The deadliest mass shootings in the United States are increasingly carried out with modern sporting rifles (MSRs, also known as “AR-15 style” or “assault-style” rifles). Recent lawsuits, complaints to the Federal Trade Commission, and congressional action have implicated a small number of specific MSR manufacturers’ advertising as factors in mass shootings. The authors investigate 90 MSR manufacturers’ print advertisements from 2012 through 2024 (n = 574 ads) to identify implied uses of MSRs. They find that 38% of ads did not imply a use, 23% implied legal civilian uses, 13% implied an ambiguous use, and 26% implied offensive use against another person inconsistent with legal self-defense. Critical visual analysis of offensive use ads revealed three categories: military use, paramilitary use, and use against a human target conjured by the reader. The authors identify ways that offensive use ads violate the American Marketing Association's Statement of Ethics and suggest new industry and public policy to prohibit the most serious transgressions. This article contributes an empirically based understanding of the nature and industry-wide frequency of unethical advertising by MSR manufacturers, some of which may foster gun violence and/or be deceptive or unfair.
Sustaining behavior change is challenging when consumption is habitual, as with smartphone use. Across two longitudinal field studies involving 5,686 observations of objectively measured smartphone use from 153 individuals, we explore how to reduce smartphone usage sustainably. Our intervention leverages positive alternatives (learning a new language or engaging in walking) to sustain smartphone usage reductions after an intervention with incentives has ended. We study whether consumers who are incentivized to curb smartphone use and adopt a positive activity demonstrate greater long-term success compared to those solely incentivized to reduce smartphone use. Across both studies, participants reduced smartphone use while incentives were in place, but these reductions were not sustained after incentives were removed. However, individuals achieving both targets (instead of one) had lower social media and smartphone use during the post-treatment period relative to their baseline, especially if a higher proportion of idle time was occupied by the positive alternative. In the first study, higher engagement in the alternative activity was associated with lower self-reported social media addiction, while larger reduction in social media use was linked to improvement in subjective well-being. However, well-being findings were mixed: the second study found no effect of screen time reduction on subjective well-being.
This paper explores the affective barriers consumers face when seeking transformative services in subsistence contexts and proposes strategies that can be used to increase uptake. Whereas these services have the potential to address urgent needs and significantly improve life circumstances, challenges experienced while seeking them can result in missing out. The authors use qualitative research to gain understanding of the affective barriers consumers face in seeking services. They conducted thirty-six in-depth interviews with consumers and service providers, covering diverse offerings, across four countries, to provide a big-picture understanding of challenges. Data analysis revealed affective barriers associated with ontological insecurity. A typology of approaches presents empathy, equity and educational practices as potential pathways to overcome affective barriers and increase engagement with transformative services. This research contributes to the growing body of work on transformative service research in subsistence marketplaces, offering implications for subsistence consumers, service providers, marketers, and policymakers.
Alcohol-impaired driving is a major public health and safety problem with far-reaching consequences for individuals and communities. Despite these persistent harms, identifying measures to prevent alcohol-related driving incidents remains a challenge for marketing and public policy stakeholders. In response, this work introduces the consumer impairment journey , a novel framework that conceptualizes this risky behavior as a process that unfolds over time rather than as an isolated, poor decision. Using the lenses of consumer journeys and vulnerability, the authors outline five stages—planning, consumption, impaired decision, incident, and outcomes—to understand how alcohol-impaired driving emerges as a result of accumulating individual (e.g., cognitive impairment), interpersonal (e.g., peer influence), and structural (e.g., rideshare availability) resource deficits. In doing so, they extend prior research on consumer vulnerability and introduce the notion of a harmful journey that is meant to be disrupted. Importantly, this novel framework highlights diverse stage-specific marketing and public policy interventions to mitigate consumer vulnerability to impaired driving and resulting harms, and charts avenues for future research in both marketing and public policy.
This research is designed to propel the study of public advocacy for public policy within the Transformative Consumer Research and marketing disciplines. The authors define public advocacy as a systematic process of persuasion to gain enduring public support for an idea, belief, course of action, law, or policy. In this research, they sought out and partnered with experienced experts and organizational leaders doing public advocacy work across a variety of functional areas (e.g., grassroots organizing, social movements, lobbying, media interventions to shift cultural norms) and diverse topics (e.g., hunger, economic justice, pay equity, workers’ rights, voting rights). The authors build on insights drawn from these partners’ experiences and from academic research related to advocacy to innovate a conceptual framework for public advocacy. They call on researchers to investigate and advance knowledge about public advocacy and its impact on public policy, individual and community well-being, and transformative social change.
Markets excel at producing short-term, individual happiness, yet they are structurally ill-equipped to ensure that such happiness translates into long-term, collective well-being. This tension reflects market incentives that reward short-term pleasure while diffusing long-term well-being and simultaneously undermine equity, sustainability, or social connections over time. In response, the World Happiness Foundation introduced the concept of happytalism to acknowledge the connection between personal and community well-being. Drawing on this concept, we introduce the Marketplace Happiness (MH) framework to understand, evaluate, and manage this tension by examining how consumers, brands and organizations, and policymakers can better align short-term pleasure with sustainable collective well-being. We further describe the operationalization of MH in empirically tractable ways, accounting for cultural differences and existing political realities worldwide, providing pathways for future research and implementation.
