Prelims

Half Title Page

The Vulnerable Consumer

Series Title Page

Review of Marketing Research

Editor-in-Chief: Naresh K. Malhotra

Editorial Advisory Board

• Rick P. Bagozzi

• University of Michigan, USA

• Russell Belk

• York University, Canada

• Ruth Bolton

• Arizona State University, USA

• George Day

• University of Pennsylvania, USA

• Dhruv Grewal

• Babson College, USA

• Michael Houston

• University of Minnesota, USA

• Shelby Hunt

• Texas Tech University, USA

• Dawn Iacobucci

• Vanderbilt University, USA

• Barbara Kahn

• University of Pennsylvania, USA

• Wagner Kamakura

• Rice University, USA

• V. Kumar

• St. John's University, USA

• Angela Y. Lee

• Northwestern University, USA

• Donald Lehmann

• Columbia University, USA

• Debbie MacInnis

• University of Southern California, USA

• Kent B. Monroe

• University of Illinois, USA

• Nelson Ndubisi

• King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Saudi Arabia

• A. Parasuraman

• University of Miami, USA

• William Perreault

• University of North Carolina, USA

• Robert A. Peterson

• University of Texas, USA

• Jagmohan S. Raju

• University of Pennsylvania, USA

• Aric Rindfleisch

• University of Illinois, USA

• Jagdish N. Sheth

• Emory University, USA

• Itamar Simonson

• Stanford University, USA

• David Stewart

• Loyola Marymount University, USA

• Rajan Varadarajan

• Texas A&M University, USA

• Stephen L. Vargo

• University of Hawaii, USA

• Michel Wedel

• University of Maryland, USA

• Manjit Yadav

• Texas A&M University, USA

Title Page

Review of Marketing Research Volume 21

The Vulnerable Consumer:Beyond the Poor and the Elderly

Edited by

Angela Y. Lee

Northwestern University, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Emerald Publishing, Floor 5, Northspring, 21-23 Wellington Street, Leeds LS1 4DL

First edition 2024

Editorial Matter and Selection © 2024 Angela Y. Lee.

Individual chapters © 2024 The authors.

Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

Reprints and permissions service

Contact: www.copyright.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters' suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80262-956-9 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80262-955-2 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80262-957-6 (Epub)

ISSN: 1548-6435 (Series)

List of Figures and Tables

About the Editor-in-Chief

Dr Naresh K. Malhotra was selected as a Marketing Legend in 2010, and his refereed journal articles were published in nine volumes by Sage with tributes by other leading scholars in the field. He is listed in Marquis Who's Who in America, and in Who's Who in the World. In 2017, he received the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award from Marquis Who's Who. In 2020, Dr Malhotra was listed in the published list of the World's Top 2% Most-cited Researchers across all disciplines (22 major fields and 176 subfields), according to research conducted by the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford University. He is also listed in Research.com 2024 Ranking of Best Scientists in Business and Management, as well as Best Scholars. He has several top (number one) research rankings that have been published in the literature.

About the Editor

Angela Y. Lee is the Mechthild Esser Nemmers Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Dr Lee's expertise is in consumer learning, emotions, and motivation. Her research focuses on understanding what drives consumer attention, judgment, and choice. Dr Lee's publications appear in top marketing and psychology journals. She is the recipient of the 2006 Stanley Reiter Best Paper Award for her research on self-regulation and persuasion and the 2002 Otto Klineberg Award for best paper on international and intercultural relations. Dr Lee is a Fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, a Fellow of the American Psychological Society, and a Marketing Science Institute Academic Fellow. She is a Past President of the Association for Consumer Research and serves on the board of the Grant Park Music Festival and the Sheth Foundation.

About the Contributors

Rohini Ahluwalia is the Curtis L. Carlson Trust Professor of Marketing at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. She is an expert in the areas of persuasion, branding, and decision-making. Ahluwalia's research has been published in the top journals of the field, received the American Marketing Association's John A. Howard Dissertation Award, and reported in several media outlets including the National Public Radio and The New York Times. She has served on the Editorial Boards of top journals in the field, as well as the Associate Editor for the Journal of Consumer Research.

Tayler Bergstrom is a Behavioral Marketing PhD Student at UCLA Anderson School of Management. She studies how people think about their time and the implications this has on their behavior. Before UCLA, she studied Psychology and Business at the University of California, San Diego.

Ilana Brody is a PhD candidate at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. She studies the context and cues that shape judgment and decision-making, particularly as it relates to the process of giving and receiving aid. Prior to UCLA, Ilana worked as a social policy researcher and helped design, implement, and evaluate policies aimed at maximizing welfare in the United States.

Christopher Cannon is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Shidler College of Business, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He received his PhD in Marketing from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He broadly studies consumer behavior from a psychological perspective. For his primary research, he explores consumers' perception of social hierarchies and how resource scarcity affects decision-making.

Casey Carder-Rockwell is an Assistant Professor and a Graduate Coordinator at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Her research centers on exploitation and capitalization in areas with limited regulation.

Lucy Joy Chase is a Graduate Student at the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She received her BA in International Affairs from Elliott School for International Affairs at George Washington University, where she studied small business and personal development in low-income, international contexts. After over 15 years of experience practicing in the field of business management and administration, Lucy aspires to pursue further writing, teaching, and research opportunities, exploring the confluence of her interests in business, human development, and international development.

Nathan N. Cheek is an Assistant Professor of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University. He received his PhD in Psychology and Social Policy from Princeton University, where he also completed a postdoctoral fellowship. He studies prejudice, decision-making, and inequality with an eye to how behavioral science can inform and improve public policy.

David Crockett is a Professor of Marketing at the University of Illinois Chicago. His research explores sociological aspects of consumer behavior and marketing, particularly the consequences of social inequality along the lines of gender, race, and social class.

Lenita Davis is a Professor of Marketing and an Executive Director for Professional Sales and Sales Management Program at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire. Her research examines the outcomes that occur when individuals intersect with established institutions across various contexts.

Aimee Drolet is a Professor of Marketing at UCLA Anderson School of Management. Her research looks at the mental processes underlying consumers' choices, specifically focusing on decision-making among older consumers (age 50 or older), consumer habits, and meta-preferences. She coauthored and coedited The Aging Consumer: Perspectives from Psychology and Economics, and was named one of Choice Magazine's Top 10 Outstanding Academic Titles in Business, Management and Labor in 2011. Dr Drolet's latest research focuses on the development of habits and on consumption moderation.

Kelly Goldsmith is a Behavioral Scientist whose research examines consumers' psychological and behavioral responses to goals and threats. She is the E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Marketing at Vanderbilt University, where she is an award-winning teacher and researcher. She is the Chairman of the Marketing Department and the Faculty Director of the Ingram Scholars Program and the Hoogland Undergraduate Business Program, in addition to serving as an Area Editor at several top marketing journals.

E. Tory Higgins is the Stanley Schachter Professor of Psychology, Professor of Business, and the Director of the Motivation Science Center at Columbia University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received the Ambady Award for Mentoring Excellence (Society for Personality and Social Psychology) and the Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement (Association for Psychological Science). He has received the Donald T. Campbell Award for Outstanding Contributions to Social Psychology (Society of Personality and Social Psychology), the Distinguished Scientist Award (the Society of Experimental Social Psychology), the Anneliese Maier Research Award (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation), the award for Distinguished Contribution to Motivation Science (Society for the Science of Motivation), the William James Fellow Award for Distinguished Achievements in Psychological Science (Association for Psychological Science), and the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions.

Maria Jones is a Development Professional passionate about promoting women's economic empowerment. Her field research interests include gender equitable scaling of innovations, women's entrepreneurship, and improving rural women's livelihoods in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Maria holds an MBA and an MS in Environmental Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

Ronald Paul Hill, PhD, is the Dean's Professor of Marketing and Public Policy at the American University, Kogod School of Business. He has authored over 200 journal articles, books, chapters, and conference papers on topics that include impoverished consumer behavior, marketing ethics, corporate social responsibility, human development, and public policy using primarily qualitative methods. He served as the Vice President of Publications for the American Marketing Association, and he is Editor-in-Chief of the Responsible Research in Business and Management Honor Roll. He also was part of the founding of the Transformative Consumer Research Movement in ACR.

Emily Nakkawita is a PhD candidate at Columbia University interested in understanding the factors that lead to effective goal pursuit processes, with effectiveness defined in terms of both achievement and well-being. She studies the motivational underpinnings of different kinds of goal pursuit activities. In particular, she examines how the extent to which goal pursuit activities are accessible, enjoyable, and likely to be selected are affected by individual differences in the strength of fundamental motives for truth and control, combined with a focus on gains and nongains (promotion value) versus nonlosses and losses (prevention value). Prior to her graduate studies, Emily examined what motivates people through a career in brand marketing and advertising.

Ashley S. Otto is a Consumer Psychologist who specializes in the area of decision making and self-control. Her research has been published in various outlets within the domains of marketing and psychology, and her findings have been featured in media outlets from business magazines and news articles to edited academic volumes. She is currently an Associate Professor of Marketing at Baylor University.

Ryan Rahinel is an Associate Professor of Marketing, Judy and Hugh Oliphant Research Scholar at the Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon. Rahinel's research on brands and the physical world has been published in the top outlets in marketing and psychology. Previously, Ryan spent nine years at the University of Cincinnati. He received his PhD in Marketing from the University of Minnesota in 2014.

Girish Ramani, PhD, is a Sr. Professorial Lecturer of Marketing at the Kogod School of Business, American University, Washington DC. He has authored journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers in the areas of marketing strategy, digital marketing analytics, and marketing research.

Marsha L. Richins is a Professor of Marketing at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Her research deals with materialism, consumption values, and the role those values play in consumer decisions and debt. Her measure of material values has become the standard by which scholars measure consumer materialism.

Caroline Roux is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Concordia University's John Molson School of Business. She also held the Concordia University Research Chair on the Psychology of Resource Scarcity (2018–2023). Her primary area of research explores how reminders of resource scarcity – or thinking about “not having enough” resources (e.g., money, time, food, etc.) – impact consumer decision-making and behavior.

Eldar Shafir is Class of 1987 Professor of Behavioral Science and Public Policy, and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He is the Inaugural Director of Princeton's Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy, cofounder of ideas42, a not-for-profit social science R&D lab, past president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as a member of President Barack Obama's Advisory Council on Financial Capability. He received a BA in Cognitive Science from Brown University and a PhD from MIT.

Ali Tezer is an Associate Professor of Marketing at HEC Montreal. His research broadly explores conditions under which the well-being of consumers, brands, and society at large intersect. His primary area of research examines sustainable consumption with a focus on consumer interactions with sustainable products and consumer responses to socially responsible brand behavior.

Madhu Viswanathan is a Professor of Marketing at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, and Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research programs are on measurement and subsistence marketplaces. His authored books include – Measurement Error and Research Design, Subsistence Marketplaces, and Bottom-Up Enterprise. He pioneered the area of subsistence marketplaces, adopting a unique bottom-up approach to research, education with content reaching educators worldwide, and social enterprise through marketplace literacy globally.

Introduction