Jing Hu

Although traditional consumer research views physical and cognitive exertion as an undesirable resource cost, high‐effort products are increasingly favored by modern consumers. While prior work explains effortful choices primarily through compensatory motives, it remains unclear whether and why a self‐transcendent emotion can drive proactive engagement with effort. Grounded in the meaning‐in‐life framework, this study investigates how awe influences consumers' preferences for high‐effort products. We test our framework in five multi‐method experiments that capture both actual choice behavior (Study 1) and behavioral intentions (Studies 2–5) using university (Study 1), Prolific (Study 2), and Credamo (Studies 3–5) samples. To ensure generalizability, the studies consider both physical and cognitive exertion, encompassing DIY assembly kits (Study 1), intensive fitness programs (Studies 2–4), and standardized test prep courses (Study 5). The findings reveal that experiencing awe consistently increases consumers' preferences for high‐effort products and that this effect is mediated by meaning in life, indicating that effortful consumption functions as a meaning‐oriented behavior. Furthermore, self‐efficacy moderates this indirect pathway: the effect of awe on high‐effort product preferences through meaning in life is significantly stronger among consumers with lower self‐efficacy. This study contributes to the literature on product management and emotion by reframing consumer effort as not merely a resource cost but also as a vehicle for existential reward. Practically, our findings suggest that marketers integrate awe‐evoking stimuli and meaning‐based storytelling into campaigns for high‐effort products and prioritize such strategies when targeting consumer segments with lower self‐efficacy.

User-generated reviews play a crucial role in assessing market offerings and informing consumers’ purchase decisions. This study applies extant theory to examine the influence of online product ratings and reviews on consumers. The findings from experiments suggest that the impact of online ratings is heightened for higher-priced products in comparison to their lower-priced counterparts during both the information search and product evaluation stages of consumer decision making. Results also indicate that consumer ratings on social media may have more of an impact on consumers than do the ratings of experts. Consumers demonstrated a greater purchase intention for products that received low ratings from experts but high ratings from fellow consumers as compared with products with high expert ratings but low consumer ratings. Implications for marketers, consumers, and online brand communities are discussed.

The antecedents of socially responsible consumption have been increasingly discussed in the field of consumer ethics theory. However, the potential emotional factors influencing socially responsible consumers are less researched. To fill this gap, our study introduces a specific emotional disposition – dispositional awe – to the research literature on socially responsible consumption and further proposes that a fundamental psychological need – meaning in life – could explain the enhancing effect of dispositional awe on socially responsible consumption. Through a series of analysis, including confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), structural equation modeling (SEM), and moderated mediation analysis, we confirm that dispositional awe could enhance personal meaning in life, which in turn affects the socially responsible consumption of consumers. Materialism plays a moderating role in these causal links. Our study contributes to enhance knowledge about socially responsible consumption and provides a new direction to guide consumer behavior in marketing context.

Although conformity is frequently used to increase the appeal of popular tourism products, research on the drivers of tourist conformity is limited. Using laboratory experiments conducted in China, we demonstrate that the emotion of awe, which is often experienced while traveling but seldom investigated in the tourism literature, may have a novel influence on tourist conformity that has been overlooked so far. We conducted three studies using different manipulation methods and tourism purchase scenarios to provide convergent evidence that participants who experience awe (vs. neutral states) prefer majority-endorsed tourism-related products over minority-endorsed ones. Moreover, the effect of awe on conformity is partly mediated by social connectedness. Our findings shed light on the emotional determinants of tourist conformity, enrich research on the consequences of awe, and have useful managerial implications for tourism practices in terms of guiding consumer conformity by managing tourists’ emotional experiences.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of the feeling awe on individuals' endorsement of conformist attitudes in consumption choices and the mediating role of social connectedness in generating this effect.Design/methodology/approach: We test our hypotheses across three studies. Study 1 used an online survey. Study 2 and 3 conducted two laboratory experiments to induce awe and measured consumer conformity in two consumption choice tasks.Findings: This research shows that both dispositional awe and induced awe can increase individuals' preferences for majority-endorsed vs. minority-endorsed choice alternatives in subsequently unrelated consumption situations, and this effect is mediated by perceptions of social connectedness with other decision-makers.Practical implications: Marketers can promote the sales of mass-market products through inducing awe.Social implications: Public regulators could utilize people's incidental awe as an effective policy intervention to nudge individual cooperation in some cases.Originality/value: The research is the first to demonstrate a novel consequence of awe on consumer decision-making. It also highlights the significance of desire for social connectedness that explains why the feeling of awe develops conformity to the opinions of unknown people.

Projective, depth interviews with U.S. Asian immigrants revealed their ambivalence toward the U.S. commercial sector’s colonial-era representations of Asian people. These commercial representations provide polarized depictions of Asian immigrants as either threatening aliens or as model citizens. These portrayals reflect “racialized otherness,” or racial stereotyping that represent Asian immigrants as inferior. Our findings indicate that Chinese immigrants strategically use everyday consumption related to foodways to resist the reverberation of American immigrant myths. In some instances, immigrants’ consumption practices instantiate a regional Asian identity. In other instances, however, immigrants’ consumption practices reflect a separation from the past and an acceptance of a new although not exclusively American way of life. Notwithstanding immigrant consumers’ resistance practices, the findings call for future research into immigrant consumers’ reactions to visual representations of race, ethnicity, and gender