Community voices: A different approach to study low-income populations in consumer research

Vulnerable consumers can be defined as individuals facing a disadvantage, where the origin of that disadvantage is usually beyond their control and stems from multiple sources and circumstances. The impact of consumer vulnerability extends to billions of individuals, one of its major circumstances is poverty, or low-income consumers. An estimated 2.4 billion of persons are considered low-income, and yet it is not a common research objective in scientific publications. Our objective is to bring a social approach to study low-income populations called Community Voices, where we partner with local NGO’s to better recruit, perform fieldwork, and return valuable insights to the low-income populations. In our research, three studies were conducted to understand the impact of studying low-income populations. Study 1 focus on comparing the effect of fieldwork environment: impersonal face-to-face interviews versus Community voices approach (N160 per study), Study 2 focus in studying the effect of income differences in participants (low versus high-income, N120 per study), and the effect of type of fieldwork in low-income consumers (online versus face-to-face, N120 per study). The results of study 1 showed significant differences in liking across conditions, study 2 showed significant differences in liking and product perception, but not in emotions. Study 3 showed significant differences in uses and habits towards food choice of plant-based products. Overall, our findings suggest that to study low-income populations, the researcher cannot generalize the results of other populations (e.g., high-income) to lower income populations, and con not use standard methodologies and expect the same results.