Consumer Behavior

The Language of Branding: Theory, Strategies and Tactics shows marketers how to use language successfully to improve brand value and influence consumer behavior.

Research has shown that possessions have the power to change consumers' self-construal and activate different aspects of the self. Building on this literature, the authors suggest that the salience of product ownership not only activates the product-related self but also simultaneously deactivates product-unrelated selves, resulting in impaired performance on tasks unrelated to the activated self. In five experiments, we first elicit feelings of ownership over a product (e.g., a calculator) to activate a product-related identity (e.g., the math self).

The authors examine how consumers respond to pseudo-free offers--offers that are presented to consumers as free but that require consumers to make a nonmonetary payment (such as completing a survey or providing personal information) in order to receive the "free" good or service. Across six studies, the authors find that consumers are generally just as likely to accept pseudo-free offers (with nonmonetary costs) as comparable truly free offers (with no costs), as long as the costs of the pseudo-free offers are below some threshold.

The authors propose a quantitative approach for describing entertainment products, in a way that allows for improving the predictive performance of consumer choice models for these products. Their approach is based on the media psychology literature, which suggests that people’s consumption of entertainment products is influenced by the psychological themes featured in these products. They classify psychological themes on the basis of the “character strengths” taxonomy from the positive psychology literature (Peterson and Seligman 2004).

Marketing managers are responsible for understanding and predicting customer purchasing activity. This task is complicated by a lack of knowledge of all of the calendar time events that influence purchase timing. Yet, isolating calendar time variability from the natural ebb and flow of purchasing is important for accurately assessing the influence of calendar time shocks to the spending process, and for uncovering the customer-level purchasing patterns that robustly predict future spending.

The rise of "Big Data" had a big impact on marketing research and practice. In this article, we first highlight sources of useful consumer information that are now available at large scale and very little or no cost. We subsequently discuss how this information — with the help of new analytical techniques — can be translated into valuable insights on consumers' psychological states and traits that can, in turn, be used to inform marketing strategy.

Stress can impact various aspects of a person's well-being. While some researchers have suggested that consumption-related activities may cause stress, no research has yet explored such stress among vulnerable, younger consumers. To better understand this phenomenon, the concept of adolescents' perceived brand deprivation stress (BDS) is introduced as a state of tension perceived negatively by a young consumer when he or she does not have specific brands from a particular product category.

We exploit the release of a mobile application for a financial aggregation platform to analyze how technology adoption changes consumer financial decision making. The app reduced the cost of accessing personal financial information, and we find that this led to a drop in non-sufficient fund (NSF) fees. Because of the manner in which these fees are incurred, this represents an unambiguous welfare improvement for users of the platform. The leading explanation for this result appears to be mistake avoidance due to easier access to information.

The adoption and diffusion of new products and behaviors has been studied extensively and comprehensively (e.g., Rogers 2003). Disadoption — how and why people volitionally stop using products and/or cease certain behaviors (e.g., customer defection, smoking cessation) — by contrast, has received less and more situation-specific attention. This paper presents a general (conceptual) framework for understanding disadoption. Disadoption is defined and delineated from other behavioral discontinuances.