Kelly D. Martin

Life Satisfaction, Self-Determination, and Consumption Adequacy at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Concentration on consumption in material environments characterized by too much rather than too little creates important gaps in the understanding of how much of the earths population navigates the marketplace. This study investigates bottom-of-the-pyramid, or impoverished, consumers to better comprehend the relationship between societal poverty and individual life satisfaction as moderated by psychological need deprivation and described by self-determination theory. Data were gathered from more than 77,000 individuals in 51 of the worlds poorest countries. Using hierarchical linear models, results show that relatedness and autonomy improve povertys negative influence on life satisfaction, but only if basic life necessities are available, described as consumption adequacy. Findings illustrate that without consumption adequacy, psychological need fulfillment has little effect on the poverty-well-being relationship, emphasizing the hopelessness of individuals living in extreme poverty. Findings also suggest to researchers that impoverished consumers not only face different circumstances but actually respond to those circumstances in unique ways.

Broadening the Paradigm of Marketing as Exchange: A Public Policy and Marketing Perspective

The academic discipline of marketing faces concerns of relevance, which scholars ignore at their peril. These concerns evolve from three sources: (1) theoretical disregard of the majority of people in favor of a narrow, affluent socioeconomic subset; (2) languages of research and practice that dehumanize people with whom marketers engage and exchange; and (3) paradigmatic constructs that eliminate systemic realities and challenges from consideration. Consequently, most theories and practices strip away peoples heterogeneity in favor of simplistic ways of measuring success. In this article, the authors argue that this situation demands a new paradigm to guide public policy and marketing scholars. These new perspectives advocate the theoretical understanding of people through bioeconomic exchange and recognize that the ability to market brings societal responsibilities beyond the limited efforts to date. Furthermore, measures of success must integrate what marketing does, how it is done, and what it fails to do so that scholars and policy makers can fully comprehend its larger impact.

Data Privacy: Effects on Customer and Firm Performance

Although marketers increasingly rely on customer data, firms have little insight into the ramifications of such data use and do not know how to prevent negative effects. Data management efforts may heighten customers’ vulnerability worries or create real vulnerability. Using a conceptual framework grounded in gossip theory, the authors link customer vulnerability to negative performance effects. Three studies show that transparency and control in firms’ data management practices can suppress the negative effects of customer data vulnerability. Experimental manipulations reveal that mere access to personal data inflates feelings of violation and reduces trust. An event study of data security breaches affecting 414 public companies also confirms negative effects, as well as spillover vulnerabilities from rival firms’ breaches, on firm performance. Severity of the breach hurts the focal firm but helps the rival firm, which provides some insight into mixed findings in prior research. Finally, a field study with actual customers of 15 companies across three industries demonstrates consistent effects across four types of customer data vulnerability and confirms that violation and trust mediate the effects of data vulnerabilities on outcomes.

A Conceptual Framework For Online Business Protest Tactics And Criteria For Their Effectiveness

In this article, the authors lay the foundation for the emerging area of research on online protest tactics mobilized against business. The authors offer a definition of online business protest tactics and distinguish them from related activities such as electronic civil disobedience and cybercrime. They also appeal to the interest-group literature as one theoretical foundation for this area of research. Based on the degree to which each tactic involves intrusion, disruption, or damage, the authors categorize the array of online business protest tactics into a typology, providing definitions and illustrative examples from the business press for each. They advance a dualistic framework to evaluate the intermediate and ultimate effectiveness of the various online business protest tactics using a set of criteria relevant to both online and off-line environments, and conclude by suggesting avenues for future research.

Saving and Well-Being at the Base of the Pyramid Implications for Transformative Financial Services Delivery

Although much saving research has been conducted in affluent nations, little is known about consumer saving and well-being at the base of the pyramid, which includes over 3 billion people who live on less than US

Ethical Beliefs and Information Asymmetries in Supplier Relationships

2.50 per day. Research evidence suggests that financial situation, and especially saving, is central to well-being in impoverished societies; however, to our knowledge, this relationship has not been tested with a global sample. Thus, in this study, we consider how societal poverty, individual saving ability, and satisfaction with one’s household financial situation influence well-being. Further, we examine how poverty moderates the relationship between individual financial drivers and well-being to test the saving-well-being centrality assumption. Our multilevel study uses hierarchical linear models with about 50,000 consumers across 38 countries and demonstrates that as societal poverty increases, well-being decreases. Yet in high-poverty societies, saving greatly improves well-being. This significant finding among saving, poverty, and well-being is particularly telling, as household financial satisfaction was not moderated by societal poverty. As a result, we suggest novel transformative financial services that should improve the lives of the poor through formal saving mechanisms that are grounded in their lived experiences.

What's Yours Is Now Mine: Deviant Consumption Through Acquisitive Crime

Heightened ethical concerns involving upstream suppliers (e.g., Peanut Corporation of America, dairy suppliers to Chinese infant formula manufacturers) have sparked interest in how managers’ knowledge of suppliers’ behavior influences decision making. This article explores the role of managers’ ethical beliefs in these often information asymmetric decisions. Using economic experiments, the authors asked managers to make strategic marketing decisions given upstream supplier ethical information. The results show how information asymmetries can interact with managers’ ethical beliefs to produce inconsistent behaviors related to (1) upstream investment in ethical product attributes and (2) willingness to leverage ethical product attributes in downstream markets. Specifically, low-ethical-beliefs managers seemed to rationalize leveraging ethics downstream even when upstream supplier past behavior was negative. High-ethical-beliefs managers invested positively in ethical product attributes with a known ethical supplier but were less willing to leverage that behavior downstream. The findings provide insight into how managers’ individual ethical beliefs, given upstream supplier information asymmetries, can affect stakeholders, including consumers, investors, and society at large.

Political Management, Research and Development, and Advertising Capital in the Pharmaceutical Industry: A Good Prognosis?

Deviant consumption in the form of acquisitive crime, or the theft of material possessions by one person from another person or household, is prevalent in countries across the globe. Anomie theory provides a multilevel framework for understanding this prevalent and damaging form of consumer misbehavior, highlighting the societal factors propagating it. The authors conduct a multilevel study that analyzes reports from more than 58,000 households in 26 countries worldwide. Using hierarchical generalized linear modeling, they contrast household-level crime reports with country data on inequality and cultural values. The findings reveal that wealth inequality, achievement orientation, individualism, future orientation, and uncertainty—both individually and in combination—influence acquisitive crime prevalence. In particular, greater societal wealth inequality increases the positive effects of achievement orientation and uncertainty to promote acquisitive crime. The negative effects of a low future orientation in promoting acquisitive crime are also enhanced under greater inequality. The findings suggest public policy implications at both societal and individual household levels of analysis. Specifically, policies directed at underground markets coupled with consumption adequacy efforts may prove effective in curbing acquisitive crime.

Deciding to Bribe: a Cross-Level Analysis of Firm and Home Country Influences on Bribery Activity

Regulatory oversight that affects the firms product-market environment continues to increase. Political management capital (PMC) describes firm expenditure committed to address the political and regulatory context. Neoinstitutional theory casts PMC as an institutionally expected normative response investors use when evaluating firm performance. Although limited evidence has suggested that firms benefit from PMC, the authors demonstrate its effects across financial outcomes including firm value, systematic risk, and idiosyncratic risk. Likewise, they examine how PMC interacts with a firms product market through research-and-development (R&D) capital and advertising capital. Regression analysis of an unbalanced data set of 212 firms in the pharmaceutical and medical device industry, tracked from 2003 to 2014, reveals that while PMC improves investor expectations through firm value and systematic risk, it increases idiosyncratic risk. The authors find that PMC plays both substitutive and complementary roles with R&D such that increasing levels of both PMC and R&D weakens main effects. Political management capital has limited, but substitutive, effects with advertising likely because there is less regulatory oversight on advertising versus R&D in this industry. The authors explore these asymmetric effects, provide implications for neoinstitutional theory, and offer managerial insights.