Browsing by Author "Fitzsimons, Gavan J"

While consumer research has long explored social influences in consumer phenomena, the literature rarely considers the implications of different dynamics in relationships. In this dissertation, I take a multi-dimensional perspective on social relationships in consumer behavior. In Chapter 1, I develop a conceptual framework of social relationships that situates different types of relationships along three theoretically orthogonal and consumer-relevant relational dimensions: closeness, competitiveness, and power. I argue that these key relational dimensions jointly shape consumer phenomena in important ways. Then, in Chapter 2, I provide an empirical demonstration of this framework in the context of a novel source of social influence: the effect of making consumption choices for different types of others. I focus on two theoretically relevant relational dimensions, closeness and competitiveness, and show across eight experiments that making goal-related consumption choices for others can influence subsequent goal-related choices for the self, depending on the type of relationship with the other. I conclude by considering the practical and theoretical implications of taking a multi-dimensional approach to consumer behavior.

Although people frequently pursue multiple goals simultaneously, these goals often conflict with each other. For instance, consumers may have both a healthy eating goal and a goal to have an enjoyable eating experience. In this dissertation, I focus on two sources of enjoyment in eating experiences that may conflict with healthy eating: consuming tasty food (Essay 1) and affiliating with indulging dining companions (Essay 2). In both essays, I examine solutions and strategies that decrease the conflict between healthy eating and these aspects of enjoyment in the eating experience, thereby enabling consumers to resolve such goal conflicts.

Essay 1 focuses on the well-established conflict between having healthy food and having tasty food and introduces a novel product offering (“vice-virtue bundles”) that can help consumers simultaneously address both health and taste goals. Through several experiments, I demonstrate that consumers often choose vice-virtue bundles with small proportions (¼) of vice and that they view such bundles as healthier than but equally tasty as bundles with larger vice proportions, indicating that “healthier” does not always have to equal “less tasty.”

Essay 2 focuses on a conflict between healthy eating and affiliation with indulging dining companions. The first set of experiments provides evidence of this conflict and examine why it arises (Studies 1 to 3). Based on this conflict’s origins, the second set of experiments tests strategies that consumers can use to decrease the conflict between healthy eating and affiliation with an indulging dining companion (Studies 4 and 5), such that they can make healthy food choices while still being liked by an indulging dining companion. Thus, Essay 2 broadens the existing picture of goals that conflict with the healthy eating goal and, together with Essay 1, identifies solutions to such goal conflicts.

Consumers have relationships with other people, and they have relationships with brands similar to the ones they have with other people. Yet, very little is known about how brand and interpersonal relationships relate to one another. Even less is known about how they jointly affect consumer well-being. The goal of this research, therefore, is to examine how brand and interpersonal relationships influence and are influenced by consumer well-being. Essay 1 uses both empirical methods and surveys from individuals and couples to investigate how consumer preferences in romantic couples, namely brand compatibility, influences life satisfaction. Using traditional statistical techniques and multilevel modeling, I find that the effect of brand compatibility, or the extent to which individuals have similar brand preferences, on life satisfaction depends upon power in the relationship. For high power partners, brand compatibility has no effect on life satisfaction. On the other hand, for low power partners, low brand compatibility is associated with decreased life satisfaction. I find that conflict mediates the link between brand compatibility and power on life satisfaction. In Essay 2 I again use empirical methods and surveys to investigate how resources, which can be considered a form of consumer well-being, influence brand and interpersonal relations. Although social connections have long been considered a fundamental human motivation and deemed necessary for well-being (Baumeister and Leary 1995), recent research has demonstrated that having greater resources is associated with weaker social connections. In the current research I posit that individuals with greater resources still have a need to connect and are using other sources for connection, namely brands. Across several studies I test and find support for my theory that resource level shifts the preference of social connection from people to brands. Specifically, I find that individuals with greater resources have stronger brand relationships, as measured by self-brand connection, brand satisfaction, purchase intentions and willingness to pay with both existing brand relationships and with new brands. This suggests that individuals with greater resources place more emphasis on these relationships. Furthermore, I find that resource level influences the stated importance of brand and interpersonal relationships, and that having or perceiving greater resources is associated with an increased preference to engage with brands over people. This research demonstrates that there are times when people prefer and seek out connections with brands over other people, and highlights the ways in which our brand and interpersonal relationships influence one another.

In this dissertation, I explore the relational consequences of humor in brand-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer relationships. In the first essay, I demonstrate that the cleverness of a brand’s humor attempts affects consumers’ brand attitudes and engagement with the brand. This effect is mediated by perceptions of brand warmth and competence and moderated by consumers’ need for cognition. I demonstrate this effect in six studies including a field study (using data scraped from Twitter) and several lab experiments. In the second essay, I explore ways to make solitude feel less socially disconnecting. Across four studies, I show that people who experience solitary amusement feel less socially disconnected than people who experience solitary happiness. This effect is mediated by other-focus such that people who are amused (vs. happy) think more of others. Together, these two essays demonstrate that humor can be an effective way to foster both consumer-brand and consumer-consumer relationships.

Since the cognitive ability to process information is limited, people often rely on stereotypes to help them make sense of their social environment. These knowledge structures allow people to utilize past experiences and social learning to infer the characteristics and behaviors of individual group members. Stereotypes provide their holders with scripts, specifying how to interact with members of specific social groups (e.g., what products to choose or avoid and how certain actions may be interpreted). Despite the prevalent use of stereotypes in daily life, little research in consumer behavior has examined the role of stereotypes from this perspective. I propose that consumers use stereotype knowledge to navigate interpersonal interactions through adjusting their self-evaluations and product choices to match the needs of the social situation. My research suggests that both the stereotypes applied to the self and those applied to others have implications for how consumers strategically leverage this socially shared knowledge when interacting with others.

In Essay 1, I examine how consumers use stereotypes to guide their self-evaluations when preparing to interact with someone who may stereotype them. Most interestingly, consumers are selective in what aspects of the stereotype they take on, depending on whether they have more interdependent or independent self-construals. In three studies, I demonstrate that individuals with more interdependent self-construals engage in selective self-stereotyping and that these shifts in self-evaluations are specifically tailored to the preferences and expectations of the interaction partner. However, I find that individuals with more independent self-construals engage in selective counter self-stereotyping in order to distance themselves from the constraints of the stereotype and also to rebuff the expectations of the interaction partner.

Essay 2 examines the various impression management concerns that arise when consumers choose products to share with others. I find that when the consumer has little information regarding his consumption partner, stereotypes related to the consumption partner's social group are used to guide product choices. Whether the chosen products are stereotype consistent or inconsistent depend on the consumer's social goals and the consumption partner's expectations. Across four studies, I take both the perspectives of the consumer making the choice and the consumption partner to examine the various strategies adopted for making joint consumption choices and also to evaluate the interpersonal consequences of these strategies.

Consumers frequently share stories about consumption experiences with others through word of mouth (WOM). Past research has focused on how hearing WOM influences the listener; I examine how sharing WOM influences the speaker. My proposed model outlines variables that determine storytelling language, predicts how specific language influences speakers' evaluations of experiences, and identifies the process through which language influences speakers. I test this model in five experimental studies and in a field study using Amazon.com data. I find that stories containing relatively more explaining language influence speakers through a process of sense-making. Sense-making helps consumers understand and recover from experiences by allowing them to figure out why experiences occurred and why they liked or disliked them. Making sense of experiences through explaining language has several consequences for consumers. Explaining language can cause paradoxical effects of WOM in terms of consumers' evaluations of experiences and their intentions to repeat and recommend experiences. Explaining positive experiences can decrease speakers' evaluations of experiences, making experiences less positive and decreasing consumers' willingness to repeat and recommend these experiences. Conversely, explaining negative experiences can increase speakers' evaluations of experiences, making experiences less negative and increasing consumers' willingness to repeat and recommend these experiences. In addition, making sense of and explaining experiences decreases consumers' intentions to spread future word of mouth about their experiences.

Material consumption has increased exponentially in recent decades, establishing most American consumers today as the most materially wealthy humans in history. But what is all of our stuff really buying us? Despite our material wealth, Americans suffer from many poverties and illnesses that seem to be exacerbated rather than alleviated by our culture of consumerism. Even more clear is the threat that our consumption behavior poses to the environment. In seeking solutions to overconsumption, interest in minimalism as a lifestyle has rapidly expanded over the past decade. Given a lack of academic research on this topic, the current work relies on four datasets using quantitative surveys (total N = 1,117) and in-depth qualitative interviews (N = 30 minimalists) to explore the following questions: what does it mean to practice minimalism, what motivates people to adopt minimalism, and what impacts do people report experiencing as a result of practicing minimalism? I find that minimalism is a practice of centering one's values and intentionally allocating and cultivating one's resources across a variety of domains. By investing one’s time, money, attention, energy, and space into that which is most valued and divesting from that which is not, minimalists seek to maximize value and minimize costs. As a result, I suggest that minimalism is a consumption orientation and practice that is value-driven and resource-building. I find that minimalist consumers often adopt minimalism during periods of significant change and transition and are primarily motivated by a desire to reduce stress and increase their psychological well-being. Minimalists report a high number of benefits from practicing minimalism, including increased financial security, improved psychological well-being, less stress, more free time, fewer distractions, and a greater sense of control. In conceptualizing minimalism more broadly, I adapt and extend Antonovsky’s theory of salutogenesis (1979, 1987) to argue that minimalism can be viewed as a case of a salutogenic (vs. pathogenic) consumption orientation – that is, consumption that is focused on building well-being through the active cultivation of valued resources (as compared to consumption that threatens well-being and depletes valued resources). I conclude that minimalism is a promising pathway to greater individual well-being with positive second-order environmental effects.

Though societally-held norms about emotion are an ever-present factor that guide and shape our emotional experiences, little research has examined how these norms might influence our consumption behaviors. In my dissertation, I begin to bridge that gap by examining how emotion norms might encourage individuals to make certain consumption choices in an attempt to achieve or avoid specific emotional states. In particular, I focus specifically on the emotion norm associated with the experience of feeling ashamed to explore how emotion norms can lead us to make some rather unexpected choices. Across a series of studies, I find that the emotion norm associated with shame attenuates consumers' basic hedonic impulses and increases their preference for products that elicit mixed emotions. Importantly, I find that this occurs despite our natural preference for feeling positively and despite the fact that feeling mixed emotions is psychologically uncomfortable and aversive. Taken together, this work extends the existing research on motivated emotion, mixed emotions and emotion norms in (1) suggesting a novel reason for why individuals might seek out one emotional state over another (2) providing an explanation for why mixed emotions-eliciting products might succeed in the marketplace (3) demonstrating that not all negative emotions lead to mood repair behavior and (4) examining how emotion norms as fundamental social structures influence consumption behavior.

Marketers have long looked for observables that could explain differences in consumer behavior. Initial attempts have centered on demographic factors, such as age, gender, and race. Although such variables are able to provide some useful information for segmentation (Bass, Tigert, and Longdale 1968), more recent studies have shown that variables that tap into consumers’ social classes and personal values have more predictive accuracy and also provide deeper insights into consumer behavior. I argue that one demographic construct, religion, merits further consideration as a factor that has a profound impact on consumer behavior. In this dissertation, I focus on two types of religious guidance that may influence consumer behaviors: religious teachings (being content with one’s belongings), and religious problem-solving styles (reliance on God).

Essay 1 focuses on the well-established endowment effect and introduces a new moderator (religious teachings on contentment) that influences both owner and buyers’ pricing behaviors. Through fifteen experiments, I demonstrate that when people are primed with religion or characterized by stronger religious beliefs, they tend to value their belongings more than people who are not primed with religion or who have weaker religious beliefs. These effects are caused by religious teachings on being content with one’s belongings, which lead to the overvaluation of one’s own possessions.

Essay 2 focuses on self-control behaviors, specifically healthy eating, and introduces a new moderator (God’s role in the decision-making process) that determines the relationship between religiosity and the healthiness of food choices. My findings demonstrate that consumers who indicate that they defer to God in their decision-making make unhealthier food choices as their religiosity increases. The opposite is true for consumers who rely entirely on themselves. Importantly, this relationship is mediated by the consumer’s consideration of future consequences. This essay provides an explanation to the existing mixed findings on the relationship between religiosity and obesity.