Cara Peters

The Consumer Quest for Authenticity: The Multiplicity of Meanings Within the MG Subculture of Consumption

Authenticity in the consumption context is an important topic within the marketing literature. This article explores authenticity’s multiplicity of meanings within the MG brand subculture of consumption. An ethnographic approach guided data collection, which included participant observation, photo and document reviews, informal conversations, and formal, in-depth interviews with 58 MG owners. The data show that MG owners gain a sense of authenticity in the consumption context via the object and its ownership, consumer experiences, and identity construction and confirmation. As an object, an MG is authentic if it broaches an ideal standard and preserves the brand heritage. An MG experience is authentic when an owner interacts with the car through driving and self-work activities. Finally, an MG owner authenticates his or her identity through role performance and communal commitment. Implications are discussed in light of brand management.

An Integrated Framework for the Conceptualization of Consumers' Perceived-Risk Processing

Research on risk is built on a complex array of diverse and sometimes inconsistent definitions, constructs, models, and outcomes. This study examines various literatures to formulate an integrated framework for the conceptualization of perceived-risk processing. The framework specifies three phases (framing, assessment, and evaluation) and their accompanying outcomes of risk attention, perceived risk, and risk-taking propensity. Explicit linkages are specified between situational and individual characteristics. Perceived-risk evaluation is identified as concepturally distinct from assessment of perceived risk, and the construct of risk-taking propensity is separated from those of risk affinity and perceived risk. The framework further presents points of intersection between the literatures on perceived risk and the literatures on consumer decision-making, information search, and satisfaction. Finally, it serves as an anchor for framing future research to promote conceptual and methodological consistency, and to guide progress in directions that are consistent with some leading edge paradigms outside of marketing.

An exploratory investigation of the virtual community MySpace.com

Purpose – Virtual communities are increasing in popularity and changing the way apparel fashion information is learned and shared by consumers. According to Agins, consumers, as opposed to elite designers, are now dictating fashion trends and pinpointing the ideal places of distribution. The purpose of this exploratory study is to examine the fashion‐related discussion which is taking place on perhaps the best known of these communities, MySpace.com. The three research questions driving this study include: “What are consumers saying about fashion within this particular virtual community?”; “What commonalities exist among the plethora of fashion‐related information available in this context?”; and “What kinds of insights can marketers draw from the categories of fashion‐related information being presented in MySpace.com?”Design/methodology/approach – Content analysis was selected as the method for investigation. Within the forum Fashion and Style, the subgroup FashionLOVERS was selected for investigation b...

Web-Based Chatting: Consumer Communication in Cyberspace

Internet shopping (or e-shopping) is emerging as a shopping mode and with its requirement of computer access and use, it is interesting to find out whether consumers associate e-shop-pers with any gender-specific stereotypes. Such stereotypes may be expected because shopping is considered a “female typed” activity whereas technology is considered to be in the male domain. In this article, we address this central question in an empirical study that varies the shopping context in terms of outlet type, product type, and purchase purpose. The respondents are college students with Internet access and familiarity with online shopping. The experimental results suggest that the global stereotype, held by both male and female respondents, is that of a shopper as a woman. This stereotype reverses when the product purchased is technical and expensive (DVD player). In terms of personality attributions, the female shopper is seen to be less technical, less spontaneous, and more reliable and attributions regarding personal characteristics are not influenced significantly by product type, outlet type, or purchase purpose.This article examines consumers’ intention to shop online during the information acquisition stage. Specifically, the study incorporates 3 essential variables, which are likely to influence consumer intentions: (a) convenience characteristic of shopping channels, (b) product type characteristics, and (c) perceived price of the product. Results indicate that convenience and product type influence consumer intention to engage in online shopping. When consumers perceive offline shopping as inconvenient, their intention to shop online is greater. Also, online shopping intention is higher when consumers perceive the product to be search goods than experience goods.The rapid growth of the Internet as an information medium has given rise to “infomediaries” that help aid consumers in making decisions. Recent research in the context of recommendation agents has shown that their use can lead to increases in consumer welfare. However, it is not clear if this varies by customer and by type of product. In this article, the role of category risk, product complexity, and customer category knowledge in moderating the impact of recommendation agents on consumer welfare is examined. A controlled experiment simulating a recommendation agent was used in conducting this study. Various product characteristics for which the recommendation agent provided information were manipulated. The results support some of the hypothesized effects. It is shown that category risk moderates the impact of recommendation agents on decision quality and product complexity moderates the role of recommendation agents on amount of search. The implications of this for theory and research on the Internet are discussed.This article examines consumers’ reactions to the provision of direct access to uncensored competitor price information within an electronic store. Based on notions derived from signaling theory, prior research on trust, and attribution theory, we propose that the facilitation of such access may have a positive impact on consumer preference for an online retailer. Furthermore, we predict that this effect will be moderated by how attractive a vendors prices are. The results of a laboratory experiment demonstrate the possibility that a retailers act of providing access to uncensored competitor price information may result in enhanced long-term preference for that vendor, especially if the latters prices are neither clearly superior nor obviously inferior to those of its competitors. Finally, this positive effect of facilitating access to competitors’ prices on consumer preference is mediated by the perceived trustworthiness of the online retailer.In this article we examine the effect of language, graphics, and culture on bilingual consumers’ Web site and product evaluations. We extend previous bilingual memory research to affective responses and to a new medium—the Internet. A series of studies suggests that attitudinal measures are influenced by the interaction of Web site language with two types of congruity: graphic congruity and cultural congruity. We conclude from our findings that both types of congruity influence bilinguals attitude-formation processes.Advances in information technology are making it possible to deliver multisensory stimuli over the Internet, giving rise to what we call second-generation electronic commerce, and to Web-based exchanges that approach in-store episodes and greatly exceed existing mass-market media in experiential richness. Delivery of multisensory stimuli is not enough, however, to fully activate, generate, and manage the embodied knowledge that is critical to consumer thinking about many types of products and services. Embodied knowledge refers to information elements that are generated and maintained outside the brain cavity and that are incorporated into consumer assessments of products and services. The view that consumers integrate embodied and conceptual knowledge into mental simulations of products and services is used as a foundation for a more general exposition of embodied knowledge and cognition. Three elements of embodied knowledge—body mapping and monitoring systems, proprioceptive knowledge, and body boundaries—are discussed, including their implications for e-commerce theory and practice and for marketing research in general. The methodological challenges of better understanding and managing embodied knowledge are also discussedConsumers often search the Internet for agent advice when making decisions about products and services. Existing research on this topic suggests that past opinion agreement between the consumer and an agent is an important cue in consumers’ acceptance of current agent advice. In this article, we report the results of two experiments which show that different types of past agreements can have different effects on the acceptance of current agent advice. In Study 1, we show that in addition to the overall agreement rate, consumers pay special attention to extreme opinion agreement when assessing agent diagnosticity (i.e., extremity effect). In Study 2 we show that positive extreme agreement is more influential than negative extreme agreement when advice valence is positive, but the converse does not hold when advice valence is negative (i.e., positivity effect). We conclude by identifying promising avenues for future research and discuss implications of the results for marketers in areas such as design of intelligent online recommendation systems and word-of-mouth management on the Internet.When consumers use computers to help make purchase decisions, how do they attribute responsibility for the positive or negative outcomes of those decisions? The results suggest that, in general, attributions of responsibility reflect a self-serving bias: Consumers tend to blame computers for negative outcomes and tend to take personal credit for positive ones. However, the results also suggest that, when consumers have a history of intimate self-disclosure with a computer, this pattern of attribution is significantly mitigated: Consumers are more willing to credit the computer for positive outcomes, and are more willing to accept responsibility for negative outcomes. In addition, this research provides evidence that the causal relation between self-disclosure and attributions of responsibility is partially mediated by attraction.In the context of online shopping, a major change in the consumer decision-making cognitive process is the partial shift of effort from consumers to electronic decision aids. The objective of this article is to investigate consumers’ perception of the “effort” expended by decision aids and how this perception influences their satisfaction with the decision process. The findings of two laboratory experiments show that, in comparison to human decision aids, consumers believe that electronic aids exert less effort but save them an equal level of effort. It is also shown that consumers’ satisfaction with the search process is positively associated with their perception of effort saved for them by electronic aids.Recently, it has been proposed that creating compelling experiences in the distinctive consumption environment defined by the Internet depends on facilitating a state of flow. Although it has been established that consumers do, in fact, experience flow while using the Web, consumer researchers do not as yet have a comprehensive understanding of the specific activities during which consumers actually have these experiences. One fruitful focus of research on online consumer experience has been on two distinct categories of consumption behavior— goal directed and experiential consumption behavior. Drawing distinctions between these behaviors for the Web may be particularly important because the experiential process is, for many individuals, as or even more important than the final instrumental result. However, the general and broad nature of flow measurement to date has precluded a precise investigation of flow during goal-directed versus experiential activities. In this article, we explore this issue, investigating whether flow occurs during both experiential and goal-directed activities, if experiential and goal-directed flow states differ in terms of underlying constructs, and what the key characteristics are—based on prior theory—that define “types” of flow experiences reported on the Web. Our approach is to perform a series of quantitative analyses of qualitative descriptions of flow experiences provided by Web users collected in conjunction with the 10th GVU WWW User Survey. In contrast with previous research that suggests flow would be more likely to occur during recreational activities than task-oriented activities, we found more evidence of flow for task-oriented rather than experiential activities, although there is evidence flow occurs under both scenarios. As a final note, we argue that the role that goal-directed and experiential activities may play in facilitating the creation of compelling online environments may also be important in a broader consumer policy context.The World Wide Web has the potential to change much about consumer behavior and consumer communication. Web-based chatting, the focus of this study, is one example. In this article, we provide an illustrative description of various consumer chatting situations, examine the motivations underlying Web-based chatting, and discuss the ways in which chatters act as “naive marketers” in their attempt to attract chatting partners. Using information gathered through the combined use of an Internet survey and a content analysis, we explore five research questions: who chats, why individuals chat, how chatters communicate, what links exist between Web chatting and other consumer behaviors, and which factors lead to a successful chatting experience? The findings provide some insight into how consumers market themselves in cyberspace and the effectiveness of their “personal advertisements” in attracting other chatters.Whereas the Internet itself poses unique challenges and opportunities, it is possible that the context of the Internet (a computer context) affects consumers differently than other contexts would, thereby causing people to think about and evaluate products differently. Drawing from learning theory and the functional theory of attitudes, it is predicted that computers, by being associated with the accessibility of detailed information, will elicit a need for meaning. Consequently, when a computer is present, people may think about and seek more product information than will those evaluating the product on paper (a print context). The results of an experiment support these hypotheses. Across two diverse products, the mere presence of a computer caused people to think more about and request more information about the product than those in the print context did. Furthermore, the attitudes of those in the computer context were more representative of both dimensions described in the advertisement, whereas the attitudes of those in the print context reflected the valence of the dimension that is typically used when evaluating the product. Implications for promoting products and conducting market research in computer environments are discussed.In the bricks-and-mortar environment, stores employ sales people that have learned to distinguish between shoppers based on their in-store behavior. Some shoppers appear to be very focused in looking for a specific product. In those cases, sales people may step in and help the shopper find what they are looking for. In other cases, the shopper is merely “window shopping.” The experienced sales person can identify these shoppers and either ignore them and let them continue window shopping, or intercede and try and stimulate a purchase in the appropriate manner. However, in the virtual shopping environment, there is no sales person to perform that role. Therefore, this article theoretically develops and empirically tests a typology of store visits in which visits vary according to the shoppers’ underlying objectives. By using page-to-page clickstream data from a given online store, visits are categorized as a buying, browsing, searching, or knowledge-building visit based on observed in-store navigational patterns, including the general content of the pages viewed. Each type of visit varies in terms of purchasing likelihood. The shoppers, in each case, are also driven by different motivations and therefore would respond differentially to various marketing messages. The ability to categorize visits in such a manner allows the e-commerce marketer to identify likely buyers and design more effective, customized promotional message.We propose an analytical framework for studying bidding behavior in online auctions. The framework focuses on three key dimensions: the multi-stage process, the types of value-signals employed at each phase, and the dynamics of bidding behavior whereby early choices impact subsequent bidding decisions. We outline a series of propositions relating to the auction entry decision, bidding decisions during the auction, and bidding behavior at the end of an auction. In addition, we present the results of three preliminary field studies that investigate factors that influence consumers’ value assessments and bidding decisions. In particular, (a) due to a focus on the narrow auction context, consumers under-search and, consequently, overpay for widely available commodities (CDs, DVDs) and (b) higher auction starting prices tend to lead to higher winning bids, particularly when comparable items are not available in the immediate context. We discuss the implications of this research with respect to our understanding of the key determinants of consumer behavior in this increasingly important arena of purchase decisions.

Web Accessibility Theory and Practice: An Introduction for University Faculty*

This study sought to examine instructor immediacy and presence in an online learning environment in relation to student affective learning, cognition, and motivation. It found a statistically significant positive relationship between instructor immediacy and presence. It also found that the linear combination of instructor immediacy and presence is a statistically significant predictor of student affective learning, cognition, and motivation. However, it did not find instructor immediacy to be a significant individual predictor of the aforementioned variables, whereas it did find instructor presence to be a significant individual predictor. The study also showed that students in synchronous online courses reported significantly higher instructor immediacy and presence. Implications for researchers and practitioners of online instruction are discussed at the conclusion of the paper.Web accessibility is the practice of making Web sites accessible to all, particularly those with disabilities. As the Internet becomes a central part of post-secondary instruction, it is imperative that instructional Web sites be designed for accessibility to meet the needs of disabled students. The purpose of this article is to introduce Web accessibility to university faculty in theory and practice. With respect to theory, this article first reviews empirical studies, highlights legal mandates related to Web accessibility, overviews the standards related to Web accessibility, and reviews authoring and evaluation tools available for designing accessible Web sites. With respect to practice, the article presents two diaries representing the authors’ experiences in making their own Web sites accessible. Finally, based on these experiences, we discuss the implications of faculty efforts to improve Web accessibility.

Self‐concept and the fashion behavior of women over 50

Purpose – The purpose of the present study is to examine the connection between the self‐concept and fashion consumer behaviors of senior females.Design/methodology/approach – Participants for the study (n=200) were recruited from 12 chapters of the Red Hat Society located in the Southeastern USA; they completed a self‐administered survey. Relational, individual and collective identities were measured via well‐established, pre‐existing scales. Statistical findings were used to examine how senior females with unique identities (i.e. relational, individual, and collective self‐concepts) differ in terms of their shopping behaviors and fashion orientation.Findings – Statistical results from this study indicate that apparel purchase decisions for senior females are complex and involve issues beyond style, fit, and price. Information on how the identity groups differed from one another in the various shopping behaviors and their interest in fashion is identified.Research limitations/implications – This study pr...

An Investigation of Factors That Influence the Consumption of Dietary Supplements

Abstract This study finds that consumers take dietary supplements to improve their physical health and gain peace of mind. Several factors influence the consumption of dietary supplements, but the advice of a physician underlies most consumer behavior. Few dietary supplement users over-consume these types of products, but those who do could be partaking in potentially dangerous consumption practices. More importantly, those who consume multivitamins, concentrates, and herbs/flowers/roots express different consumer behaviors from those who only take multivitamins and concentrates. Conclusions are drawn in light of the medias impact on the behaviors of dietary supplement consumers.

An exploratory investigation of Black Friday consumption rituals

Purpose – The purpose of the present study is to explore the collective consumption rituals associated with Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, and one of the largest shopping days in the USA.Design/methodology/approach – The research design for this study followed the approach of psychological phenomenological interviewing. Over a two‐year period, the authors, along with trained research assistants, conducted interviews with experienced female Black Friday shoppers.Findings – Qualitative data from 38 interviews indicated that Black Friday shopping activities constitute a collective consumption ritual that is practiced and shared by multiple generations of female family members and close friends. Four themes emerged from the data: familial bonding, strategic planning, the great race, and mission accomplished. The themes coalesced around a military metaphor.Practical implications – The findings of this study indicate that Black Friday shoppers plan for the ritual by examining advertisements and strat...

An exploratory investigation of the dramatic play of preschool children within a grocery store shopping context

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine the consumer socialization of preschool age children in a peer‐to‐peer context as they participate in dramatic play in a grocery store setting.Design/methodology/approach – This research employs a case study approach as outlined by Yin. A preschool located within a major metropolitan area in the Southeastern USA was selected for investigation. Located within each of the three classrooms was a grocery store learning center. This learning center provided children the opportunity to engage in dramatic play while enacting grocery shopping scripts. A total of 55 children between the ages of three‐ and six‐years old were observed over a six‐week period. Observations were recorded via field notes and transcribed into an electronic data file. Emergent themes were compared with theoretical propositions, fleshing out an overall interpretation and description of the case context.Findings – Findings indicate that even very young children (ages three to six years) are ...

Actions Speak as Loud as Products: Disposition as a Self‐Perceptive Method of Identity Incorporation

This paper investigates consumer identity negotiation via product disposition, specifically analyzing disposition as a means of identity separation, management, and incorporation within the context of tattoo removal in the United States. Evidence for separation and management functions of disposition replicate previous studies and demonstrate tattoo removal is a valid consumer domain for analyzing disposition. Motivations conceptually tied to identity incorporation are proposed, expanding upon previous disposition research. This work focuses on how the process, rather than the object, of disposition can symbolically alter a person’s self‐concept by allowing him or her to further incorporate an identity into, rather than separate it from, his or her self‐concept. Implications for disposition, the transfer of personal meanings, and self‐authentication are discussed.