Though the marketplace features products styled at varying levels of formalness, little is known about situations or factors that marketers can leverage to promote their formal (vs. casual) product offerings. This research suggests that fresh start reminders, such as calendar landmarks (e.g., a new year) or messages that remind consumers to start afresh, can increase consumer preferences for formalness in product styles. Employing various fresh start reminders readily available in consumer lives and incorporating field investigation and text analysis techniques, ten studies (including five supplementary studies) show that reminding consumers about fresh starts increases their preferences for formal (vs. casual) styles in clothing, social activities, and lifestyles. The observed effect is driven by consumers' meaning-seeking motives evoked by fresh start reminders. This research provides marketers with novel perspectives on developing effective strategies to promote formal products and services.

Experiencing art, whether by visiting museums, attending live performances, or listening to music, constitutes a considerable part of consumers' daily activities. However, little is known about what situational factors can influence consumer preferences for art offerings. This study identifies a ubiquitous social activity in people's mundane lives-gossiping-that can systematically shape consumers' art preferences. Seven studies (three supplementary) demonstrate that gossiping can ironically increase consumer preferences for high-art (e.g., opera, classical music) over popular-art (e.g., musical, pop music) offerings. This effect is supported by a within-article meta-analysis and a long-term field data analysis. The authors also demonstrate that this effect occurs because gossiping induces a sense of tackiness in consumers, which subsequently drives compensatory preferences for more tasteful options. Moreover, the influence of gossip on high-art preferences is mitigated for individuals who do not value aesthetics. Practically, this study provides marketers with novel insights into developing effective communication strategies for the marketing of art offerings.

Repeat consumption, a common aspect of consumers' daily lives, often results in hedonic adaptation such as satiation or boredom. In line with a growing body of research exploring methods to alleviate hedonic adaptation, this research proposes and finds that creative thinking can effectively reduce hedonic adaptation. Through five experiments conducted across various consumption contexts (music listening, video watching, photograph viewing, snack eating), we show that creative thinking reduces hedonic adaptation by fostering cognitive flexibility during repeat consumption (e.g., enjoying the same photograph from different aspects across repetitions). Supporting this underlying mechanism, the mitigating effect of creative thinking on hedonic adaptation attenuates when consumers' cognitive flexibility is constrained, or when the product itself possesses sufficient complexity that naturally encourages cognitive flexibility over repetitions. Overall, this research sheds light on how creative thinking helps alleviate hedonic adaptation in repeat consumption, with implications for marketing managers and practitioners.

Next article FreeThe Pandemic Transformed EconomyReflection, Resilience, Rebound: Consumer Coping with the PandemicXiaoyan Deng, Xiaojing Yang, Yuwei Jiang, and Selin A. MalkocXiaoyan Deng Search for more articles by this author , Xiaojing Yang Search for more articles by this author , Yuwei Jiang Search for more articles by this author , and Selin A. Malkoc Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreThe story which we think is over is only a chapter in a story which will not be over.—Robert Penn WarrenOn March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Three years later, after 675 million cases and more than 6.76 million deaths (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/), the coronavirus, unfortunately, remains omnipresent, with its new variants posing new threats to public health. Health experts believe that the coronavirus will no longer be novel, to our immune systems or to our society, and that we are likely to live with it for many years to come (Greshko 2021; Associated Press 2022).The Journal of the Association for Consumer Research (JACR) has published two issues that examined COVID-19: January 2021 (vol. 6, no. 1) supplemental issue and January 2022 (vol. 7, no. 1). In the first of these issues, Goldsmith and Lee (2021) discussed the consumer behavior insights that resulted from a once-in-a-lifetime societal disruption. A year later, their editorial (Lee and Goldsmith 2022) looked back and forward on how the pandemic, which was still a force in our lives, continued to influence and shape consumer behavior. As the world enters year 4 of a crisis that has affected so many lives and livelihoods, we again focus on this historic pandemic and reflect on how we learned to live with it and how it transformed many aspects of the economy while highlighting the extraordinary resilience demonstrated in the process.Resilience refers to positive adaptation in significant adversity or risk (Masten and Reed 2002). It has two preconditions: the presence of an extenuating circumstance and the ability to adapt and recover (Masten and Reed 2002), both of which are present in how the consumers and firms reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the last three years, consumers adapted to living with unprecedented uncertainty, social isolation, and financial insecurity. Similarly, companies showed resilience by continuing to deliver products and services to their customers and thriving when they could take advantage of unique opportunities. Thus, the concept of resilience provides an appropriate framework to understand how the pandemic transformed consumers and the marketplace.In the following pages, we first offer a comprehensive review of COVID-19 articles published in marketing journals through the resilience lens, using the capital-based approach (Mayunga 2007) as a framework. We then introduce the nine articles in this special issue to provide a perspective on how consumers accumulate social, human, and economic capital (Kendra, Clay, and Gill 2018) to survive and thrive during the pandemic. We conclude by discussing several clusters of topics we hope future research can shed light on.A Review of COVID-19 Articles: A Resilience LensResilience in response to emergencies, like disasters and crises, has garnered considerable attention from scholars across social science disciplines, including anthropology (Barrios 2016), sociology (Rodríguez, Donner, and Trainor 2018), and psychology (Fletcher and Sarkar 2013). After reviewing decades of research on individual, organizational, and community resilience, Kendra et al. (2018) proffered a framework identifying the key elements needed to build resilience, that is, the conditions under which we expect resilience to prevail. Specifically, among the nine resilience elements summarized by Kendra et al. (2018), six are pertinent to the marketing context: economic capital (economic and financial resources), human capital (personal adaptations and adjustment), improvisation (changes adjusting to ever-changing environments and situations), institutional capital (coordination and cooperation among institutions and organizations), political capital (political leadership and participation), and social capital (social support and social participation). We adopt this framework first to review and organize COVID-19 articles published during the pandemic and then to introduce the articles in this special issue.To compile a list of published COVID-19 articles, we first identified the relevant journals using the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), a publicly available ranking based on the Scopus database (https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php). We specified the general subject area to be “Business, Management, and Accounting” and the subject subcategory to be “Marketing” while limiting the journals to those that appear in Web of Sciences (WoS) Core Collection and are published in North America. This resulted in a list of 44 journals. Next, we generated a list of 272 articles whose titles or keywords contained “Covid” or “pandemic” and were published between 2020 and 2022.We started by descriptively categorizing these articles based on substantive areas (see fig. 1). The literature has covered a wide range of topics related to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, ranging from more consumer-oriented areas such as transformative consumer behavior, marketing communications, and purchase patterns, to more strategy-focused topics such as innovations and technology, small and medium enterprises, and supply chain management, and more industry-specific topics such as tourism and education. These widespread research topics confirm that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on consumers, businesses, and society is far-reaching and multidimensional.Figure 1. Literature based on substantive areas.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointWe then grouped these articles based on the research methodology and geographic origin (see fig. 2). About 72% of the COVID-19 research published in marketing journals used empirical methods. Given that most of the early work was descriptive, survey research was the most popular method among these empirical articles. The remaining empirical articles divide roughly equally among experiments, secondary data, case studies, and qualitative techniques—reflecting the diversity of research expertise. Not surprisingly, some Covid research was also nonempirical (conceptual or commentary), as researchers tried to explain and predict the observed behavior given existing theories. An examination of the geographic origin of the published work also showed quite a bit of diversity, attesting to the fact that the impact of Covid is worldwide. Nonetheless, most of the empirical research was conducted in North America, followed by Asia and Europe, though researchers in other continents also contributed substantially.Figure 2. A, research methodology; B, geographic origin.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointWe also examined the vantage points adopted by each article. As seen in figure 3, a considerable proportion of the marketing articles focus on firms, discussing how organizations and businesses get acclimated to the pandemic through various resilience strategies. Research on consumer psychology and decision-making garnered about a third of the attention, with research intending to inform policy makers not being far behind.Figure 3. Literature based on vantage point.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointFinally, we have categorized and organized these 272 articles using the resilience framework based on the six types of capital most relevant to marketing (see fig. 4). Validating the use of the resilience framework, all six types of capital have garnered attention from researchers. Chief among them was improvisation capital, documenting how the firms had to improvise to overcome the disruptions in daily operations and the global supply chain.Figure 4. Literature based on resilience type.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointBeyond the ability to improvise, human and institutional capital received the most attention. Human capital refers to the various personal coping strategies—like access to resources (e.g., training, expert knowledge) and psychological adaptation (e.g., temperaments, optimism; Abramson et al. 2015; Kendra, Clay, and Gill 2018)—people use to overcome the obstacles caused by disasters. In line with the many changes the pandemic imposed on how people live, work, and shop, these articles examined a wide range of topics, documenting how consumers adapted to and coped with the pandemic and its aftermath.Institutional capital, in contrast, is about the more top-down efforts by the government and administrative bodies in responding to the emergency (e.g., infrastructure, emergency plans, and backup responses; Bruneau et al. 2003; Kendra, Clay, and Gill 2018). This stream of literature has generated scholarly work that examines the different roles local and federal governments and other institutions (e.g., nonprofit organizations) played in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and how they can continue to work together in synergy. Our examination revealed that the role of social, economic, and political capital during the pandemic received significantly less attention.In conclusion, in a relatively short period, marketing researchers worldwide have generated an impressive body of research related to the COVID-19 pandemic. They covered a wide array of sustentative areas, used different quantitative and qualitative methods, and employed various vantage points. Of particular relevance, the resilience framework provided a particularly fitting lens for us to contemplate the multidimensional impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on consumers, businesses, and society.The Special IssueThis special issue has curated nine articles that examine how the marketplace has adapted to the new normal that followed the turbulent years of the COVID-19 pandemic (Table 1). Despite using a variety of methodologies (conceptual, experimental, survey, secondary data), all articles take the consumer’s vantage point. Keeping up with the theme of resilience and the types of capital that enable it, we introduce these articles based on the capital type they represent. The most relevant types of capital consumers utilize to adapt and persevere are social, human, and economic. Not surprisingly, the articles in this issue fall under one of these three categories.Table 1. Overview of Articles in This Special IssueForms of capitalTitle, author(s), type of research, data sourceSocialArticle 1: Synchronized Scheduling: Choosing to Experience Different Events in Different Places at the Same Time as Others(Franklin Shaddy, Yanping Tu, and Ayelet Fishbach)• Empirical/experimental• Eight experiments (six preregistered)• Student and MTurk samples (data available at https://osf.io/r6dmv/?view_only=3c16d22635e94275a05c90c19194f7d3)Article 2: Friends Interrupted: How Reunions after Social Separation Motivate Physically Transformative Consumer Behavior(Carter Morgan, Cait Lamberton, Rebecca Walker Reczek, and Claudia Townsend)• Empirical/experimental• Three experiments (one preregistered)• MTurk samples (data available at https://osf.io/y8hk4/?view_only=c8c34e76fafb4cab976963d91eea5693)Article 3: Choosing Backgrounds for Success: The Role of Videoconference Backgrounds in Self-Presentation(Feyzan Karabulut, Sarah G. Moore, and Paul R. Messinger)• Empirical/experimental• Four experiments (including a Facebook ad field study)• Prolific samplesHumanArticle 4: Consumer Pandemic Coping: A Stage Model of COVID-19 Response(Jean Zhang and On Amir)• Empirical/descriptive analyses of field data from Fiverr.com, one of the largest online freelance marketplaces for digital servicesArticle 5: Covid Time: How Quarantine Affects Feelings of Elapsed Time(Minju Han, Guy Voichek, and Gal Zauberman)• Empirical/large-scale survey• Prolific samples (data available at https://tinyurl.com/2p9xh45c)Article 6: The Pursuit of the Solitary(Mark J. Kay, Sophie A. Kay, Fiona Cheetham, and Haiyan Hu)• ConceptualHuman and economicArticle 7: Inequality, Stress, and Obesity: Socioeconomic Disparities in the Short- and Long- Term Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic(Maria Langlois and Pierre Chandon)• Empirical/cross-lagged multiwave survey• Prolific samples (data available at https://tinyurl.com/2p9xh45c)Economic and socialArticle 8: Ending Hunger: How COVID-19 Revealed a Path to Food Access for All(Melissa G. Bublitz, Katherine M. Du, Jonathan Hansen, Elizabeth G. Miller, and Laura A. Peracchio)• ConceptualHuman, economic, and socialArticle 9: Exploring Consumer Responses to COVID-19: Meaning Making, Cohort Effects, and Consumer Rebound(Martin Mende, Dhruv Grewal, Abhijit Guha, Kusum Ailawadi, Anne Roggeveen, Maura L. Scott, Aric Rindfleisch, Koen Pauwels, and Barbara Kahn)• Conceptual and empirical/interview• 21 interviews conducted with executives across industriesView Table ImageSocial CapitalSocial capital has been operationalized as received or perceived social support, including but not limited to social embeddedness (informal ties), citizen participation, sense of community, and attachment to place (Norris et al. 2008). The COVID-19 pandemic has been particularly disrupting consumers’ social capital, as interventions devised to curb the spread of the virus have cut many people from their social support systems. The first set of articles in this special issue examines how consumers found novel ways to accumulate social capital, how they reintegrated into old social networks, and how the technologies used during the pandemic to generate social capital have introduced new concerns that transcend the pandemic.The first article, by Shaddy, Tu, and Fishbach (titled “Synchronized Scheduling: Choosing to Experience Different Events in Different Places at the Same Time as Others”), examines how consumers managed to stay psychologically connected even when they were physically disconnected. Indeed, many consumers—unable to share physical space—found ways to share “temporal space” by choosing to experience an event in different places but simultaneously as others. For instance, in the summer of 2020, many running events switched to a “virtual” format: athletes ran alone in different locations but started simultaneously, on the same day, to feel they were part of a larger group. Eight experiments in this article demonstrate that this preference for synchronized scheduling persists, even when there are costs to do so, because synchronized scheduling acts as “social glue,” increasing feelings of not only person-to-person social connection but also solidarity, trust, and cohesion within the group. As a result, it counteracts experienced and anticipated physical disconnection.Examining not how consumers coped with separation but how they integrated back into their social networks, Morgan, Lamberton, Reczek, and Townsend (“Friends Interrupted: How Reunions after Social Separation Motivate Physically Transformative Consumer Behavior”) find that when faced with large-scale social separation, consumers treat the in-person reconnection as a “fresh start” to refresh the impressions that others hold of them. As a result, the likelihood of engaging in physically visible transformative (but not nonvisible or nontransformative) consumption activities leading up to the in-person reconnection increases. Three studies reported in this article demonstrate that as the social separation duration increases, so does the tendency to construe the in-person reconnection as a fresh start and, eventually, the likelihood of engaging in physically transformative behaviors.Finally, Karabulut, Moore, and Messinger (“Choosing Backgrounds for Success: The Role of Videoconference Backgrounds in Self-Presentation”) study videoconferencing, which increased exponentially during the COVID-19 pandemic but remained a staple of our lives even after the social isolation ended. First introduced by Zoom during the pandemic, the ability to choose onscreen backgrounds and contexts allows us to customize our physical surroundings to manage our self-presentation. Focusing on the interaction between consumers and employees, three controlled lab experiments reported in this article identify an asymmetry in how much each group attempts to communicate warmth versus competence using their backgrounds. While employees try to convey competence by not choosing backgrounds that convey information about their personality and preferences (e.g., hobbies, tastes), customers prefer to interact with employees who use backgrounds that reveal personal information because they convey warmth.Taken together, these three articles provide insights into how consumers utilized social capital to persevere through the pandemic and how the pandemic transformed how consumers connect, communicate, and present themselves.Human CapitalAt an individual level, human capital has been operationalized as one’s temperament, optimism, self-efficacy, coping, and psychobiological adjustment (Abramson et al. 2015). The second set of articles in this special issue focuses on examining how consumers accumulate human capital in coping with the pandemic as well as pandemic-induced aloneness and loneliness.Utilizing secondary marketplace data from Fiverr.com, Zhang and Amir (“Consumer Pandemic Coping: A Stage Model of COVID-19 Response”) present a consumer pandemic coping model derived from a synthesis of existing stage theories of psychological coping and adaptation. Their coping model consists of four stages: denial, distress, readjustment, and normality, which are collaborated by the descriptive analysis of different measures (e.g., traffic, sentiment, adoption, transaction patterns) derived from the marketplace data. Their findings offer insights about consumer coping to companies and policy makers who aim to be more prepared in the face of future crises.Exploiting the natural variation imposed by lockdowns, Han, Voichek, and Zauberman (“Covid Time: How Quarantine Affects Feelings of Elapsed Time”) examine how the unique circumstances brought on by the pandemic altered perceptions of elapsed time (subjective distance from a past event), a judgment that is highly relevant to consumers’ decisions, adaptation, and coping. Their survey of over 1,500 Americans conducted in June 2020 demonstrates that perceptions of elapsed time were systematically altered by being in a state of quarantine. Whether people quarantined alone and the extent to which they maintained a temporal structure affected feelings of elapsed time while consumers were in quarantine. However, once consumers left the quarantine, feelings of elapsed time depended on how much of the time following an event was spent in quarantine rather than on how they spent their time in it. These findings highlight how the pandemic has become a marker, which we use to divide the time as before and as after it, and ultimately influence how we judge, evaluate, and remember the events of the past.Based on their observations of how some consumers suffered and others thrived during the solitary time that was imposed by the pandemic, Kay, Kay, Cheetham, and Hu (“The Pursuit of the Solitary”) propose a dual-path model where the personal agency determines whether being alone is construed as loneliness or solitude. In this conceptual piece, the authors also introduce the notion of disciplined practice—the consistent, repetitive, and regular exertion of attention to foster states of solitude—and discuss how the pandemic allowed consumers to form new habits that will likely transcend the pandemic and can help improve self-regulation and support self-development and self-renewal.Taken together, these articles highlight how human capital—our mental and psychological resources—has allowed consumers to persevere. But, maybe more importantly, they also demonstrate how the pandemic transformed, possibly forever, how we experience time and solitude.Interactions of the Economic Capital with Human and Social CapitalEconomic capital can be measured through household income, savings, access to credit or loans, property value, employment, and investments (Abramson et al. 2015; Mayunga 2007). The third set of articles in this special issue looks at how economic capital interacts with human or social capital to affect consumers’ access to healthy and nutritious food and changes in their food consumption patterns during the pandemic.Honing in the patterns of food consumption, Langlois and Chandon (“Inequality, Stress, and Obesity: Socioeconomic Disparities in the Short- and Long-Term Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic”) suggest that economic capital and human capital jointly influenced food consumption during the pandemic. A longitudinal study of a large sample of Americans found that people with a low socioeconomic status (SES) gained more weight during the COVID-19 pandemic, further exacerbating their vulnerability to the coronavirus. The association between weight gain and SES, an economic capital factor, was mediated by stress, a human capital factor. A follow-up study revealed that the early effects of the pandemic on weight and behavioral changes persisted 20 months later. These findings demonstrate how the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated health inequalities and provide insights for market-based and government solutions.Bublitz, Du, Hansen, Miller, and Peracchio (“Ending Hunger: How COVID-19 Revealed a Path to Food Access for All”) further examine how economic and social capital jointly influenced access to healthy and nutritious food during the pandemic. In this conceptual piece, the authors discuss how two systems—federally funded public nutrition programs and a network of nonprofit organizations—jointly averted a hunger crisis that would affect those who lacked economic and social capital. Their detailed discussion of the pandemic-induced policy innovations critically highlights the need to continue these policies to provide healthy and affordable food access for all after the pandemic.This special issue concludes with an article by Mende, Grewal, Guha, Ailawadi, Roggeveen, Scott, Rindfleisch, Pauwels, and Kahn (“Exploring Consumer Responses to COVID-19: Meaning Making, Cohort Effects, and Consumer Rebound”) that discusses how the variation in consumers’ human, economic, and social capital led to considerable heterogeneity in how consumers responded to the pandemic. The authors explicate and delineate the pandemic through the lens of meaning-making, proposing four distinct ways consumers coped with and responded to the meaning violation COVID-19 posed. The authors also report the summary of 21 interviews conducted with executives across industries, allowing them to identify which crisis-related changes are likely to persist post-crisis. The results help enhance the ecological validity of the theoretical framework and offer important insights for marketers as they navigate the marketplace transformed by the pandemic.These articles uniquely examine how human, social, and economic factors jointly influenced how consumers responded to the pandemic. Maybe more importantly, they inform policy makers and industry leaders as they navigate the new normal brought on by three years of dealing with the pandemic.Future Research DirectionsWhile the articles in this special issue shed light on important ways the COVID-19 pandemic changed the marketplace, we need to understand the extent of its longer term impacts. We thus encourage consumer researchers to continue important work in this area to generate new insights to help consumers, firms, and policy makers better cope with this historic crisis’s aftermath. Continuing with the theme of resilience and the types of capital that enable it, we call for research examining how the variation in consumers’ human, economic, and social capital led to considerable heterogeneity in their responses to the pandemic, how the pandemic changed how they accumulate human, economic, and social capital, and how these changes produce long-term impacts on their psychology and behavior. We specifically raise some topics below that we deem important but have not been addressed in this special issue.Social CapitalThe first set of articles in this special issue shows how consumers seized opportunities to strengthen social ties and increase social embeddedness through consumption activities during the pandemic. Future research should examine if the pandemic has long-term impacts on how consumers accumulate social capital. For example, consumers’ sheltering-in-place lifestyles during the pandemic might have reduced the size of their circle of friends and socialization. Will they maintain a smaller and more intimate social circle even after the pandemic? The lockdowns, quarantines, and virus spread have forced consumers to cut back on travel during the past several years. Will they now deem flying to meet people, for personal or business reasons, less necessary, as opposed to using online platforms such as FaceTime and Zoom?Future research should also investigate social-psychological dimensions of social capital, such as a sense of community and place attachment. For example, during the pandemic, many consumers shifted to shopping in neighborhood stores and buying more locally sourced products out of appreciation for frontline workers in the local community. Will they continue this local patronage to support their local community in the longer term?Human CapitalThe second set of articles in this special issue explores how consumers psychologically adjust to the new experiences they gained during the pandemic. Future research should examine whether pandemic-induced experiences have long-term psychological and behavioral impacts on consumers. For example, having experienced inventory disruptions over the pandemic, will consumers develop a “stock up” mentality and adopt the practice of pantry loading post-pandemic?The COVID-19 pandemic and its disruptions have caused a wave of stress and worry unseen in recent years. Since pleasurable experiences can serve as a buffer against stress, will consumers increase their spending on hedonic (vs. utilitarian) consumption, even after the pandemic-induced stressors disappear? As liquor and marijuana stores were deemed essential businesses during the pandemic, will consumers develop a more hedonistic approach toward their consumption post-pandemic?During the pandemic, there was an uptick in pet ownership. Research should examine the effectiveness of pet ownership in helping people cope with loneliness and improve their psychological well-being. The pandemic and its aftermath have prompted many people to pause and ponder what’s most important to them. Will their consumption patterns reflect their redefinition of purposes? For example, will people adopt a less (or more) materialistic lifestyle?Economic CapitalThe third set of articles in this special issue reveals that economic capital was strongly associated with consumers’ ability to access healthy and nutritious food and their food consumption patterns during the pandemic. More generally, it engendered considerable heterogeneity in people’s responses to the pandemic. Future research should examine how the pandemic causes changes in people’s economic capital and how these changes shape their psychology and behavior post-pandemic. For example, in the first two years of the pandemic, historic levels of government financial support (e.g., stimulus checks) boosted household income while household spending, especially on leisure, hospitality, and recreation services, was severely curtailed by lockdowns and social distancing. This has led to a soaring personal saving rate. Over the same period, household wealth has also increased due to gains in equity and home prices. Will this increase in consumer disposable income change how they make current and future financial decisions?On the other hand, at the beginning of the pandemic, concerns about an economic downturn drove many consumers to prioritize low-price options, private labels, and essentials rather than discretionary. Many families indeed experienced financial distress due to unemployment and income loss. Future research should examine how facing financial problems shapes consumers’ consumption habits and how financial hardship influences consumers’ long-term psychological well-being.We also call for research that documents the differential recovery and resilience paths of the groups of consumers who were particularly hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. With the high inflation rate, how will the financially disadvantaged consumers cope? How will they prioritize their lives? What kind of community and government resources and support should be put in place for those in the more marginalized groups of society? Which group of consumers will likely sustain a long-term negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic?ReferencesAbramson, David M., et al. 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Giurge, London School of Economics and Political ScienceAyelet Gneezy, University of California, San DiegoJoseph Goodman, Ohio State UniversityAbhijit Guha, University of South CarolinaYanliu Huang, Drexel UniversityJianna Jin, Ohio State UniversityGita Johar, Columbia UniversityMansur Khamitov, Indiana UniversityTina M. Lowrey, HEC ParisAndrea Luangrath, University of IowaSam Maglio, University of TorontoHuifang Mao, Iowa State UniversityBrent McFerran, Simon Fraser UniversityTravis Tae Oh, Yeshiva UniversityLinda Price, University of WyomingMarisa Sharif, University of PennsylvaniaSharon Shavitt, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignRosanna Smith, University of GeorgiaLei Su, Hong Kong Baptist UniversityGabriela Tonietto, Rutgers UniversityRemi Trudel, Boston UniversityKathleen Vohs, University of MinnesotaQiyuan Wang, Hong Kong Polytechnic UniversityYajin Wang, China Europe International Business SchoolWenbo Wang, Hong Kong University of Science and TechnologyPatti Williams, University of PennsylvaniaRussell Winer, New York UniversityLinyun Yang, University of South CarolinaYanfen You, University of Massachusetts AmherstYinlong Zhang, University of Texas at San Antonio Next article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of the Association for Consumer Research Volume 8, Number 2April 2023The Pandemic Transformed EconomyGuest Editors: Xiaoyan Deng, Xiaojing Yang, Yuwei Jiang, and Selin Malkoc Sponsored by the Association for Consumer Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/724545 Views: 531Total views on this site HistoryPublished online March 07, 2023 © 2023 Association for Consumer Research. 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Despite the ubiquity of pets in consumers’ lives, scant research has examined how exposure to them (e.g., recalling past interactions with dogs and cats, viewing ads featuring a dog or a cat) influences consumer behavior. The authors demonstrate that exposure to dogs (cats) reminds consumers of the stereotypical temperaments and behaviors of the pet species, which activates a promotion- (prevention-) focused motivational mindset among consumers. Using secondary data, Study 1 shows that people in states with a higher percentage of dog (cat) owners Google more promotion- (prevention-) focused words and report a higher COVID-19 transmission rate. Using multiple products, Studies 2 and 3 demonstrate that these regulatory mindsets, when activated by pet exposure, carry over to influence downstream consumer judgments, purchase intentions, and behaviors, even in pet-unrelated consumption contexts. Study 4 shows that pet stereotypicality moderates the proposed effect such that the relationship between pet exposure and regulatory orientations persists to the extent consumers are reminded of the stereotypical temperaments and behaviors of the pet species. Studies 5–7 examine the role of regulatory fit and evince that exposure to dogs (cats) leads to more favorable responses toward advertising messages featuring promotion- (prevention-) focused appeals.

Many firms attempt to enhance experience consumption by facilitating the consumption outcome (i

Multifunctional products are ubiquitous in consumers' daily lives. However, scant research has examined whether and how the presence of multifunctional products systematically alters consumer behavior beyond product evaluations and adoption. Across four experiments and three supplementary studies, the authors identify a multifunction‐impatience effect. They show that after exposure to multifunctional (vs. single‐function) products, consumers are more likely to choose a smaller but sooner (vs. a larger but later) reward (Study 1), report more impatience when waiting for the web search results to load and perceive the loading time as longer (Study 2), and are willing to pay more for expedited shipping (Study 3). The authors further show that the effects occur because multifunctional products activate an efficiency goal among consumers, which renders them less patient (studies 2 and 3). In addition to the regular, “sequential” multifunctional products for which each of the functions has a specific usage situation, the proposed effect also applies to “simultaneous” multifunctional products whose functions operate simultaneously during consumption (Study 4). Taken together, this research broadens the scholarly understanding of the effects of multifunctional products from consumers' responses to these products to the unintended impact of such products on consumer impatience.

In their initial recovery efforts after a service failure, service providers need to decide what to communicate to consumers to restore their satisfaction. Prior work has primarily examined apology (saying “sorry”) as a symbolic recovery strategy; the current research suggests appreciation (saying “thank you”) as an alternative, often more effective strategy. Drawing from research on linguistic framing and self-view, the authors reason that the shift of focus in the service provider–consumer interaction, from emphasizing service providers’ fault and accountability (apology) to spotlighting consumers’ merits and contributions (appreciation), can increase consumers’ self-esteem and, in turn, postrecovery satisfaction. Across multiple service failure contexts, Studies 1a–1e establish the superiority of appreciation in redressing service failures. By measuring and manipulating self-esteem and examining the moderating role of narcissism and recovery timing, Studies 2–5 provide converging evidence for consumers’ state self-esteem as the underlying mechanism. Studies 6 and 7 go beyond examining appreciation in isolation and show that it is as effective as recovery messages that combine appreciation and apology (Study 6) and that its superiority over apology holds when service providers combine symbolic and utilitarian recovery (Study 7).

Prior research suggests that close friends and family members exert similar effects on consumer behavior because both represent strong social ties and are subject to communal norms. However, drawing on regulatory focus theory, we postulate that accessibility of friend and family can have divergent impacts on consumers' subsequent purchase decisions. Across four experiments, as well as a pilot study, we demonstrate that accessibility of friend (vs. family) is more likely to activate a promotion focus, which results in more favorable consumer responses toward products with promotion‐focused appeals, whereas accessibility of family (vs. friend) is more likely to activate a prevention focus, which leads to more positive consumer responses toward products with prevention‐focused appeals.

Drawing from research on prosocial behavior, aesthetics, and conceptual metaphor, we posit and find that simply exposing consumers to beauty-related words activates the concept of prosociality (study 1), improves their prosocial tendency in general (study 2), and lowers their evaluations and purchase intentions of products with corporate social responsibility issues (but has no effect on products without such issues) (study 3). Our research contributes to the existing literature by establishing the mental association between verbal beauty primes (activated by mere exposure to beauty-related words) and prosociality. Additionally, by identifying exposure to beauty-related words as a situational antecedent of prosocial tendency, we suggest that verbal beauty primes may be used as an effective strategy to enhance consumers' prosocial behavior. These findings have implications for both nonprofit and for-profit marketers.

Drawing from research on food consumption, conceptual metaphors, and assimilation and contrast, we examine how exposure to romantic stimuli (e.g., watching a romantic ad, reading a romantic note) affects consumers' subsequent consumption of sweets. Across five studies, we find that romantic stimuli exposure increases sweet food consumption among abstract thinkers but reduces sweet food intake among concrete thinkers. We also identify the moderating role of metaphor content on this finding such that the effects of romantic exposure on the consumption of sweets occur only when the metaphoric association between love and sweetness is highlighted but dissipate when a competing metaphor is accentuated.

Both ad creativity and ad repetition play a pivotal role in advertising strategy. It is therefore of practical and theoretical importance to understand how they interact with one another on advertising effectiveness. After reviewing existing theories, we predict three-way interactions among: divergence, relevance, and repetition over six important dependent variables. Using a 2×2×3 between-subjects experimental design, we find that the classic inverted U-Shape (repeatedly found in previous repetition research) is observed only for ads with low divergence and relevance. In contrast, creative ads (high divergence and relevance) wear in immediately and show little sign of wearing-out even over repeated exposures. Mixed levels of divergence and relevance produce immediate wear-in but do show wearing-out over repeated exposures. Implications for advertising management and media programming are discussed.

Building on regulatory focus research, we investigate how certain visual elements of an advertising message, such as stylistic properties, contribute to regulatory fit and persuasion. Across three experiments, we examine how the visual perspective (actor's vs. observer's) through which a product is depicted in an ad affects product evaluations among participants with different regulatory foci (promotion- vs. prevention-focused). Specifically, we find that when an actor's perspective is used in an ad to portray a product, regulatory fit occurs among promotion-focused (vs. prevention-focused) participants and they report more favorable product evaluations; conversely, when an observer's perspective is used, regulatory fit occurs among prevention-focused (vs. promotion-focused) participants and they evaluate the product more favorably. An analysis of internal vs. external evaluation thoughts helps explain the persuasion effects. (C) 2015 Society for Consumer Psychology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Drawing from research on food consumption and assimilation and contrast, we examine how exposure to romance stimuli (e.g., a romantic ad) affects consumer preference for sweet foods. Romantic exposure increases choices of sweet foods among romantically uninvolved consumers but results in more choices of less-sweet foods among romantically involved consumers.

Consumer perceptions of advertising creativity are investigated in a series of studies beginning with scale development and ending with comprehensive model testing. Results demonstrate that perceptions of ad creativity are determined by the interaction between divergence and relevance, and that overall creativity mediates their effects on consumer processing and response.