Rebecca Walker Reczek
Biographic Data
| ID | 79865 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rebecca Walker Reczek |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rebecca Walker |
| FAMILY NAME | Reczek |
| SIGNATURE | RECZEK R W |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Ohio State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1127-5272 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 92 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 14 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The Desire for Perfect Products
Some consumers evaluate products against demanding, ever-rising ideals of perfection. We introduce the desire for perfect products (DPP), a novel consumer trait capturing the extent to which consumers desire flawless products. Drawing on four qualitative studies, we identify three characteristics that distinguish high (vs. low) DPP consumers: (1) richer and more demanding ideal points, (2) greater susceptibility to upwardly revising those ideals …
A Framework for Understanding Consumer Response to the Depiction of Historically Underrepresented Identities in Marketing Communications
In recent years, firms’ depictions of some historically underrepresented identities (HUIs) in marketing communications have elicited backlash, while depictions of other HUIs have been more broadly accepted. The present work develops a framework to explain when and why these divergent responses occur. We propose that, while liberals respond positively to the depiction of all HUIs due to their prioritization of the Fairness moral foundation, conser…
The Impact of Green Energy Production on Healthiness Perceptions and Preferences
This research finds that products that have been produced using renewable (“green”) energy, and labeled as such, are perceived to be healthier and, consequently, are more likely to be purchased than otherwise identical products produced with non-green or conventional energy. The effect of green energy production on the perceived healthiness of food products is found to be driven via perceived contagion: Consumers believe that the “good for you” e…
Woman-Owned Business’ Labels Enhance Perceived Competence
Gender bias is widely recognized as having negative effects on women in business, including on outcomes such as hiring, promotion, pay, and access to venture capital funding. This study identifies a strategy that women business owners can employ to boost business outcomes. Across five preregistered studies (N = 2585), including a field study, affixing the owner attribute label “woman-owned business” can engender positive business outcomes, includ…
Consumer Moral Decision Making: The Impact of Alignable Versus Nonalignable Differences
Consumer choice decisions often involve a tradeoff between an alignable difference (a difference along a shared attribute) and a nonalignable difference (a difference between unique attributes of each alternative). For example, Café A provides friendly service, while Café B offers unwelcoming service (an alignable difference). However, Café A occasionally makes billing errors, and Café B has comfortable seating (a nonalignable difference). Prior …
Beauty as a Goal: Creating Harmony Between Health and Taste
People frequently perceive a trade-off between health and taste, leading to poor dietary choices. This research identifies a novel pathway to healthier eating: seeking beauty in food. Across seven preregistered field and lab studies, pursuing beautiful food systematically increased healthy choices without diminishing perceived taste. This effect arises because beauty is positively associated with both health and taste, effectively creating health…
Fairness Perceptions in Demographic Targeting
Deciding which customer segment(s) to serve, or targeting, is a cornerstone of marketing strategy. While companies commonly target based on demographic characteristics, recent cultural movements (e.g., #MeToo, Black Lives Matter) have heightened sensitivity to the differential treatment of certain demographic groups. Yet research to date has not examined whether demographic targeting itself seems fair or appropriate. Fourteen experiments (N = 9,3…
When and Why Consumers (Erroneously) Believe Income Impacts the Enjoyment of Consumption Experiences
We examine how people (as observers) anticipate levels of happiness from psychological consumption experiences (e.g., learning a new language or visiting a park). All else being equal, we propose and demonstrate that people expect differences in happiness based on income. Specifically, we show that relative to observers themselves, individuals simultaneously expect low-income consumers to enjoy psychological consumption experiences less and high-…
Brand Corporateness: Measurement and Symbolic Meaning of an Unfavorable Brand Association
This research establishes brand corporateness as a novel brand association that most consumers find unfavorable. Exploratory focus group findings first illuminate consumer meaning structures and attitudes around brand corporateness. An inductive grounded theory approach suggests three core (hierarchical, mechanistic, opaque) and three ancillary (ubiquitous, traditional, strategic) dimensions of the construct, informing a subsequent literature rev…
Better late than never? Gift givers overestimate the relationship harm from giving late gifts
Past work has found that there is often a mismatch between the types of gifts that individuals send and the types of gifts that recipients would prefer to receive. Moving beyond gift choice, the present work explores a novel type of giver–recipient mismatch—beliefs about the importance of sending an on‐time gift. Specifically, the current work offers evidence that gift givers systematically overestimate the negative impact that a late occasion‐ba…
Nudges Increase Choosing but Decrease Consuming: Longitudinal Studies of the Decoy, Default, and Compromise Effects
Research in marketing, psychology, economics, and decision making has long examined what people choose, when people choose, and why people choose. But almost no research has examined how long people consume their choices. Here, we examined an asymmetry between choosing an option and consuming it. Under the aegis of nudges, we conducted two randomized longitudinal experiments on how long people consumed a choice that was incentivized vis-à-vis a d…
Avoiding embarrassment online: Response to and inferences about chatbots when purchases activate self‐presentation concerns
We explore how self‐presentation concerns and the desire to avoid embarrassment impact two distinct types of interactions consumers have with chatbots: interactions when a chatbot's identity is (1) not disclosed and therefore ambiguous or (2) disclosed. We propose that consumers feel less embarrassed with a chatbot than a human service agent in purchase contexts where self‐presentation concerns are active because consumers ascribe less mind to ch…
Get Your Science Out of Here: When Does Invoking Science in the Marketing of Consumer Products Backfire
In this research, we propose that although consumers view the scientific process as competent, they also perceive it as cold. Across 10 experimental studies, we demonstrate that these lay beliefs impact consumers' reactions to marketers touting the science behind their brands. Specifically, since hedonic attributes are associated with warmth, the coldness associated with science is conceptually disfluent with the anticipated warmth of hedonic pro…
Let Me Show You What I Did versus What I Have: Sharing Experiential versus Material Purchases Alters Authenticity and Liking of Social Media Users
Social media may encourage novel ways of signaling that involve different purchase types (experiential vs. material), signaling frequencies (multiple vs. single signals), and other features unique to social media (e.g., hashtags). This work examines how purchase signals are received on social media and how these signaling variations affect signal receivers' perceptions of the authenticity of social media posts as well as the overall impressions r…
Consumers and Artificial Intelligence: An Experiential Perspective
Artificial intelligence (AI) helps companies offer important benefits to consumers, such as health monitoring with wearable devices, advice with recommender systems, peace of mind with smart household products, and convenience with voice-activated virtual assistants. However, although AI can be seen as a neutral tool to be evaluated on efficiency and accuracy, this approach does not consider the social and individual challenges that can occur whe…
Viewing leisure as wasteful undermines enjoyment
Hiding from the Truth: When and How Cover Enables Information Avoidance
More information is available today than ever before, yet at times consumers choose to avoid it. Even with useful information (I should find out), people may prefer ignorance (But I don’t want to). Seven studies (N = 4,271) and five supplemental studies (N = 3,013) apply the concept of “cover” to information avoidance for consumer choices with real financial consequences. More consumers avoid information with cover—that is, when they can attribut…
Status Pivoting
Prior research has established that status threat leads consumers to display status-related products such as luxury brands. While compensatory consumption within the domain of the status threat (e.g., products associated with financial and professional success) is the most straightforward way to cope with comparisons to high-status individuals, we examine when, why, and how consumers cope with status threat by choosing to 'pivot' and display succ…
Assimilating and Differentiating: The Curvilinear Effect of Social Class on Green Consumption
Building on optimal distinctiveness theory, this research examines the effects of social class on green consumption. Across six studies, we find a curvilinear effect of social class on green consumption, with the middle class having greater propensity for green consumption compared to the lower and upper classes. This effect can be explained by tension between need for assimilation (NFA) and need for differentiation (NFD) that varies among the th…
Choosing what to choose from: Preference for inclusion over exclusion when constructing consideration sets from large choice sets
Decision making is a two‐stage process, consisting of, first, consideration set construction and then final choice. Decision makers can form a consideration set from a choice set using one of two strategies: including the options they wish to further consider or excluding those they do not wish to further consider. The authors propose that decision makers have a relative preference for an inclusion (vs. exclusion) strategy when choosing from larg…
The Meaning of Distraction: How Metacognitive Inferences from Distraction during Multitasking Affect Brand Evaluations
Consumers often encounter advertisements in the background while primarily focused on other stimuli (e.g., while multitasking). Consumers' perceived level of distraction by these background ads serves as a metacognitive cue from which inferences are drawn. When consumers perceive themselves to be relatively distracted by a background advertisement, they draw on an underlying lay theory that distraction implies interest in the contents of the dist…
Make It Hot? How Food Temperature (Mis)Guides Product Judgments
Despite being a basic food property, food temperature has been largely neglected by consumer research thus far. This research proposes that consumers spontaneously infer that warm foods contain more calories, an unexplored lay belief we named the "warm is calorie-rich" intuition. Eight studies reveal that this deep-seated intuition has powerful implications in terms of guiding (and often biasing) product judgments and consumption decisions. Tempe…
A Framework for Understanding Consumer Choices for Others
Although most research on consumers' choices, and resulting insights, have focused on choices that consumers make solely for themselves, consumers often make choices for others, and there is a growing literature examining such choices. Theoretically, how can this growing literature be integrated, and what gaps remain? Practically, why should marketers, consumers, and policy makers care when choices are made for others, and what should they do dif…
That's Not How I Remember It: Willfully Ignorant Memory for Ethical Product Attribute Information
This research documents a systematic bias in memory for ethical attribute information: consumers have better memory for an ethical attribute when a product performs well on the attribute versus when a product performs poorly on the attribute. Because consumers want to avoid emotionally difficult ethical information (e.g., child labor) but believe they should remember it in order to do the right thing, the presence of negative ethical information …
Healthy Diets Make Empty Wallets: The Healthy = Expensive Intuition
Understanding consumer decision making about what to eat is both complex, as multiple factors can drive food choice, and important, as food choice impacts overall health. This research examines an intuition at the crossroads of two important criteria for food decision making—healthiness and price—finding that consumers believe that healthier food is more expensive than less healthy food. While this relationship may be accurate in some cases, cons…
A Framework for Understanding Consumer Choices for Others
Although most research on consumers' choices, and resulting insights, have focused on choices that consumers make solely for themselves, consumers often make choices for others, and there is a growing literature examining such choices. Theoretically, how can this growing literature be integrated, and what gaps remain? Practically, why should marketers, consumers, and policy makers care when choices are made for others, and what should they do dif…
Assimilating and Differentiating: The Curvilinear Effect of Social Class on Green Consumption
Building on optimal distinctiveness theory, this research examines the effects of social class on green consumption. Across six studies, we find a curvilinear effect of social class on green consumption, with the middle class having greater propensity for green consumption compared to the lower and upper classes. This effect can be explained by tension between need for assimilation (NFA) and need for differentiation (NFD) that varies among the th…
Status Pivoting
Prior research has established that status threat leads consumers to display status-related products such as luxury brands. While compensatory consumption within the domain of the status threat (e.g., products associated with financial and professional success) is the most straightforward way to cope with comparisons to high-status individuals, we examine when, why, and how consumers cope with status threat by choosing to 'pivot' and display succ…
The Meaning of Distraction: How Metacognitive Inferences from Distraction during Multitasking Affect Brand Evaluations
Consumers often encounter advertisements in the background while primarily focused on other stimuli (e.g., while multitasking). Consumers' perceived level of distraction by these background ads serves as a metacognitive cue from which inferences are drawn. When consumers perceive themselves to be relatively distracted by a background advertisement, they draw on an underlying lay theory that distraction implies interest in the contents of the dist…
An Audience of One: Behaviorally Targeted Ads as Implied Social Labels
Behavioral targeting" is an Internet-based targeting strategy that delivers digital ads to individuals based on their online behavior (e.g., search, shopping). This research explores the unique ways in which consumers respond to ads using this type of targeting (vs. to ads that use more traditional forms of targeting), demonstrating that a behaviorally targeted ad can act as a social label even when it contains no explicit labeling information. I…
Let Me Show You What I Did versus What I Have: Sharing Experiential versus Material Purchases Alters Authenticity and Liking of Social Media Users
Social media may encourage novel ways of signaling that involve different purchase types (experiential vs. material), signaling frequencies (multiple vs. single signals), and other features unique to social media (e.g., hashtags). This work examines how purchase signals are received on social media and how these signaling variations affect signal receivers' perceptions of the authenticity of social media posts as well as the overall impressions r…
Viewing leisure as wasteful undermines enjoyment
That's Not How I Remember It: Willfully Ignorant Memory for Ethical Product Attribute Information
This research documents a systematic bias in memory for ethical attribute information: consumers have better memory for an ethical attribute when a product performs well on the attribute versus when a product performs poorly on the attribute. Because consumers want to avoid emotionally difficult ethical information (e.g., child labor) but believe they should remember it in order to do the right thing, the presence of negative ethical information …
Make It Hot? How Food Temperature (Mis)Guides Product Judgments
Despite being a basic food property, food temperature has been largely neglected by consumer research thus far. This research proposes that consumers spontaneously infer that warm foods contain more calories, an unexplored lay belief we named the "warm is calorie-rich" intuition. Eight studies reveal that this deep-seated intuition has powerful implications in terms of guiding (and often biasing) product judgments and consumption decisions. Tempe…
Healthy Diets Make Empty Wallets: The Healthy = Expensive Intuition
Understanding consumer decision making about what to eat is both complex, as multiple factors can drive food choice, and important, as food choice impacts overall health. This research examines an intuition at the crossroads of two important criteria for food decision making—healthiness and price—finding that consumers believe that healthier food is more expensive than less healthy food. While this relationship may be accurate in some cases, cons…
Lucky Loyalty: The Effect of Consumer Effort on Predictions of Randomly Determined Marketing Outcomes
This research explores how loyal customers, those who have invested relatively high amounts of effort with a firm in the form of past purchases, respond to randomly determined marketing outcomes (e.g., winning a prize in a random drawing). Across five studies, participants exhibit a "lucky loyalty" effect, in which they believe that greater effort (e.g., dollars spent at a retailer or number of nights stayed at a hotel) results in greater likelih…
Hiding from the Truth: When and How Cover Enables Information Avoidance
More information is available today than ever before, yet at times consumers choose to avoid it. Even with useful information (I should find out), people may prefer ignorance (But I don’t want to). Seven studies (N = 4,271) and five supplemental studies (N = 3,013) apply the concept of “cover” to information avoidance for consumer choices with real financial consequences. More consumers avoid information with cover—that is, when they can attribut…
Avoiding embarrassment online: Response to and inferences about chatbots when purchases activate self‐presentation concerns
We explore how self‐presentation concerns and the desire to avoid embarrassment impact two distinct types of interactions consumers have with chatbots: interactions when a chatbot's identity is (1) not disclosed and therefore ambiguous or (2) disclosed. We propose that consumers feel less embarrassed with a chatbot than a human service agent in purchase contexts where self‐presentation concerns are active because consumers ascribe less mind to ch…
Get Your Science Out of Here: When Does Invoking Science in the Marketing of Consumer Products Backfire
In this research, we propose that although consumers view the scientific process as competent, they also perceive it as cold. Across 10 experimental studies, we demonstrate that these lay beliefs impact consumers' reactions to marketers touting the science behind their brands. Specifically, since hedonic attributes are associated with warmth, the coldness associated with science is conceptually disfluent with the anticipated warmth of hedonic pro…
Brand Corporateness: Measurement and Symbolic Meaning of an Unfavorable Brand Association
This research establishes brand corporateness as a novel brand association that most consumers find unfavorable. Exploratory focus group findings first illuminate consumer meaning structures and attitudes around brand corporateness. An inductive grounded theory approach suggests three core (hierarchical, mechanistic, opaque) and three ancillary (ubiquitous, traditional, strategic) dimensions of the construct, informing a subsequent literature rev…
Choosing what to choose from: Preference for inclusion over exclusion when constructing consideration sets from large choice sets
Decision making is a two‐stage process, consisting of, first, consideration set construction and then final choice. Decision makers can form a consideration set from a choice set using one of two strategies: including the options they wish to further consider or excluding those they do not wish to further consider. The authors propose that decision makers have a relative preference for an inclusion (vs. exclusion) strategy when choosing from larg…
Lucky Loyalty: The Effect of Consumer Effort on Predictions of Randomly Determined Marketing Outcomes
This research explores how loyal customers, those who have invested relatively high amounts of effort with a firm in the form of past purchases, respond to randomly determined marketing outcomes (e.g., winning a prize in a random drawing). Across five studies, participants exhibit a "lucky loyalty" effect, in which they believe that greater effort (e.g., dollars spent at a retailer or number of nights stayed at a hotel) results in greater likelih…
An Audience of One: Behaviorally Targeted Ads as Implied Social Labels
Behavioral targeting" is an Internet-based targeting strategy that delivers digital ads to individuals based on their online behavior (e.g., search, shopping). This research explores the unique ways in which consumers respond to ads using this type of targeting (vs. to ads that use more traditional forms of targeting), demonstrating that a behaviorally targeted ad can act as a social label even when it contains no explicit labeling information. I…
Healthy Diets Make Empty Wallets: The Healthy = Expensive Intuition
Understanding consumer decision making about what to eat is both complex, as multiple factors can drive food choice, and important, as food choice impacts overall health. This research examines an intuition at the crossroads of two important criteria for food decision making—healthiness and price—finding that consumers believe that healthier food is more expensive than less healthy food. While this relationship may be accurate in some cases, cons…
That's Not How I Remember It: Willfully Ignorant Memory for Ethical Product Attribute Information
This research documents a systematic bias in memory for ethical attribute information: consumers have better memory for an ethical attribute when a product performs well on the attribute versus when a product performs poorly on the attribute. Because consumers want to avoid emotionally difficult ethical information (e.g., child labor) but believe they should remember it in order to do the right thing, the presence of negative ethical information …
A Framework for Understanding Consumer Choices for Others
Although most research on consumers' choices, and resulting insights, have focused on choices that consumers make solely for themselves, consumers often make choices for others, and there is a growing literature examining such choices. Theoretically, how can this growing literature be integrated, and what gaps remain? Practically, why should marketers, consumers, and policy makers care when choices are made for others, and what should they do dif…
Choosing what to choose from: Preference for inclusion over exclusion when constructing consideration sets from large choice sets
Decision making is a two‐stage process, consisting of, first, consideration set construction and then final choice. Decision makers can form a consideration set from a choice set using one of two strategies: including the options they wish to further consider or excluding those they do not wish to further consider. The authors propose that decision makers have a relative preference for an inclusion (vs. exclusion) strategy when choosing from larg…
The Meaning of Distraction: How Metacognitive Inferences from Distraction during Multitasking Affect Brand Evaluations
Consumers often encounter advertisements in the background while primarily focused on other stimuli (e.g., while multitasking). Consumers' perceived level of distraction by these background ads serves as a metacognitive cue from which inferences are drawn. When consumers perceive themselves to be relatively distracted by a background advertisement, they draw on an underlying lay theory that distraction implies interest in the contents of the dist…
Make It Hot? How Food Temperature (Mis)Guides Product Judgments
Despite being a basic food property, food temperature has been largely neglected by consumer research thus far. This research proposes that consumers spontaneously infer that warm foods contain more calories, an unexplored lay belief we named the "warm is calorie-rich" intuition. Eight studies reveal that this deep-seated intuition has powerful implications in terms of guiding (and often biasing) product judgments and consumption decisions. Tempe…
Consumers and Artificial Intelligence: An Experiential Perspective
Artificial intelligence (AI) helps companies offer important benefits to consumers, such as health monitoring with wearable devices, advice with recommender systems, peace of mind with smart household products, and convenience with voice-activated virtual assistants. However, although AI can be seen as a neutral tool to be evaluated on efficiency and accuracy, this approach does not consider the social and individual challenges that can occur whe…
Viewing leisure as wasteful undermines enjoyment
Hiding from the Truth: When and How Cover Enables Information Avoidance
More information is available today than ever before, yet at times consumers choose to avoid it. Even with useful information (I should find out), people may prefer ignorance (But I don’t want to). Seven studies (N = 4,271) and five supplemental studies (N = 3,013) apply the concept of “cover” to information avoidance for consumer choices with real financial consequences. More consumers avoid information with cover—that is, when they can attribut…
Status Pivoting
Prior research has established that status threat leads consumers to display status-related products such as luxury brands. While compensatory consumption within the domain of the status threat (e.g., products associated with financial and professional success) is the most straightforward way to cope with comparisons to high-status individuals, we examine when, why, and how consumers cope with status threat by choosing to 'pivot' and display succ…
Assimilating and Differentiating: The Curvilinear Effect of Social Class on Green Consumption
Building on optimal distinctiveness theory, this research examines the effects of social class on green consumption. Across six studies, we find a curvilinear effect of social class on green consumption, with the middle class having greater propensity for green consumption compared to the lower and upper classes. This effect can be explained by tension between need for assimilation (NFA) and need for differentiation (NFD) that varies among the th…
Let Me Show You What I Did versus What I Have: Sharing Experiential versus Material Purchases Alters Authenticity and Liking of Social Media Users
Social media may encourage novel ways of signaling that involve different purchase types (experiential vs. material), signaling frequencies (multiple vs. single signals), and other features unique to social media (e.g., hashtags). This work examines how purchase signals are received on social media and how these signaling variations affect signal receivers' perceptions of the authenticity of social media posts as well as the overall impressions r…
Get Your Science Out of Here: When Does Invoking Science in the Marketing of Consumer Products Backfire
In this research, we propose that although consumers view the scientific process as competent, they also perceive it as cold. Across 10 experimental studies, we demonstrate that these lay beliefs impact consumers' reactions to marketers touting the science behind their brands. Specifically, since hedonic attributes are associated with warmth, the coldness associated with science is conceptually disfluent with the anticipated warmth of hedonic pro…
Better late than never? Gift givers overestimate the relationship harm from giving late gifts
Past work has found that there is often a mismatch between the types of gifts that individuals send and the types of gifts that recipients would prefer to receive. Moving beyond gift choice, the present work explores a novel type of giver–recipient mismatch—beliefs about the importance of sending an on‐time gift. Specifically, the current work offers evidence that gift givers systematically overestimate the negative impact that a late occasion‐ba…
Nudges Increase Choosing but Decrease Consuming: Longitudinal Studies of the Decoy, Default, and Compromise Effects
Research in marketing, psychology, economics, and decision making has long examined what people choose, when people choose, and why people choose. But almost no research has examined how long people consume their choices. Here, we examined an asymmetry between choosing an option and consuming it. Under the aegis of nudges, we conducted two randomized longitudinal experiments on how long people consumed a choice that was incentivized vis-à-vis a d…
Avoiding embarrassment online: Response to and inferences about chatbots when purchases activate self‐presentation concerns
We explore how self‐presentation concerns and the desire to avoid embarrassment impact two distinct types of interactions consumers have with chatbots: interactions when a chatbot's identity is (1) not disclosed and therefore ambiguous or (2) disclosed. We propose that consumers feel less embarrassed with a chatbot than a human service agent in purchase contexts where self‐presentation concerns are active because consumers ascribe less mind to ch…
Woman-Owned Business’ Labels Enhance Perceived Competence
Gender bias is widely recognized as having negative effects on women in business, including on outcomes such as hiring, promotion, pay, and access to venture capital funding. This study identifies a strategy that women business owners can employ to boost business outcomes. Across five preregistered studies (N = 2585), including a field study, affixing the owner attribute label “woman-owned business” can engender positive business outcomes, includ…
Consumer Moral Decision Making: The Impact of Alignable Versus Nonalignable Differences
Consumer choice decisions often involve a tradeoff between an alignable difference (a difference along a shared attribute) and a nonalignable difference (a difference between unique attributes of each alternative). For example, Café A provides friendly service, while Café B offers unwelcoming service (an alignable difference). However, Café A occasionally makes billing errors, and Café B has comfortable seating (a nonalignable difference). Prior …
Beauty as a Goal: Creating Harmony Between Health and Taste
People frequently perceive a trade-off between health and taste, leading to poor dietary choices. This research identifies a novel pathway to healthier eating: seeking beauty in food. Across seven preregistered field and lab studies, pursuing beautiful food systematically increased healthy choices without diminishing perceived taste. This effect arises because beauty is positively associated with both health and taste, effectively creating health…
Fairness Perceptions in Demographic Targeting
Deciding which customer segment(s) to serve, or targeting, is a cornerstone of marketing strategy. While companies commonly target based on demographic characteristics, recent cultural movements (e.g., #MeToo, Black Lives Matter) have heightened sensitivity to the differential treatment of certain demographic groups. Yet research to date has not examined whether demographic targeting itself seems fair or appropriate. Fourteen experiments (N = 9,3…
When and Why Consumers (Erroneously) Believe Income Impacts the Enjoyment of Consumption Experiences
We examine how people (as observers) anticipate levels of happiness from psychological consumption experiences (e.g., learning a new language or visiting a park). All else being equal, we propose and demonstrate that people expect differences in happiness based on income. Specifically, we show that relative to observers themselves, individuals simultaneously expect low-income consumers to enjoy psychological consumption experiences less and high-…
Brand Corporateness: Measurement and Symbolic Meaning of an Unfavorable Brand Association
This research establishes brand corporateness as a novel brand association that most consumers find unfavorable. Exploratory focus group findings first illuminate consumer meaning structures and attitudes around brand corporateness. An inductive grounded theory approach suggests three core (hierarchical, mechanistic, opaque) and three ancillary (ubiquitous, traditional, strategic) dimensions of the construct, informing a subsequent literature rev…
The Desire for Perfect Products
Some consumers evaluate products against demanding, ever-rising ideals of perfection. We introduce the desire for perfect products (DPP), a novel consumer trait capturing the extent to which consumers desire flawless products. Drawing on four qualitative studies, we identify three characteristics that distinguish high (vs. low) DPP consumers: (1) richer and more demanding ideal points, (2) greater susceptibility to upwardly revising those ideals …
Psychology (23 works) · Social Psychology (17 works) · Business (15 works) · Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification (15 works) · Marketing (12 works) · Economics (10 works) · Advertising (9 works) · Behavioral Health and Interventions (9 works) · Perception (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works)