Companies increasingly complain about a new band of “mysterious” consumers whose behavior is challenging the very foundation of modern consumer economies: materialistic aspirations. There is less interest in “things”. Designer labels are not the turn‐on like they were a few years ago....

There is significant documentation of fraud and abuses of consumer privacy through telemarketing activities. This led to a proliferation of legislative efforts to protect consumer privacy rights in the USA. Two such federal laws, the Health Plan Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 and the...

Invasion of privacy is a serious, and sometimes frightening, concept for many people. It can evoke images of big brother, in the form of big business, knowing your most intimate secrets and even selling those secrets to others. Laws to guard against these personal violations have been slow in...

This study compares the mall shopping behavior of Chinese and US consumers. Marked differences wee found between the two populations in their shopping motives, criteria for selecting the mall, and shopping behaviors. Unlike US shoppers, who visited the mall with diverse reasons, Chinese mall...

Because consumers can vary greatly in their value composition, they may seek a range of different benefits from products and brands and hence will react differently to marketing communications emphasizing selected brand benefits. The present study adapts a scale for measuring benefits that drive...

With growing competition and the increasing complexity of commercial information, interpersonal communication continues to be important to marketers. Market mavens, those consumers with general product knowledge that act as disseminators of product information, play a central role in influencing...

We live in an aging society, thus, it is important for businesses to develop a solid understanding of the older consumer. The food and grocery store industry is no exception since mature consumers spend more money on the average at food stores than their younger aged counterparts. Because there...

In 2002, Story et al . proposed an ecological model for understanding the individual and environmental factors that influence young consumers’ eating behaviors. The theoretical framework suggests that eating behavior is a function of four levels of influence: individual, interpersonal,...

A survey was conducted in a large US metropolitan area of the West. The objective of the study was to determine if loyalty cards issued by supermarkets are actually associated with customer loyalty and how loyalty cards compare with other factors that retailers could use to enhance supermarket...

As an exploratory study on rural and urban consumers in an emerging market like China, this paper presents empirical evidence about the impacts of economic development on consumer lifestyles. Chinese rural and urban consumers were found to be statistically different in terms of their attitudes...