International Journal of Consumer Studies最新文献

The evolving landscape of the academic world has ushered in a plethora of challenges and opportunities for researchers. While there are undoubtedly monetary incentives and fringe benefits for those who actively engage in publishing, the journey toward acceptance by a premier journal is often arduous and time-consuming. Considering this context, this paper endeavors to dissect prevailing trends, elucidate the reasons behind manuscript rejections, and furnish a compendium of strategies and insights aimed at augmenting the likelihood of acceptance while mitigating the probability of rejection.

Scholars have explored the factors influencing new product adoption from various perspectives, such as product characteristics, personality traits, and marketing communication strategies. However, these studies lack the consideration of consumer social relationships. Thus, this study examined how social exclusion influences new product adoption. Three experiments involving 1372 participants indicated that social exclusion leads to a higher really new products adoption compared to social inclusion. The mediating factor in this relationship is the need for uniqueness. In contrast, no significant difference in incrementally new product adoption was found between socially excluded and included individuals. The above effects only exist in individuals with low self-control. Individuals with high self-control exhibit no significant difference in RNP adoption intention, whether they experience social exclusion or inclusion. These findings not only significantly increase the body of knowledge on social exclusion and new products, but also advise marketers on how to promote new products.

Despite the enormous negative economic influence on consumer well-being, price-fixing remains a largely unexplored area in consumer research. Previous research showed that consumers perceive different prices for the same product as unfair. However, our findings counterintuitively indicate that consumers may also perceive uniform prices as unfair. Two experimental studies examined the effect of price uniformity (uniform/nonuniform) and price patterns over time (increase/no change) on the perception of price unfairness and third-party complaint intention. The findings show that consumers perceive prices as unfair when retailers increase a uniform price simultaneously. This pricing strategy by retailers increases consumers' intention to report suspected price-fixing activities to authorities, that is, third-party reporting. Based on the findings, implications for marketing practices and tactics to enhance public policy are discussed.

This research study proposes a model to test the impact of advertising puffery on purchase intention and brand loyalty involving the mediating role of ad-related factors—likability of the advertisement and attitude toward the ad- and brand-related factors—brand familiarity, attitude toward the brand, and brand credibility. The inclusion of brand loyalty as an exogenous construct is an attempt to extend the existing research in the ad puffery domain. Further, a combination of ad-related and brand-related factors as mediators is a novel approach in the field of ad puffery. It provides insightful findings for researchers as well as practitioners. The cross-sectional approach used in this study involved gathering data from young adult respondents (age group between 18 and 24 years) over a specific period. Results based on 330 young adult respondents revealed significant direct and mediating effects. All the ad-related and brand-related factors mediated the direct relationship of ad puffery with purchase intention and brand loyalty. Additionally, gender significantly moderated the direct relationship of ad puffery with purchase intention. Further, theoretical contributions, practical implications, and future research directions are discussed.

Telemedicine, despite its longstanding presence, has emerged as a valuable resource amidst health crises. Yet, research on individuals' willingness to embrace telemedicine in such circumstances remains scarce. This article employs the Motivation–Opportunity–Ability theory to construct a novel framework for investigating how motivational, opportunity-related, and ability-related factors influence individuals' intention to use telemedicine during a health crisis. A sample of 468 respondents from Indonesia participated in an online survey. The data were analyzed using covariance-based structural equation modeling and the Hayes PROCESS macro. The findings revealed that contamination avoidance, telemedicine usability, and privacy concerns significantly influence the intention to use telemedicine services. Moreover, the findings also confirmed the moderated moderating effect of e-health literacy and technology optimism on the relationship between contamination avoidance and intention to use telemedicine services. By deepening our understanding of the factors shaping individuals' intention to use telemedicine services, this study makes valuable academic contributions to the field of telemedicine adoption literature. Additionally, it provides practical insights for telemedicine providers aiming to enhance individuals' intention to use telemedicine services during critical health situations.

Linguistic relativity (linguistic patterns influence perception and cognition) is crucial for marketing communication effectiveness. The argument is that linguistic relativity enablers in marketing communication may assist marketers, communicators, and creators achieve the desired “effectiveness” more successfully. Based on this premise, prior research in consumer studies has examined language's mediation role in consumer perception and cognition. However, the question of identifying these enablers and the plausible existence of any structural relationship among them persists. This article, therefore, seeks to examine the identification and interrelationship of linguistic relativity enablers in the context of social marketing communication. We examine the query through in-depth interviews with specific respondents with a strong and influential relationship with the subject. This study presents the analysis conducted through Fuzzy-ISM and Fuzzy-MICMAC and presents relative findings by providing a structure with the potential to be used in longitudinal studies.

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.