Marketing for Good
When I tell my friends that I study marketing, their first reaction is always “you evil marketers, suck the blood of consumers”. I start to ask myself, can marketing do any good for consumers? Since then, I become motivated to pursue research on marketing for good that helps marketers and public policy makers to improve consumer health and wellbeing. To do so, I approach this matter from the perspective of social influences and cognitive influences. I also employ a wide array of methodologies including lab/online experiments, field experiments, secondary data analysis, and machine learning.
First, I seek to investigate how social factors (e.g., power, power distance belief, social crowding and competitiveness) influence consumer health and wellbeing.
For example, in my dissertation, I examine consumers’ raising dietary trend in consuming free-from food (e.g., glute-free) that might lead to negative health consequences from the perspective of power. I find that the experience of low power might drive consumers to endorse a free-from diet because they are more sensitive to threats in the environment, and thus the allergens in their diets. Consequently, low power individuals prefer free-from products as a way to prevent such threats.
In addition, I am also interested in examining how do consumers perceive and react to different types of threats from social crowdedness depending on their motivation to compete with others. Consumers often experience threats, which largely affect their physical and psychological wellbeing. In my research, I propose that when the competitive motivation is activated, social crowding makes the social threat salient because it lowers their perceived status, which in turn increases preference for conspicuous consumption to cope with the social threat. In contrast, when competitive motivation is absent, social crowding makes the physical threat to consumers salient, which decreases preferences for conspicuous consumption as they do not want to stand out.
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In my second stream of research, I explore the cognitive factors (e.g., decision bias; lay beliefs; the salience of choice; protestant work ethics) that influence decisions related to consumer health and wellbeing.
For instance, I study how consumers fail to make effective donation choices due to a cognitive bias. While most consumers want to help others who are in need, this research finds that this need-based approach might lead to ineffective donations. Although the effective altruism movement suggests donors donate to charities that are more effective, which could help more people with the same amount of money, this research identifies a bias whereby people tend to donate to charities that are less competent—penalizing those who are more effective. Furthermore, we find that this bias arises because they perceive competent charities as needing less help.
