Trickle-down theories suggest that status symbols and fashion trends originate from the elites and move downward, but some high-end restaurants serve lowbrow food (e.g., potato chips, macaroni and cheese), and some high-status individuals wear downscale clothing (e.g., ripped jeans, duct-taped shoes). Why would high-status actors adopt items traditionally associated with low-status groups?
In light of consumers’ growing dependence on their smartphones, this article investigates the nature of the relationship that consumers form with their smartphone and its underlying mechanisms. We propose that in addition to obvious functional benefits, consumers in fact derive emotional benefits from their smartphone—in particular, feelings of psychological comfort and, if needed, actual stress relief. In other words, in a sense, smartphones are not unlike adult pacifiers.
Submitting queries to search engines has become a major way for consumers to search for information and products. The massive amount of search query data available today has the potential to provide valuable information on consumer preferences. In order to unlock this potential, it is necessary to understand how consumers translate their preferences into search queries. Strategic consumers should attempt to maximize the information content of the search results, conditional on a set of beliefs on how the search engine operates.
In this research, we investigate the prevalence, robustness and possible reasons underlying the polarity of online review distributions with the majority of the reviews at the positive end of the rating scale, a few reviews in the mid-range and some reviews at the negative end of the scale.
Qualitative research is often used by marketers to develop new brand positionings. This case illustrates how two sequentially applied qualitative approaches were used to generate positionings for a pet food brand. The methods included psychologically oriented focus groups and anthropologically informed ethnographies. When implemented independently by a single market research company, the two approaches inspired highly distinctive brand positionings.
Technologies are becoming increasingly autonomous, able to make decisions and complete tasks on behalf of consumers. Virtual assistants already take care of grocery shopping by replenishing used up ingredients while cooking machines prepare these ingredients and implement recipes. In the future, consumers will be able to delegate substantial parts of the shopping process to autonomous shopping systems.
We estimate the benefit of life-extending medical treatments to life insurance companies. Our main insight is that life insurance companies have a direct benefit from such treatments as they lower the insurer's liabilities by pushing the death benefit further into the future and raise future premium income. We apply this insight to immunotherapy, treatments associated with durable gains in survival rates for a growing number of cancer patients. We estimate that the life insurance sector's aggregate benefit from FDA approved immunotherapies is $9.8 billion a year.
Although consumer behavior theory has traditionally regarded evaluations as instrumental to consumer choice, in reality consumers often assess and express what they like and dislike even when there is no decision at stake. Why are consumers so eager to express their evaluations when there is no ostensible purpose for doing so? In this research, we advance the thesis that this is because consumers derive an inherent pleasure from assessing and expressing their likes and dislikes.