In light of consumers’ growing dependence on their smartphones, this article investigates the nature of the relationship that consumers form with their smartphone and its underlying mechanisms. We propose that in addition to obvious functional benefits, consumers in fact derive emotional...

This article presents new conceptual and managerial insights about consumer experiences of positive emotions in the marketplace and how to engineer these emotional experiences for business purposes. Specifically, we provide an in-depth conceptual analysis of three positive emotions that are of...

The relation between emotion and rationality is assessed by reviewing empirical findings from multiple disciplines. Two types of emotional phenomena are examined incidental emotional states and integral emotional responses and three conceptions of rationality are considered logical, material,...

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how regulatory focus theory, a theory of motivation and self-regulation, can be drawn upon to explain a variety of consumer decision making phenomena. We briefly review the major tenets of the theory, which proposes a fundamental distinction between two...

The contribution of the feelings-as-information hypothesis to our understanding of the role of affect in judgment and decision making is discussed. Basic principles and regularities in how affective feelings guide judgments and decisions are then identified. Based on these principles and...

Although consumer-behavior theory has traditionally regarded evaluations as instrumental to consumer choice, in reality consumers frequently evaluate what they like and dislike even when there is no decision at stake. Why are consumers so eager to evaluate things when there is no ostensible...

The assessment of consumer scholarship must move beyond a mere counting of the number of “A”s on a researcher’s CV to include at least some measure of impact. To facilitate a broader assessment of scholarship in consumer research, we provide detailed statistics on the productivity and...

Motivation research distinguishes two types of goals: (a) ideals, which relate to people’s hopes, wishes, and aspirations, and (b) oughts, which relate to people’s duties, obligations, and responsibilities. We propose that, in persuasion, the accessibility of ideals increases consumers’...

The experience of fun plays a major role in the consumer society. Drawing on a grounded theory approach, we advance a psychological theory of consumer fun. Through an integration of in-depth interviews, narrative analyses, controlled experiments, structural equation modeling, and a...

Effective communication requires that consumers attribute the message content to its intended source. The proposed framework distinguishes four types of source identification processes--cued retrieval, memory-trace refreshment, schematic inferencing, and pure guessing--and delineates their...