To create a more sustainable society, changing unsustainable social conventions is crucial. But when are small groups of people most effective at triggering social tipping necessary for convention change? Literature suggests non-conformist minorities exert more influence over individual attitudes of majority members when they oppose the majority convention consistently. However, social change requires not just individual attitude change among some majority members but that the entire society, over time, tips from one convention to a new one. Using a multi-round group experimental paradigm, we empirically examine whether minorities trigger social tipping more successfully when being consistent in their choices. In line with past theorising, we find that consistent minorities are perceived as more confident, which promotes tipping. We also find that consistent minorities are perceived as uncompromising, which surprisingly impedes rather than promotes tipping. Future research building on our work may ultimately provide practical guidance for activists: projecting as much confidence as possible through consistency while occasionally conceding to avoid appearing uncompromising may turn out to be an ideal cocktail when it comes to promoting tipping.

To expedite urgently needed system-level changes, as consumer researchers, we need to better understand how individual-level interventions affect the likelihood of group-level changes over time, which ultimately can lead to system-level, societal changes. To help this mindset shift, we offer a conceptual framework, based on complexity theory, to guide this shift by focusing on the study of (1) consumers as elements in a wider system, (2) consumers as active agents of change, while also (3) accounting for the feedback loops among stakeholders in the system over time. We introduce two methods that can be applied by consumer researchers in the context of group-level change and be integrated into experimental work: coordination games and agent-based modeling. These methods can complement qualitative and conceptual consumer research that started to address the need in group- and system-level change by adding a quantitative approach and presenting ways in which experimental work can be applied.

Consumer movements like Extinction Rebellion are being increasingly examined for their potential to change current consumption conventions and thus facilitate societal-level change. Past consumer research employs primarily qualitative methods to examine how such movements emerge, mobilize, and what strategies they employ. It is less clear though when these movements succeed in provoking enduring social change. We here introduce a collection of experimental paradigms that allow researchers to examine when and how consumer movements can provoke a change across a social network over time: social tipping paradigms grounded in game theory. Specifically, these paradigms help provide insight into the causal role of different interventions (e.g., consumer activists being identifiable or not) in boosting or buffering societal-level social tipping provoked by a movement. Our goal is to create an approachable review of existing paradigms and provide consumer researchers with a primer for employing these paradigms in their own research.

Governments enact various regulations to decrease the use of plastic. This raises the question of whether the effectiveness of such measures is restricted to the realm of the plastic products being regulated, or whether and how it ‘spills over’ on to the use of other plastic products. Leveraging scanner and survey data across 22 countries, the authors show that a ban or a charge on plastic bags strengthens descriptive social norms to avoid plastic, which in turn curbs the purchasing and use of plastic bottles, as well as of other plastics. Yet there is also a dark side to charging consumers for plastic bags, as a negative cueing effect can lower concerns about plastic pollution and make consumers less vigilant about their use of other plastic products. Taken together, this research shows that government regulation aimed at changing small common behaviors potentially has a much larger impact via spillover effects.

Societal change toward sustainability often starts with minorities publicly rebelling against an unsustainable convention (e.g., signing a petition to ban meat products from canteens). Such rebellion is often fueled by moral concerns (e.g., environmental protection). Importantly, such morally-motivated rebellion may come at a social cost. Others may perceive rebellion based on moral concerns as a judgment of their actions and resent rebels for it. Rebels may refrain from publicly rebelling to avoid these social costs. Self-silencing may keep unsustainable conventions in place and hamper societal change. In this paper, we test whether offering people pragmatic, i.e. non-moral, arguments (e.g., financial reasons for banning meat) facilitates people to publicly rebel against unsustainable conventions, because it alleviates the concerns about social costs. Our results suggest that providing pragmatic (vs. moral) arguments does not alleviate the concerns about social costs, and that it does not facilitate people to publicly rebel against unsustainable conventions. Additional analyses suggest a possible explanation. People spontaneously associate rebellion with moral motives despite offering them pragmatic arguments.

This manuscript investigates if and how startups can utilize referral campaigns to increase Internet enabled software adoption. It is analyzed how geographic proximity, tie strength and status differences between referrer and referee and the sender’s network position impact adoption success. This study complements a complete diffusion dataset of a startup launching Internet enabled software with user survey data on dyad characteristics. Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, we show that there are different combinations of network position and dyad characteristics that facilitate adoption success. Results reveal that referral campaigns provide a feasible go to market strategy for software startups.

Social conventions change when individuals collectively adopt an alternative over the status quo, in a process known as social diffusion. Our repeated trials of a multi-round experiment provided data that helped motivate the proposal of an agent-based model of social diffusion that incorporates inertia and trend-seeking, two behavioural mechanisms that are well documented in the social psychology literature. The former causes people to stick with their current decision, the latter creates sensitivity to population-level changes. We show that such inclusion resolves the contradictions of existing models, allowing to reproduce patterns of social diffusion which are consistent with our data and existing empirical observations at both the individual and population level. The model reveals how the emergent population-level diffusion pattern is critically shaped by the two individual-level mechanisms; trend-seeking guarantees the diffusion is explosive after the diffusion process takes off, but inertia can greatly delay the time to take-off.

In the hope of benefiting from the increasing focus on sustainability in Western markets, national brands are introducing new sustainable products.We investigate the success of new sustainable products with a unique dataset combining household panel data, consumer survey data, expert panel survey data, and advertising expenditure data.We show that sustainable new product introductions achieve lower sales than their conventional counterparts.Investing in corporate social responsibility activities compensates for this negative effect and is therefore a viable strategy to boost sales of new sustainable products.Importantly, making sustainable new products clearly innovative mitigates the negative effect of a sustainability claim on new product sales, whereas price promotions aggravate the negative effect.We furthermore caution that the negative effect of sustainability may not decrease as sustainability becomes more mainstream, even if our data covers a period before the currently increased interest in sustainability.

In this paper, we focus on a new aspect of the diffusion process that can help explain the virality of online new product campaigns. We propose that the sense of anonymity associated with being online liberates people from impression management concerns. This facilitates individuals to express themselves more freely at the individual level, in turn having a major accelerating on diffusion at the group level. We tested our hypothesis with a novel experimental paradigm as well as via an agent-based model (ABM). Participants in the experiment were tasked with coordinating on a product selection and confederates acted as a minority trying to spread the innovative product. The ABM mirrored the experimental game using an agent-level social payoff function. Across both empirical settings, we found that individuals are more likely to explore novelties in anonymous settings, which allows societies to reach the tipping points that are required for innovations to diffuse more easily.

In this research, we focus on the presumed negative effect of a sustainability claim on product quality. We propose that a brands' corporate social responsibility (CSR) can reduce this negative effect. We conduct an experiment to test our hypotheses for a newly introduced detergent brand with an ecolabel vs. without one for high and low brand CSR levels. The experiment was conducted among 304 participants. Our results show that the ecolabel of the detergent can indeed trigger quality concerns. These quality concerns are reduced for brands high in CSR. This suggests that a brand's sustained commitment to sustainability is important in overcoming negative effects of sustainability claims on product quality.

Data is considered the new oil of the economy, but privacy concerns limit their use, leading to a widespread sense that data analytics and privacy are contradictory. Yet such a view is too narrow, because firms can implement a wide range of methods that satisfy different degrees of privacy and still enable them to leverage varied data analytics methods. Therefore, the current study specifies different functions related to data analytics and privacy (i.e., data collection, storage, verification, analytics, and dissemination of insights), compares how these functions might be performed at different levels (consumer, intermediary, and firm), outlines how well different analytics methods address consumer privacy, and draws several conclusions, along with future research directions.

Purpose This study aims to study to what extent the helpfulness votes others attach to a review affect a consumer’s perceived helpfulness of that review. In addition, the purpose of this study is to investigate whether this social influence moderates the relationships among several content presentation factors and perceived helpfulness. Design/methodology/approach A choice-based conjoint experiment was carried out in which 201 respondents evaluated different reviews and chose the review they perceive as most helpful. Findings Consumers perceive reviews as more (less) helpful in the presence of clearly valenced positive (negative) helpfulness votes. In addition, helpfulness votes of others diminish the positive impact of structure and the negative impact of spelling errors. Research limitations/implications The experimental setup may limit the external validity of the study. Practical implications Providing a helpfulness button gives firms an instrument to offer content that consumers perceive as more useful and to exert some influence on the effects of content presentation factors on the review’s helpfulness. Social implications Consumers tend to follow other consumers’ opinions without forming their own opinion. Firms could misuse this tendency by hiring people to vote on reviews that are not necessarily helpful for consumers, but are helpful for the firm. Originality/value This study is the first to assess the extent to which social influence affects consumers’ evaluation of reviews. Given that consumers use helpfulness votes to distinguish reviews, it is important to understand to what extent these votes reflect the actual helpfulness of the information in the review and to what extent they reflect previous helpfulness votes.