Ethan Pancer

The evolution of consumer well‐being

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the historical origins of consumer well‐being as well as the factors that shaped its evolution.Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a review of original publications that highlight classic views of consumer well‐being, including schools of thought on functionalism, management, buyer‐behavior, macromarketing, and consumer activism.Findings – There has been a tendency to understand consumer well‐being as a function of economic‐based choice, where a “more‐is‐better” ideology has motivated much of the extant literature on the topic.Originality/value – Integrating literature from the twentieth century demonstrates that perspectives on consumer well‐being have been influenced by forces beyond the classic economic model. The paper speculates that incorporating more community‐oriented and contextually‐bound criteria into the understanding of consumer well‐being may yield new research insights.

The Role of Dominance in the Appeal of Violent Media Depictions

Research related to violent media has overwhelmingly focused on the consequences of exposure, typically with a view to informing its regulation. Such media is extremely popular, yet little research has examined why it should be appealing to consumers. The current work examines violent consumption in the context of advertisements for violent video games. We argue that it is not the violence endemic to many of these games, and indeed other media, that is rewarding, but rather the domination that often accompanies such depictions. We test this basic proposition by manipulating the dominative content of a violent depiction. We also examine conditions that moderate the scope of this effect.

The popularity and virality of political social media: hashtags, mentions, and links predict likes and retweets of 2016 U.S. presidential nominees’ tweets

Abstract What political social media messages resonate and get shared? We analyzed the first three months of tweets from Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump since winning their respective nominations and found that messages containing #hashtags, @usermentions, or http://www.websitelinks.com decreased likes and retweets. While these features are intended to increase audience exposure, their presence concurrently increases disfluency – the subjective experience of difficulty associated with cognition. These features make the message less visually clear (perceptual disfluency) and require the translation of symbols and text strings into meaning (orthographic disfluency). Features that improved processing fluency (i.e. embedded images) increased interactions. These findings underscore the importance of fluency in brief word-of-mouth transmissions and suggest strategies for social media users seeking to influence the voting public.

Schadenfreude and product failures: the role of product deservingness and product status

ABSTRACT This article examines the influence of product considerations on the experience of schadenfreude – taking pleasure in the suffering of another consumer. We examine how schadenfreude is affected by the extent to which the person suffering a product failure deserves to own the product and the status of the failed product. This work also explicitly considers how these factors interact with those of the person observing the misfortune. These ideas are tested across three experiments. The results show that high product status increases schadenfreude via its exacerbating effects on envy and that a lack of perceived product deservingness increases schadenfreude via both envy and deservingness. These effects differ based on the corresponding factors of the observer where the observer’s own deservingness and lack of product status are found to exacerbate schadenfreude via envy.

Consumer Schadenfreude: Deservingness of Product Ownership Impacts Affect Following Another’s Product Failure

This paper examines perceptions of fairness in product ownership as an antecedent to the experience of schadenfreude—taking pleasure in the suffering of another consumer’s product failure. Prior research has found that consumers will experience more schadenfreude when they are envious of the target, particularly the social attention received from the use of a status product (Sundie et al., 2009). Alternatively, we focus on the perceived deservingness of the initial product ownership (e.g. did they earn the product?). These findings suggest that schadenfreude can stem from the removal (via product downfall) of an unfair situation.