Abstract Fairness is a foundational and highly consequential construct in marketing, shaping purchase intentions, brand attitudes, complaints, boycotts, and word‐of‐mouth. Yet extant consumer research has largely concentrated on price fairness, leaving fairness across the rest of marketing strategy and the marketing mix comparatively underexplored. This review makes three contributions. First, we review and integrate the field's three theoretical foundations: dual entitlement, inequity aversion, and moralized cognition. Second, we organize recent findings in the fairness literature around two managerial frameworks: strategy (segmentation, targeting, and positioning) and tactics (promotion, place, and product, in addition to price). Third, we highlight understudied areas and topics across the full range of marketing activities and issue a call to action for future research.
Abstract To help address the global obesity pandemic, extensive research in consumer psychology has studied what encourages (un)healthy food and portion choice. The present paper organizes this body of work into two predominant agendas: influencing (un)healthy food and portion choice through factors that shape healthiness perception or doing so through factors that modulate healthiness motivation and self‐control . Extant research has overwhelmingly relied on dichotomous choice measures (pitting healthy options against tasty but unhealthy alternatives) or on portion choice and intake (treating smaller amounts as healthier). Based on this observation, this review suggests at least two areas in which future research could provide important novel insights: first, investigating factors that impact the variety of foods that consumers choose (instead of dichotomous choice) as well as how the variety of food elements impacts perceptions and choice; and second, examining factors that enhance alignment of healthiness and tastiness perceptions (instead of forcing a tradeoff ).
Physicalism is the belief that everything is physical or ensues from the physical. Lay consumers resist this view, preferring instead accounts that combine the physical with the nonphysical. Inasmuch as physicalism is foundational to science and many science‐based welfare‐enhancing applications, departures from physicalism often result in resistance to such applications, with vital consequences. We review prior research that uses physicalism to explain consumer behavior, but we argue that even larger returns to welfare would arise from examining consumer response to physicalist characterizations of the world. To do so, we document gaps between lay beliefs and the physicalist beliefs that underlie science and technology and describe how increased lay acceptance of physicalism would result in a more just, habitable, and adaptable world.
Political advocacy is increasingly common. Companies routinely voice positions on political issues, consumers mobilize around issues they care about, and campaigns spend billions of dollars each election cycle. In this review, we define the construct of political advocacy, distinguish it from related constructs, and review the fast‐growing interdisciplinary literature on the topic. We organize our review around a central question: when is political advocacy effective? We posit that the answer depends on two critical factors: the goal of political advocacy and the actor behind it. Drawing on decades of research across marketing, psychology, political science, management, and economics, we identify four goals that frequently underlie political advocacy: capturing attention, changing attitudes, inspiring action, and cultivating affiliation. For each goal, we review relevant findings and organize them by actor type (political campaign, company, and consumer). We conclude by discussing open questions and promising future directions for research on political advocacy.
Building on a review of pertinent literature, we draw attention to preference‐expressive choice — decisions that appear to reveal a well‐established individual preference — and propose that such choices can be shaped by a distinct epistemic metacognitive state: the feeling of preference (FOP). FOP is the perception that one has, or should be able to form, a preference in a given domain, even before encountering specific options and without retrievable prior preferences. Building on research in metacognition, preference fluency, and preference expression, we theorize likely antecedents and consequences of FOP and test its viability in the context of the compromise effect, where having a preference often entails “picking a side” rather than choosing the middle option. Across multiple studies, FOP — situationally triggered by preference‐related cues — reduced compromising and increased preference‐expressive choice, independent of preference retrieval, certainty, or social desirability. Identifying FOP as a distinct driver of choice integrates and extends existing theory on metacognition and decision‐making, and highlights it as a promising, underexplored piece of the puzzle in understanding when, why, and how people feel ready to make bold and self‐expressive choices.
