Contagious effects of customer misbehavior in access-based services

Customer misbehavior in service settings is problematic for two reasons: (1) because of the direct damage it causes and (2) because of additional negative effects that arise from the contagion of such misbehavior. The authors extend existing theory of customer misbehavior by studying its contagious effect. The investigation focuses on access-based services, defined as transactions in which multiple consumers successively gain temporal, short-term access to a good, while legal ownership remains with the service provider (e.g., car sharing and fashion rentals). Due to the nature of these services, they are especially prone to indirect customer misbehavior, which is directed at the accessed product and occurs in the absence of others. Two online experiments provide the first empirical evidence for a contagiousness of misbehavior and reveal that this effect is driven by customers’ perceptions of the social norms among the customer group. Moreover, they indicate that greater strength of the accessed product’s brand as well as lower anonymity of the accessed product’s owner attenuate contagion. A field experiment shows that an increase in the communal identification among access-based service customers reverses the contagious effect, with customers more likely to remove signs of previous users’ misbehavior. The results suggest that access-based service providers should address customer misbehavior by (a) investing in the products they offer access to, (b) establishing more personal relationships with customers, and, foremost, (c) increasing communal identification among customers

Let Us Eat and Drink, for Tomorrow We Shall Die: Effects of Morality Salience and Self-Esteem on Self-Regulation in Consumer Choice,”

We examine how making mortality salient affects consumer choices. We develop a new theoretical framework predicting when consumer behaviors will be more (less) indulgent when mortality is salient, arguing that individuals focus more of their limited self-regulatory resources on domains that are important sources of self-esteem and less on domains that are not important sources. In two domains, food choice and charitable donations/socially conscious consumer behaviors, high mortality salience led to less indulgent choices among participants for whom that domain was an important source of esteem and more indulgent choices for participants for whom the domain was not an important esteem source

Let Us Eat and Drink, for Tomorrow We Shall Die: Effects of Mortality Salience and Self-Esteem on Self-Regulation in Consumer Choice

We examine how making mortality salient affects consumer choices. We develop a new theoretical framework predicting when consumer behaviors will be more (less) indulgent when mortality is salient, arguing that individuals focus more of their limited self-regulatory resources on domains that are important sources of self-esteem and less on domains that are not important sources. In two domains, food choice and charitable donations/socially conscious consumer behaviors, high mortality salience led to less indulgent choices among participants for whom that domain was an important source of esteem and more indulgent choices for participants for whom the domain was not an important esteem source. (c) 2005 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

The impact of facial emotional expression on the effectiveness of charitable advertisements: the role of sympathy and manipulative intent

In charitable advertisements, organizations often display the image of a person in need with different facial emotional expressions. Prior research showed the positive effect of using a sad- (vs. happy- or neutral-) faced image in evoking sympathy from viewers. Across five studies (N = 2141), we demonstrate that a sad-faced image evokes not only sympathy but also an inference about the organization's manipulative intent. Moreover, we show that inference of manipulative intent and sympathy simultaneously mediate the effects of facial expression on donation and on attitude toward the advertising campaign, but in opposing directions. While greater sympathy leads to larger donation, greater inference of manipulative intent lowers donation, together contributing to a null effect of facial expression on donation. In contrast, using a sad-faced image reduces attitude toward the advertising campaign because the mediating effect of inference of manipulative intent tends to be larger than the mediating effect of sympathy in absolute size. The negative effect of a sad-faced image on attitude toward the advertising campaign is attenuated when the prominence of the image is low (vs. high). Finally, we show that these effects also emerge in the cause-related marketing advertising context

The Power of Strangers: The Effect of Incidental Consumer Brand Encounters on Brand Choice

In the course of daily encounters with other consumers, an individual may be incidentally exposed to various brands. We refer to these situations as incidental consumer brand encounters (ICBEs). This research examines how ICBEs influence brand choice. Four studies provide evidence that repeated exposure to simulated ICBEs increases choice of the focal brand for people not aware of the brand exposure, that perceptual fluency underlies these effects, and that these effects are moderated by perceivers' automatic responses to the type of user observed with the brand. (c) 2008 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Of Chameleons and Consumption: The Impact of Mimicry on Choice and Preferences

This article investigates the effect of mimicry on consumer product consumption and appraisal. We propose and test two paths via which mimicry may influence product preferences. In the mimicking consumer path, we suggest that individuals automatically mimic the consumption behaviors of other people and that such mimicry then affects preferences toward the product(s) consumed. In the mimicked consumer path, we argue that being mimicked leads to increased prosociality, which affects preferences for products presented in dyadic interactions. Three studies confirm the two paths and suggest that mimicry can indeed influence product preferences. (c) 2007 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..