Building on prior work (MacInnis and de Mello (2005) 'The concept of hope and its relevance to product evaluation and choice'. <italic>Journal of Marketing</italic> <bold>69</bold>(January), 1–14; de Mello and MacInnis (2005) 'Why and how consumers hope: Motivated reasoning and the marketplace'. <italic>Inside Consumption: Consumer...</italic>

Employers have moved away from traditional defined benefit pension plans to defined contribution plans such as 401(k)s. As a result, many individuals are now required to make their own retirement saving and investment decisions, which has raised concerns about their ability and desire to handle...

Critics within the consumer behavior field have consistently debated three fundamental issues about the field's defining properties and goals: (1) whether consumer behavior should be an independent discipline, (2) what is (and is not) consumer behavior, and (3) whether our field should be...

Three studies find that when individuals become less confident that what they yearn for is possible (i.e., when hope is threatened) they engage in motivated reasoning related to products that purport to enable goal attainment. Specifically, they (a) selectively search for information from a...

We introduce the concept of affective misforecasting (AMF) and study its impact on product evaluations. Study 1 examines whether and when AMF affects evaluations, finding that AMF has an impact on evaluations when the affective experience is worse (but not when better) than forecasted. Study 2...

While reasonably comprehensive in nature, Cohen and Reed's integrative attitude model may benefit from an articulation of the boundaries of the attitude construct. As evidence, the present comment focuses on the extent to which attitudes can or should account for hot affect-based brand...

When faced with sequential information, consumers tend to fall prey to one of two well-known heuristics: the hot (or cold) hand and the gambler's fallacy. The authors relate these two traditionally separate heuristics to differences in accepting (buy) versus rejecting (sell) decisions. They...

This review examines four key issues involved in developing and establishing strong brand relationships with its customers. The first concerns the meaning of "brand attachment" and its critical consequences for brand equity. The second concerns outcomes of brand attachment to customers and the...