While a great deal of research has demonstrated word of mouth's impact, less is known about the broader discussions in which such sharing takes place. Some things are talked about for longer, and longer discussion tends to increase persuasion, but how might the language consumers use to talk about something shape discussion length? Natural language processing of hundreds of conversations begins to address this question. Results indicate that discussions last longer when conversation partners speak more concretely and asking narrow (but not broad) questions. These results hold even controlling for who is talking, what they are talking about, and a variety of other aspects of the discussion. Overall, the findings deepen understanding of word of mouth, shed light on linguistic drivers of conversation, and highlight how natural language processing can provide insight into consumer behavior.
Deadlines are a common tool for motivating consumer behavior, yet their effectiveness can depend on subtle features of temporal framing. Across eight experiments (N = 3, 045 including a posttest and two studies re ported in the appendix, available online), we identify a novel phenomenon-the fresh deadline effect-wherein dead lines that fall on the first of the month compress the perceived time during which a task must be completed and in crease motivation to complete the task. Time intervals ending on the first feel subjectively shorter than equivalent durations ending within the same month or later in the following month, despite objective duration being held con stant. This perceptual time compression increased motivation toward a deadline. A field experiment further showed that an expiration on the first increased coupon redemption rates. These findings contribute to research on time perception, temporal landmarks, and motivation, and offer practical insights for marketers and organizations designing time-sensitive interventions.
Consumers make a multitude of food consumption decisions every day, and such decisions are influenced by internal motivations and external factors, consequential for health and well-being, and highly connected over time. To enhance our understanding of food decision making, we propose the Start-Stop Continuous-Time Food Framework. This novel framework (1) identifies and characterizes each eating episode through three key interrelated dimensions (when to start eating, what to eat, when to stop eating) and (2) depicts relationships between eating episodes over time through this framework. We propose ways to enhance the consideration of single eating episode approaches, while also advocating for a more "continuous-time" approach that facilitates the identification of food consumption patterns reflective of consumers' everyday choices. We specify a wide range of future research questions and promising avenues for applying our framework for helping consumers eat consistently with their goals, designing effective policies, and conducting impactful consumer food research.
This research examines how market-mediated countermyths enable consumer temporal resistance by analyzing US consumers' adoption of Danish hygge to challenge the dominant myth that "time is money." Through a netnographic study combining visual analysis and existential-phenomenological interviews, findings reveal a four-stage recursive process through which consumers utilize hygge to achieve temporal transformation within contexts of acceleration. Unlike temporary oases of deceleration, this process enables an enduring transformation in consumers' orientation toward time through (1) recognizing temporal myths as constructed rather than natural, (2) finding market legitimation for alternative temporalities, (3) crafting new temporal rhythms and timeflows in everyday life, and (4) sustaining emancipatory timework within dominant structures. This research extends understanding of consumer temporality by demonstrating how counter-temporal myths, mediated by the market, provide resources for sustained consumer deceleration, and introduces "emancipatory mythwork" as the strategic borrowing of alternative cultural narratives to expand agency within constraining structures.
There is a growing interest in the role of language in consumer research. This article reviews 60 years of research on one specific topic in this area, foreign languages in advertising. It documents the language strategies, theory clusters, topics, and methods in 125 articles, and compares linguistic research with marketing research. This comparison shows that marketing-oriented research can benefit from two distinguishing characteristics of linguistic research: foreignness as an important language strategy, and "language as a symbol" as a theory cluster. More concretely, the results of this article contribute to advancing consumer language research by offering linguistic insights for brand name translation strategies, and by presenting a framework for generating new research ideas on linguistic complexity. Finally, for the broader domain of consumer research, we present implications for research on brand associations as well as research on consumer identity and consumption.
Consumers repeatedly fail to bring about desired outcomes, yet they also fail to learn from their own and others' mistakes. One potential cause for this failure to learn is that people believe that they will have more control over the future than they had over the past. Across many real-life and hypothetical situations, participants expressed the belief that, despite the uncertainty inherent in the future, future outcomes will be more under their control than were identical past outcomes, including even negative outcomes. The difference does not arise solely due to a broad sense of optimism, but instead is related to the fact that people generally are more aware of and thus more likely to take into account the constraints on their past behavior than potential constraints on their future behavior.
Time is experienced differently by men and women, with women's time often less valued, protected, and compensated. Society's time norms assign women family-building and caregiving roles, creating gendered time shaped by systemic inequalities and pressure to meet normative timelines. In fertility services, women face ongoing reminders of their failure to align with societal expectations for family formation. Drawing on archival data, we identify three ways women experience and communicate gendered time: individualizing, valorizing, and memorializing consumer timework. These practices help reconcile their lived experience of infertility with society's rigid timelines. We introduce the concept of gendered consumer timework, where women use both event time and relational time to navigate social pressures and personal expectations. Our study reveals that consumer timework exists on a friend-foe continuum and becomes an important asset for women facing infertility, a visible testament to their efforts regardless of outcomes.
Procrastination-the voluntary delay of a focal task-is both frequent and costly. But while procras tination objectively undermines effective time use, how might consumers' perceptions of their procrastination behav ior shape its effects? This research examines how the perceived productivity of procrastination influences consumers' time-use decisions. Eleven experiments (N = 6, 869) demonstrate that perceiving procrastination as more (vs. less) productive makes consumers more likely to procrastinate for longer (i.e., spend time) and less likely to compensate for the time spent (i.e., save time). This is driven by beliefs that more (vs. less) productive procrastination has less impact on available time. Consequently, perceiving (even identical) procrastination behaviors as more productive can further exacerbate ineffective time use. Our findings advance understanding of how subjective perceptions of pro ductivity affect procrastination behavior and consumer time-use decisions, and offer practical implications for the de sign, development, and positioning of antiprocrastination tools and services.
This special issue explores the ubiquitous yet complex role of time in the marketplace. Building on over 50 years of research, this collection synthesizes contributions across micropsychological, mesoinstitutional, and macrocultural levels. Some of the work in this issue examines the fresh deadline effect, the dominance of enjoyment in goal progress, and gendered consumer timework used to navigate societal timelines. Collectively, these articles reposition time as an engineered meaning system with significant ethical and managerial implications regarding consumer pressure and well-being. Beyond synthesizing current findings, this editorial proposes a novel future agenda titled "The Edge of Time." It advocates for a shift from within-time thinking toward outside-time thinking, exploring phenomena such as non-time, mortal-time, temporal solvents in extraordinary experiences, and the mega-time of climate and geology. By investigating these temporal boundaries, consumer researchers can better understand how time experiences are managed to help both people and the planet thrive.
From interpersonal conversations to commercial and political messaging, our world revolves around people making sense of communications. In this research, we illustrate how specific lexical choices systematically shape recipients' confidence in their judgment of a message's truthfulness. Prior work has shown that words can differ in their "reversibility," that is, how easily their antonyms can be retrieved. We propose a novel theoretical framework that predicts when and how statements containing concepts with different levels of reversibility engage distinct psychological processes, which in turn differentially affect downstream judgments of confidence. We test this model across two experiments (N=1,067) using truthfulness judgments arising from both participants' existing beliefs and experimentally manipulated beliefs.
Consumers reference their identities using phrases that can take either copular form (e.g., "I am a Democrat") or verbal form (e.g., "I vote Democrat"). How might the identity-referent phrases a consumer uses affect how they seem themselves? We examine how using copular versus verbal identity-referent phrases affects the consumer's self-concept and identity-related behavior. In seven experiments, we demonstrate that using copular ("I am") identity-referent phrases (1) increases identity self-importance more than using verbal ("I do") identity-referent phrases, (2) spreads to closely overlapping identities, and promotes identity-congruent behavior.
