Our special issue on young consumers introduces readers to a research area that has been part of the consumer behavior field for over 50 years. We provide an overview of topics and findings from past to present that have appeared in marketing and consumer journals. We also identify current research issues and gaps and invite readers to contribute to the field. Throughout our discussion, we introduce the 10 articles in this special issue, whose topics include neuroscience insights into youth risk behaviors, the effects of social media on youth, social activism among young people, strategies for encouraging them to eat healthier food, parenting strategies and youth smoking, how gambling advertising affects youth, their need for marketplace literacy, and the importance of studying the lived experiences of youth in poverty. These articles include empirical findings and identify opportunities for future research that can positively impact the lives of children and adolescents.

Firms build strong brands by communicating positive and unique brand identities to consumers. By doing so, brands develop special meanings and associations for consumers, sometimes to the point of achieving iconic status. Disney is associated with childhood, fantasy, and family entertainment. In the marketplace, dilution may be detected in a variety of ways, including a negative change in consumer brand perceptions and associations, a decrease in overall brand attitude or preference, and a decrease in brand sales, market share, or stock valuation. This chapter defines dilution in terms of its proximate cause and subsequent consequences. It then defines dilution as a negative and harmful change in the way consumers relate to a brand on a cognitive, affective, or behavioral basis. The chapter also discusses two major sources of brand dilution—external and internal sources of dilution.

Despite the explosive growth of luxury consumption, researchers have yet to examine how the experience of using luxury products affects us both psychologically and behaviorally. In this research, we explore how the experience of using a luxury product can alter a user's perceptions of themselves and their behavior toward other people. We gave women either a luxury product (e.g., Prada handbag) or a non-luxury product (e.g., unbranded handbag) to use, and afterwards, we presented women with opportunities to exhibit either selfish or generous behaviors toward others. We found that, after using a luxury product, women exhibited more selfish behavior, such as sharing fewer resources with others and contributing less money to charity than women who used a non-luxury handbag. We also found this pattern can be reversed, with luxury users exhibiting more generous behavior when the generous behavior can be performed in front of other people. Further, we show that these patterns of selfish and generous behaviors are mediated by changes in perceived status and superiority that are triggered when women experience using a luxury product.

Bicultural consumers now represent a third of the US population and are the fastest growing demographic group in the United States. This shift in consumer markets presents a challenge for marketers as they try to design brand strategies to serve this important group. In this article, the authors show that certain types of brands, specifically paradox brands that incorporate contradictory brand meanings, are particularly appealing to bicultural consumers. Results from seven studies reveal that bicultural consumers evaluate paradox brands more favorably and choose paradox brands more than traditional brands without contradictions. Furthermore, bicultural consumers exhibit more favorable evaluations and greater choice of paradox brands than do monocultural consumers. These cultural differences are attributable to greater cognitive flexibility found among biculturals, particularly those who adopt an acculturation strategy of integrating their different cultural identities. Greater cognitive flexibility, in turn, prompts stronger engagement with a paradox brand, which contributes to more favorable brand evaluations and choice. Contributions of this research for understanding bicultural consumers, marketing to bicultural consumers, and directions for future research are discussed.

Previous articleNext article FreeThank You to Our ReviewersPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe editors wish to thank the following reviewers who gave so generously of their time to assist in the publication of this issue of the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.Melanie Brucks, Stanford UniversityChristopher Cannon, Northwestern UniversityElise Chandon Ince, University of South CarolinaLan Nguyen Chaplin, University of Illinois, ChicagoKristina Durante, Rutgers UniversityGavan Fitzsimons, Duke UniversityChelsea Galoni, Northwestern UniversityJessica Gamlin, University of OregonSzu-Chi Huang, Stanford UniversityJoel Huber, Duke UniversityDeborah John, University of MinnesotaPunam Keller, Dartmouth CollegeUzma Khan, University of MiamiSara Kim, University of Hong KongMinjung Koo, Sungkyunkwan UniversityMichal Maimaran, Northwestern UniversityKatherine Milkman, Pennsylvania State UniversityChiraag Mittal, Texas A&M University, College StationSarah Moore, University of AlbertaAnastasiya Pocheptsova Ghosh, University of ArizonaEleanor Putnam-Farr, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyRaj Raghunathan, University of TexasDerek Rucker, Northwestern UniversityRima Toure-Tillery, Northwestern UniversityGulden Ulkumen, University of Southern CaliforniaOleg Urminsky, University of ChicagoStacy Wood, North Carolina State UniversityAlison Xu, University of Minnesota Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of the Association for Consumer Research Volume 5, Number 3July 2020Longitudinal Effects and Consumption Guest Editors: Pradeep Chintagunta and Aparna A. Labroo Sponsored by the Association for Consumer Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/709467 © 2020 the Association for Consumer Research. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Advertisers often depict their products being consumed in a social setting, but they also depict people secretly consuming their products. Will consumers like a product more if they are prompted to consume it in secret? We report eight studies, where women consumed and evaluated products such as cookies, chocolate, and apple chips. Women in secret consumption conditions were instructed to imagine eating the food in secret, instructed to hide the food from others while consuming it, or shown an advertisement encouraging eating the food in secret. These secret consumption prompts resulted in more positive product evaluations and increased product choice, compared to evaluations in non-secret conditions. We identify preoccupation and attitude polarization as the primary drivers for these outcomes. When women consume a product in secret, they become preoccupied with the product, as thoughts about the product continually pop into mind. Increased thinking leads to attitude polarization, where evaluations for products they like become even more positive. Finally, we also identify moderators of these secrecy effects.

Despite decades of research on materialism, there are few viable strategies for reducing materialism in younger consumers. In this paper, we present two studies conducted among over 900 adolescents that reveal a promising strategy for decreasing materialism: fostering gratitude. In Study 1, results from a nationally representative survey showed that children and adolescents with a grateful disposition were less materialistic. In Study 2, experimental evidence showed that an intervention designed to increase gratitude (i.e. keeping a gratitude journal) significantly reduced materialism among adolescents and also attenuated materialism's negative effect on generosity. Using real money and donation as a behavioral measure, we found that adolescents who kept a gratitude journal donated 60% more of their earnings to charity compared to those in the control condition. We discuss the implications of our findings, offer some suggestions for putting our results into action, and provide an agenda for future research in this domain.

When luxury brands (exuding self-enhancement values) incorporate CSR (eliciting self-transcendence values) in their brand platform, they are blending opposing values into their marketing strategies, often resulting in negative responses from consumers. This research provides a solution to this problem—“value instantiation,” which encourages people to generate reasons for a value and to pursue it via a concrete example. We introduce the following two approaches for instantiating self-transcendence values in the context of self-enhancement value pursuit: (1) exposing consumers to philanthropic activities of self-enhancement-driven celebrities (study 1) and (2) encouraging consumers to visualize themselves engaging in philanthropic activities while pursuing self-enhancement values (study 2). We show that such value instantiation, which promotes the integration of the values, reduces unfavorable responses to a luxury brand’s product promoted with CSR appeals, particularly among the core consumers of luxury brands, who are self-enhancement driven, and thus would respond to the CSR appeals most negatively.

What happens when females use counterfeit luxury products in a social context? The authors show that counterfeit users view social interactions they have with other people as a possible signal that their counterfeit product has been judged to be an authentic luxury product (high authenticity signal) or a counterfeit product (low authenticity signal). Low authenticity signals trigger higher levels of social anxiety than do high authenticity signals. And, higher levels of social anxiety result in decreases in moral disengagement regarding counterfeit purchases. The end result is that low authenticity signals lead to lower purchase intentions and actual spending on counterfeit luxury goods compared to high authenticity signals. In a final study, the authors use these findings to develop a new anticounterfeit advertising strategy, and show it to be effective in reducing females' interest in purchasing counterfeit luxury products in the future.

Researchers have found that consumers abandon and avoid products when they feel threatened by the presence of dissimilar groups who also use the product. In this article, the authors propose a different strategy for responding to dissimilar users, upgrading to a brand’s more exclusive products. Results from six studies show that upgrading is a preferred strategy for consumers with strong self–brand connections, who are unlikely to avoid or abandon the brand because their self-identity is tied to the brand. Among these consumers, the act of upgrading to a brand’s more exclusive products is driven by their feelings of self-threat when exposed to dissimilar users, which triggers a desire to attain a higher-status position among brand users that is fulfilled by upgrading. The authors also identify moderators of the upgrading effect for consumers with strong self–brand connections. These consumers’ increased interest in upgrading is dampened when a brand’s exclusive products are made more readily available and when a brand has already conferred higher status to them through a customer status tier program.

Gelman and Echelbarger (2019—this issue) provide a valuable discussion about children's understanding of the inferred or nonobvious features of objects, which has implications for how children value products. We further this conversation by examining how children value products and brands as a means for meeting important goals, which we refer to as instrumental valuation. Specifically, we examine developmental trends in instrumental valuation for three goals—self‐concept development, self‐presentation, and happiness. Across these areas, we find that children place greater value on products and brands for meeting these goals as they grow older, particularly during late childhood and early adolescence. We conclude with a discussion of how age differences in instrumental valuation add to the general conversation about how children of different ages value objects.

Prior research finds that strong consumer-brand relationships buffer the potentially negative consequences of brand transgressions, but weak consumer-brand relationships fail to do so. We reconsider these findings regarding weak consumer-brand relationships. Results from three studies show that consumers with weak brand relationships can actually become more engaged and more emotionally attached to a brand after a brand transgression, depending on their implicit beliefs about relationships. If they believe that successful relationships grow through the partners’ mutual efforts to resolve problems and overcome obstacles, they can develop stronger relationships with a brand after a brand transgression.

Research in marketing often begins with two assumptions: that consumers are able to choose among desirable products, and that they have sufficient resources to buy them. However, many consumer decision journeys are constrained by a scarcity of products and/or a scarcity of resources. We review research in marketing, psychology, economics and sociology to construct an integrative framework outlining how these different types of scarcity individually and jointly influence consumers at various stages of their decision journeys. We outline avenues for future research and discuss implications for developing consumer-based marketing strategies.

Do people judge others based on the brands they use? Prior research finds evidence to this effect, yet we argue this phenomenon is far from universal. Drawing on research on implicit self‐theories, we find that only entity (but not incremental) theorists are prone to judging people based on their brand use (Studies 1 and 2). We show that entity theorists infer that people use brands to signal who they are to others, thereby forming perceptions of these people based on the personality of the brands they use, but incremental theorists are reluctant to make inferences about brand users’ signaling motives (Studies 3, 4, and 5). When tendencies to make signaling inferences are reduced, entity theorists no longer judge people based on their brand use (Studies 3 and 4). Furthermore, even incremental theorists judge people based on their brand use when given the information that their brand use is not driven by situational forces, but is potentially driven by a signaling motivation (Study 5).

In his seminal Journal of Marketing article, entitled “Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Customer-Based Brand Equity,” Kevin Keller argued persuasively that we can best understand, measure, and manage brands by understanding what consumers know about brands. In this commentary, I discuss the progress we have made in researching several areas of consumer branding, including measuring consumer brand knowledge and leveraging brands through brand extensions. Further, I identify challenges for future research in both areas, including needed developments in measuring brand association networks, researching global differences in consumer response to brand extensions, and understanding how contextual factors such as competitive environments affect brand extension success.