Elizabeth G. Miller

Transforming Consumer Health

The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is intended to transform the U.S. health care system. Its success will require the transformation of consumers’ views about health and their willingness to participate in healthful behaviors. Focusing on three barriers to consumers’ engagement in healthful behaviors, the authors review the research literature and suggest opportunities for further research. Using a social marketing perspective, they suggest actions for health care providers, marketers, and policy makers to help overcome these barriers.

Monetary Incentives and Mood

Researchers have long debated the methodological necessity of monetary incentives in experimental research. The current work shows that financial incentives not only can fail to improve task performance but also can worsen it. Three studies verify that incentives can elevate mood and that this mood enhancement contributes to worsened task performance. The authors discuss implications for the use of incentives in experimental research.

Moralities in food and health research

Abstract Society has imposed strict rules about what constitutes a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ food and ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ eating behaviour at least since antiquity. Today, the moral discourse of what we should and should not eat is perhaps stronger than ever, and it informs consumers, researchers and policy-makers about what we all should consume, research and regulate. We propose four types of moralities, underlying sets of moral assumptions, that orient the contemporary discourses of food and health: the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ nature of food items, the virtue of self-control and moderation, the management of body size and the actions of market agents. We demonstrate how these moralities influence consumer behaviour as well as transformative research of food and health and develop a critical discussion of the impact of the underlying morality in each domain. We conclude by providing a few guidelines for changes in research questions, designs and methodologies for future research and call for a general reflection on the consequences of the uncovered moralities in research on food and health towards an inclusive view of food well-being.

Goal Reversion in Consumer Choice

How do consumers manage goal conflicts before making a choice? This question was studied by examining emerging preferences in choices involving two products that were means to conflicting goals. These preference patterns revealed that an initially active goal, which had been set aside to reconcile a goal conflict, exerted greater than expected influence on the remainder of the choice process. This influence was manifest in a tendency for consumers to revert to the product aligned with the initially active goal upon seeing information that objectively favored neither product. The prevalence of the reversion (i.e., flip-flop) preference pattern suggests that activation of a set-aside goal escalates when it is set aside, much as if its pursuit had been impeded by an external force. In addition to revealing goal reversion in a variety of choice contexts, the studies in this article also find that goal reversion is moderated by goal conflict.

Social media as complementary consumption: the relationship between consumer empowerment and social interactions in experiential and informative contexts

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the interaction between consumer empowerment and social interactions as fundamental social media elements. It demonstrates their relationship in both experiential and informative social media setting where social media complements an offline consumer activity. The study aims to contribute to the literature on social media by demonstrating its complementary role on offline activities through these fundamental elements. Design/methodology/approach – The paper reports three experimental designs that manipulate the empowering and the socializing elements of complementary activities to show their effects on both the complementary online and the complemented offline activities. Findings – The paper presents three empirical studies that reveal the effects of two fundamental social media elements (i.e. empowerment and socialization) on consumers’ responses toward consumption episodes that consist of complementary online and complemented offline activities. It reveals that that...

The mitigating role of holistic thinking on choice overload

Purpose This paper aims to demonstrate how and why holistic thinking mitigates the negative impact of large assortments on satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach Five between-subject experiments demonstrate the mitigating role of holism on choice overload across a variety of contexts. Findings While large assortments create overload feeling, holistic thinking mitigates the negative impact of overload feeling on satisfaction for both chronic (Studies 1a and 1b) and decision-specific (Studies 1b and 1c) holistic thinkers, as well as those who adopt a more holistic thinking style because of the decision goal (Study 2) or incidental priming (Study 3). Research limitations/implications This paper introduces a new moderator of choice overload effects – holistic thinking – and shows how it mitigates the negative indirect effect of assortment size on satisfaction. This paper contributes to the literature on assortment size effects and shows that even when assortment size increases overload feeling, this negative impact of assortment size can still be reduced. Practical implications Marketers with large assortments can reduce the negative impact of overload feeling and increase satisfaction by promoting the hedonic features of the products and encouraging holistic thinking. Similarly, consumers can reduce the negative impact of overload feeling by approaching their consumption more holistically either because of their individual traits or situational factors. Originality/value This research contributes a new moderator to the choice overload literature: holistic thinking. In doing so, it adopts a broader consideration of the decision-making process underlying overload effects and pinpoints how (i.e. by which path) holistic thinking mitigates the negative impact of large assortments.

Don’t Kill the Suspense: How Outcome Knowledge Influences the Enjoyment of Entertainment (an Abstract)

Technological advances have enabled consumers to take greater control over how and when they view television programming, with many consumers choosing to time-shift consumption. Yet, preferences for live viewing vs. time-shifting viewing vary across program types, with news, special event, and sports programming showing higher real-time viewing than other program types. While indeterminacy is one factor that has been shown to predict consumer preferences for real-time broadcasts, drawing on literature related to the uncertainty of outcome and suspense, we argue that there is more to this preference than indeterminacy alone. More specifically, we propose that entertainment experiences contain two types of suspense (outcome and process suspense) and we show how process suspense impacts consumer preferences for time-shifting in TV entertainment consumption. Our research enriches our understanding of the nature of suspense and the relationship between outcome knowledge and the ability to experience suspense while also providing practical insights into why consumers choose to time-shift some programs, but not others.

Do/Feel Good: Health Risk Display Formats and Decision-Making

Healthcare is experiencing a shift from traditional one-way communication to a two-way communication process in which the patient is expected to be an active participant in the decision. This shift has heightened the need to understand what formats are most effective for communicating health information to patients and the underlying mechanism(s) by which risk information influences decision-making. The goal of this paper is to investigate these questions. We investigate consumer responses to five different presentation formats and test a model of decision-making involving three different decision paths – a cognitive path, an affective path, and a cognitive fluency path. We find that the impact of display format on decision-making is mediated consecutively by verbatim and gist knowledge and that processing fluency enhances this cognitive process as well as creates a path on its own. In addition, we find evidence of an affect-driven decision path. Implications of these findings for better engaging patients and encouraging improved decision-making are discussed.

When Flippers Flop: Goal Reversion in Consumer Choice

How do consumers resolve goal conflicts en route to making a choice? To answer this question, we examined choices in which two products were means to achieving different and conflicting goals. To glean insight into how consumers reconcile predecisional goal conflict, we tracked emerging preferences and used changes in these preferences to infer changes in goal activation. Emerging preference patterns from various choice studies indicated that an initially active goal, which had been set aside to reconcile a goal conflict, exerted greater than expected influence on the remainder of the choice process. We infer from this that activation of the set aside goal escalated as if its pursuit had been impeded by an external force. Four studies find that that this type of goal reversion is common and that it is moderated by goal commitment.