Consumers’ Legal Claims: Motives, Expectations and the Complaint Journey of Indian Consumers

While consumer complaining behaviour (CCB) has seen phenomenal scholarly interest, its effortful facets, such as complaints to regulators or the legal system, remain under investigated. Viewing complaints as deeper patterns of systemic malaise, this study has explored consumers’ legal claims from the perspective of individual complainers. Relying on informants’ lived experiences explicated through semi-structured interviews and a blend of inductive and deductive inferencing, a complaint journey framework based on the dispute tree paradigm was charted. The study’s findings map relevant complaint antecedent and exacerbator themes to the formative stages of naming, claiming, blaming and disputing and visualize consumer problems as they reach the law after germinating through these stages. The work contributes to theory and practice by broadening the understanding of CCB motives, emphasizing the role of emotions, identifying consumers’ recovery expectations and revealing legal action as a blend of agentic choice and structural necessity. In delineating the individual vigilant consumers’ role in shaping the consumer protection framework into motion and their experience of legality, we also raise the need for policy refinements.