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s3155781MARKETING & CONSUMER WELL-BEING
ARTICLE SUMMARY 2021
Content
Week 1.................................................................................................................................................. 2
van Ittersum (2015).......................................................................................................................... 2
Burroughs & Rindfleisch (2011) ..................................................................................................... 3
Reynolds & Gutman (1988)............................................................................................................. 7
Week 2................................................................................................................................................ 12
Walker, Keane & Burke (2010) ..................................................................................................... 12
Week 3 & 4 ........................................................................................................................................ 15
Frederiks, Stenner & Hobman (2015) ........................................................................................... 15
Trope, Liberman & Waslak (2007) ............................................................................................... 18
Alcott & Mullainathan (2010) ....................................................................................................... 23
Hamilton & Thompson (2007) ...................................................................................................... 24
Newman, Gorlin & Dahr (2014) .................................................................................................... 27
Week 5 & 6 ........................................................................................................................................ 31
Bolderdijk et al. (2013) .................................................................................................................. 31
Griffiths & West (2015)................................................................................................................. 33
Hertwig & Grüne-Yanoff (2017) ................................................................................................... 36
White, Habib & Hardisty (2019) ................................................................................................... 41
Chandon & Wansink (2012) .......................................................................................................... 49
Week 7................................................................................................................................................ 55
van Doorn & Kurz (2021).............................................................................................................. 55
Khan & Dahr (2006) ...................................................................................................................... 57
1
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WEEK 1
VAN ITTERSUM (2015)
Inaugural speech as chair for Marketing and Consumer Well-being
• It was not until long ago that consumers were seen as exogenous to marketing and creating value. In 2007
this changed to seeing consumers as endogenous to creating value.
• Important that large companies change their strategies because our increasing habits will leave increase
social and health inequalities
• Welfare economics makes use of Pareto optimum, but this doesn’t work (obviously) because the
assumptions it is based on are flawed. Assumptions are:
o Everybody has free choice
o Everybody has capability to make well-informed decisions
• These are not true (now) and if we want to change things, we should not look at changing pareto strategy,
but eliminating the flaws in the two assumptions.
• Uses obesity as example:
o Assumption 1:
§ Free choice is eliminated because many people from low SE neighborhoods do not have
access to healthy foods.
§ Healthy food is more expensive.
o Assumption 2
§ Cognitive resources diminish while shopping, putting risk on shoppers.
§ Also affects us when preparing food.
• Marketers focusing on profitability add to the obesity problem.
o A win-win situation can be created if firms would try to enhance the free choice for people by
providing more healthy choices, attracting and maintaining new customers.
§ Example: providing smaller plates at buffets to reduce food intake and waste
§ Example: using smart-shopping carts for shoppers on a budget resulting in more
spending and happier customers – increased well-being
o Conducting research on these win-win situations is extremely important!
§ Van Ittersum does research on obesity, specifically. It has been shown that merely the
presence of healthy foods usually does not contribute to healthier eating/buying habits.
He argues that confronting people with nutri-scores while shopping will be a solution.
• Intention is to conduct research on both flawed assumptions of welfare economics and in that way
contribute to marketers bottom-line and financial well-being and consumers’ waistline and personal well-
being—a win-win.
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BURROUGHS & RINDFLEISCH (2011)
Association for Consumer Research (ACR) did not really enhance consumer welfare while this was their initial
plan since 1973. Therefore, the Transformative Consumer Research (TCR) movement was born, a resurged
interest in consumer well-being. The ultimate success of the TCR movement hinges on developing and directing
research that produces demonstrable positive change for consumers in all corners of the world, and there is a firm
belief that the collective talents of ACR can be marshaled to this end. However, a realistic assessment of TCR’s
domain and focus will tell us if it has the ability to make an important lasting difference in consumers’ lives.
By taking inventory of recent developments in the TCR movement it is possible to do such an assessment. Based
on careful reflection and our many years researching this topic, we believe materialism has the potential to serve
as a foundational construct in TCR, both in terms of defining the scope of consumer welfare and as a lens through
which many other TCR concerns may be viewed.
Domain of transformative consumer research
A survey of the TCR landscape reveals that the bulk of extant research falls into one of four overlapping categories:
1. Suboptimal decision making
2. Consumption-related disorders
3. Macro- social concerns
4. Materialism
In contrast to the other three areas of TCR, materialism is the one topic that is homegrown within the field of
consumer research. Materialism research has considerable value for TCR scholars, even those primarily interested
in other areas. Figure 12.1 also illustrates other areas of overlap across the four subdomains of TCR, and each
intersection represents an opportunity to combine one or more TCR topics. Although it is not possible to consider
all the potential ways materialism research can be extended into these other areas, the overlap further reinforces
the value of materialism for widening TCR scholarship. There are other overlaps of course, however these overlaps
are partial. Consumer researchers must therefore be mindful not to overreach. For example, materialism may be
only peripherally related to issues such as consumer safety or choice biases. In sum, TCR scholarship encompasses
a wide variety of issues, united in their focus on consumer welfare.
Defining Consumer Welfare
No area of study, including the TCR, has ever formally defined what consumer welfare entails, i.e., provided a
specific definition. Only until this issue: Mick et al. (Chapter 1 of this issue) define it as “a state of flourishing that
involves health, happiness, and prosperity” and note how consumer welfare is comprised of seven dimensions or
3
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contributing factors: “emotional, social, economic, physical, spiritual, environmental, and political” (see also
McGregor & Goldsmith, 1998). Mick and colleagues acknowledge that this is a wide array of factors and will
likely involve trade-offs across them. Andreasen et al. (Chapter 2 of this volume), by comparison, suggest that
consumer welfare is fundamentally about human development and reflects both personal (e.g., happiness, life
satisfaction) and societal aspects (e.g., economic health, environmental health).
The lack of a clear and consistent definition to mobilize the TCR movement suggests that consumer welfare may
mean different things to different researchers. This is not beneficial, as this can lead to variance in research and
efforts becoming diluted. If TCR research wishes to succeed, it must show progress through prioritization by the
field. Burroughs and Rindfleisch (2011) believe that positive results will be best achieved by limiting our efforts
to a tractable set of research issues built around a shared set of concepts and points of focus. In short, there remains
a need to define the parameters of consumer welfare. In addition to establishing TCR’s conceptual boundaries, we
must also consider what unique value we can bring to these varied topics, nearly all of which have been the subject
of decades of research and public policy efforts.
We believe that research on materialism can help establish a common understanding of what is meant by consumer
welfare as well as provide a valuable lens for TCR scholars interested in these other areas of inquiry. Consumer
welfare should not be viewed from an either/or perspective (individual/societal), but more as a complementary,
both are needed to understand consumer welfare. It is an alignment between individual and societal needs.
Individual perspective
Consumer researchers have historically viewed individual well-being through the lens of rational choice theory.
According to rational choice theory, individuals carefully select and consume products because they expect to
benefit from these purchases. However, individuals usually make suboptimal choices because due to bounded
rationality, e.g., inability to comprehend intertemporal trade-offs, deceptive marketing techniques.
• So, there is a psychological aspect of consumer welfare, often regarded via subjective indicants
(happiness/life satisfactions/depression/anxiety etc.).
• Social and physical interests have also largely grown, so researchers now also take for example, obesity
and family ties, in consideration when examining consumer welfare.
o Over the past 2 decades, materialism researchers have been at the forefront of consumer research
on individual well-being, and in sum, the data indicate that materialism is harmful to both
mind and body.
Economic and societal perspectives on consumer welfare
Although consumer researchers have concentrated on the psychological and physical aspects of well-being, many
of the issues that transformative consumer researchers are interested in (e.g., poverty, overconsumption,
sustainability) are societal in scope. However, this has not been addressed as much as individual perspectives.
In contrast to the more individualistic view of well-being described previously, economic and social welfare
focuses on the health of an entire society or economic system, in terms of both total welfare and welfare
distribution. Termed the social welfare function, economists define welfare as the sum total of the well-being of
all the citizens that comprise a society. There remains a belief that material resources are fungible and can therefore
be translated into other forms of well-being. The goal of welfare economics is to maximize total social welfare,
which is captured in the concept of the Pareto optimum.
Although the idea that individual interest will maximize the collective good is long-standing in economic thought,
the problem with the Pareto optimality is that it can be satisfied in conditions when “some people are rolling in
luxury and others are near starvation, as long as the starvers cannot be made better off without cutting into the
pleasures of the rich. Two well-known flaws of free-market economics:
1. presumption of free choice
2. capability of making informed choices
à this leads to a frequent disparity in personal welfare, even in wealthy societies.
Because some individuals are able to capture and consume a disproportionate share of a society’s wealth (Sen,
1979), economists have historically been left with two rather unattractive choices when it comes to maximizing
social welfare. One is to accept the status quo that egoistic pursuit produces the maximum total output, and then
hope for an acceptable level of trickle-down. The other is to intervene in the distribution of resources through
alternative forms of social governance, accepting attendant inefficiencies in the process. Because, at its heart, the
TCR movement is focused on challenging accepted paradigms and upsetting the status quo, we shall consider these
two options more deeply.
Interventionist approach:
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