assist firms and marketers in understanding and mitigating the aversive outcomes of embarrassment.

Envy fuels luxury consumption—both real and fake. Through three studies, we show that benign envy motivates online shoppers to purchase authentic luxury products, whereas malicious envy encourages counterfeiting. By triggering envy through its antecedents of deservingness and pride, we show that benign (malicious) envy motivates a general tendency towards moral (immoral) behavior, which has distinct downstream effects on consumer attitude towards luxury. Benign envy increases belief in the moral virtue of hard work, thereby inspiring consumers to aspire and strive for original luxury products. Whereas malicious envy triggers moral disengagement—dissolving the moral dilemma associated with counterfeiting. Malicious envy also makes consumers appraise luxury corporations as immoral—fueling the desire to punish the brand through counterfeiting. The effects hold for both brand-generated envy and incidental envy. The findings have important implications for luxury branding to help control consumer demand for counterfeits.

The present study examined the influence of lay elitism on preference and choice inconsistency in consumer choices across cultures. Four studies were conducted to understand this phenomenon. In Study 1, we showed that Mainland Chinese high in the belief in lay elitism displays more preference and choice inconsistency across product categories. In Study 2, we found the reverse effect for Caucasian Americans. In Study 3, Mainland Chinese belief in lay elitism is associated with their preference and choice inconsistency over geometric patterns and, at the same time, increased the consistency between their choice and the anticipated elites' choice of these geometric patterns. Lastly, Study 4 showed that in a cross-cultural study, Mainland Chinese participants' endorsement of lay elitism is associated with a higher level of preference and choice inconsistency, but the reverse pattern is observed for Caucasian Americans. Furthermore, cultural values (i.e., individualism and collectivism) fail to explain the differences in preference and choice consistency across cultures. The paper offers a new perspective in using lay elitism across cultures to understand preference and choice inconsistency in consumer behavior.

Scholarly research on virtual reality (VR) is characterized by a dynamic tension between VR's potential and the challenges impeding its adoption. Grounded in a mixed-methods systematic review, this research examines the drivers influencing consumer VR adoption by rigorously combining qualitative and quantitative analyses of 158 scholarly articles ranging from 1996 to 2023. Based on an extensive analysis of VR adoption literature, we introduce the Virtual Reality Integrated Adoption Framework (VRIAF), which is the first mixed-methods systematic review focusing exclusively on VR adoption. This empirically substantiated model integrates key determinants of VR adoption such as consumer attitudes, perceived enjoyment, ease of use, social influences, and previous user experiences. The research identifies four pivotal themes through qualitative exploration, further elucidated by quantitative meta-analyses and weight analyses. These themes encompass the user experience in VR environments, the role of VR in construction and design, the immersive attributes of VR technologies, and the ongoing technological advancements influencing adoption patterns. This research contributes significantly to the theoretical understanding of VR adoption and provides practical insights for VR professionals. By delineating future research directions, the study bridges the gap between theoretical exploration and practical application, offering a valuable resource for both scholars and practitioners in the field of VR.

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are increasingly using social media as a communication platform to promote their charitable marketing efforts. The purpose of our research is to investigate how NPOs can enhance message effectiveness by utilizing a social media influencer and different product benefit appeals (utilitarian vs. hedonic) in their social media posts to enhance attitudes toward the donation campaign and word-of-mouth (WOM) intention, leading to higher donation behavior. Across two experimental studies, we show that an NPO's donation post (i.e., social media post promoting a donation campaign) is evaluated more favorably when paired with a hedonic benefit appeal, while an influencer's donation post is more favorable when paired with a utilitarian benefit appeal. Further, we find that the effects of source and product benefit appeal types on donation behavior are serially mediated by attitude toward the donation campaign and WOM intention. As the use of influencers is becoming increasingly popular to support fundraising and charitable causes, our findings provide timely implications for researchers and practitioners who are interested in optimizing NPO communication strategies in the digital landscape.

Though social media is considered to enhance environmentally conscious behaviour, there has not been sufficient investigation on the effects of specific affordances pertaining to green social networks (GSN). Also, the mechanism by which these affordances affect pro-environmental behaviour (PEB) has not been explored in depth. Addressing these research gaps, this study first introduces three context-specific GSN affordances, such as green self-identification, green broadcasting, and green social endorsement. Further, drawing inspiration from social influence theory and the Stimulus-Organism-Response framework, the study put forth a novel framework that explains the varying effects of the conceptualized GSN affordances on PEB through the mediating mechanism of collective intention. The framework also indicates perceived informational and emotional values as moderators that accentuate the indirect influence of GSN affordances on PEB. Adopting a time-lagged multi-wave online survey design, 314 valid responses were obtained. The results of the moderated mediation analysis reveal that: (1) collective intention partially mediates the relationships between green broadcasting and PEB, and between green social endorsement and PEB; (2) collective intention fully mediates the relationship between green self-identification and PEB. Further, the indirect effect of green self-identification on PEB is positively moderated by emotional values and not moderated by informational values. Interestingly, the indirect effects of green broadcasting and green social endorsement on PEB are positively moderated by both informational and emotional values. These findings offer significant implications for researchers and practitioners who look out for online communities to promote actual PEB.

Literature reviews summarize existing literature, uncover research gaps, and offer future research directions, thus aiding in theoretical and methodological development. Informetric research including bibliometric, scientometric, webometric, cybermetric, patentometric, and altmetric methods are becoming increasingly prevalent in conducting literature review studies. Looking at the common informetric literature review methods—citation, co-citation, co-author, bibliographic coupling, and content co-occurrence analyses, this study aims to serve as a guide in using content co-occurrence also known as co-word analysis to conduct literature reviews. This study outlines a variety of informetric research methods and how they are utilized to conduct review and evidence-based conceptual studies. In addition to the analyses, the study highlights different informetric software packages like Bibliometrix, Biblioshiny, Leximancer, NVivo, and CiteSpace including their comparison. The study further discusses contributions of algorithm-based content analyses including offering taxonomies, definitions, classifications, typologies, comparisons, and theoretical development to constitute integrative literature reviews. Finally, this study offers step-by-step guidelines for conducting a review study using VOSviewer content co-occurrence analysis while providing a systems view of informetric research in social science. The study also notes the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) like Open AI's ChatGPT, Google's Bard, Elicit, Scite, Research Rabbit, and ChatPDF among others, and its potential in contributing to the literature review methods and, as such, being an interesting direction for future research.

Sustainable fashion is becoming increasingly integrated in today's society. However, the use of the term “eco” in fashion branding may evoke negative consumer perceptions, especially in terms of the perceived fashionability of clothing items. Hence, this study investigates consumer responses to environmental versus social sustainability cues used by an online fashion shop. In particular, the moderating influence of basic versus modern fashion style is examined, considering the idea that fashion style is central to consumers' brand evaluations. Using a 2 (environmental vs. social sustainability cue) × 2 (timeless basic vs. modern fashion style) between-subjects factorial design, this study explored the effectiveness of sustainability cues on fashion brand value perceptions (emotional, social, and functional value) and brand attitudes. Among the 358 respondents, the results indicate more positive brand attitudes when fashion items are presented with an environmental (vs. social) sustainability cue. In particular, this effect is stronger for the timeless basic (vs. modern trend-based) fashion style. Yet, a cue referring to environmental sustainability increases social brand values for the modern fashion style. This study offers valuable contributions to the sustainable fashion literature and recommendations for online fashion retailers.

The experiences, habits, and practices that occur post-purchase within the clothing use phase have an impact on clothing's longevity, a linchpin in sustainable clothing consumption. Though it represents one of the most carbon-intensive and polluting phases of consumption, a clear definition of sustainable clothing use practice and how it functionally contributes to sustainable consumption is currently underdeveloped. Consumer behavior researchers have most significantly illuminated sustainable clothing purchase and disposal behaviors, leaving an understanding of post-purchase habits that emerge in everyday clothing use incomplete and fragmented. Through a systematic literature review of 77 articles published from 1991 to January 2022, this study provides a holistic view of this domain of sustainable clothing use that highlights three dimensions (wear, care, repair) alongside the associated habits of mind and domestic management that constitute a system of use practice. The themes that emerged within the review are utilized to develop a framework and an agenda for future research in this important domain of consumer behavior.