This chapter reviews the emerging literature on consumer interactions with artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing. Over the past decade, the rapid proliferation of AI technology has dramatically altered how businesses deliver products and services to consumers, giving rise to a groundswell of research. Consumer research has revealed important differences in attitudes and behaviors resulting from AI interactions as compared to human to human interactions. First, the chapter reviews domains where AI interactions are preferred as compared to domains where consumers are more averse to AI interactions. Next, the chapter identifies key process mechanisms that have been identified linking AI with key consumer outcomes. The chapter concludes with the enumeration of predictions about future directions for AI research in consumer behavior and marketing.

With over 1,700 articles on the topic in the past five years alone, consumer identity is established as a critical psychological driver of behavior in the marketplace. This chapter reviews all identity research in the top 20 marketing journals from 2017 to 2022 and integrates it into a single unifying framework: the Multiple-Identity Network. This integration answers several fundamental questions: What is consumer identity? What is the psychological structure of identity? How do consumers manage multiple identities within their self-concept (e.g., race, gender)? Key takeaways include the importance of brands and other marketplace actors in shaping stereotypes that define identities, psychological relationships between identities (e.g., dissimilarities), and balancing needs across multiple identities (e.g., status vs. belonging needs). Further topics include intersectionality, social hierarchy, stigma, marginalization, diversity marketing, target marketing, autonomy, self–brand connection, and online brand communities.

This chapter reviews the myriad ways in which consumers use compensatory consumption strategies to address self-discrepancies. First, we review the existing literature on compensatory consumption. Specifically, we discuss the role of self-discrepancies in triggering compensatory consumption, review the compensatory consumption strategies consumers can use to cope with such self-discrepancies, and discuss their effectiveness. Next, we address consumer tensions and mispredictions regarding whether and when to pursue compensatory consumption. We conclude with a discussion of future opportunities for research on this topic.

Consumption is inherently a social activity. Interpersonal influences derive from exposure to others’ communications and actions and can affect the motivations, thoughts, emotions, or behaviors of a given focal consumer. Such influences arise from direct interaction between two or more individuals or from indirect exposure to other individual(s), such as via social media, social norms, or thinking about others. This chapter highlights and integrates the large body of interpersonal influence research from approximately the last five years (published between 2014 and 2021) using an organizing framework built around the customer journey. We also offer thoughts on where we see opportunities for moving interpersonal influences research in new directions.

Access represents an alternative mode of consumption to ownership that may be market mediated in which no transfer of ownership takes place. We review the last ten years of marketing research on this topic and discuss access as coexisting with ownership on a continuum. Access provides distinct benefits anchored in its temporariness and freedom from the financial, social, and emotional burdens of ownership. Our review highlights individual- as well as firm-level antecedents of access. We identify four key paradoxical consequences of access-based consumption: more consumption/less attachment; “mine”/not “mine”; prosocial/pro-status signaling; and empowerment/exploitation. We conclude with future research agenda.

Consumers are placing increasing importance on morality in the perceived costs and benefits of a marketplace transaction. This chapter considers the moral decisions consumers make, focusing on three key areas of marketplace morality: (1) how company morality or immorality influences consumer perceptions and decisions, (2) how consumers’ morality is expressed in their prosocial and sustainable decisions, and (3) how consumers’ immorality influences companies and other consumers. Finally, we identify areas for future research that we hope will lead to advancement of the literature on marketplace morality.

Research in consumer research has rightfully been criticized for p-hacking, hypothesizing after the results are known, and other practices that lead to overestimation of the reliability and replicability of published results. Remediation has centered on more closely approximating the ideal hypothetico-deductive (i.e., confirmatory) method. There has been a push toward forming, and registering, selective hypotheses before running experiments, testing only those hypotheses, and testing each hypothesis with a single, preplanned analysis. We argue that doing better confirmatory experiments is not the (whole) solution and that HARKing and running multiple analyses are not the problem per se. The problem is that we misrepresent exploratory research as confirmatory. Forcing exploratory research into a hypothetico-deductive straitjacket leads to bad hypothesis testing. The straitjacket also leads to bad exploration, crowding out essential, good exploration that deserves space in our journals. We propose a recipe for more honest consumer research, in which authors report exploratory studies meant to generate hypotheses followed by truly confirmatory studies that test those hypotheses.

Research in consumer psychology is essential for developing a deep understanding of how consumers make financial decisions as well as for creating solutions to improve this process. Fortunately, there has been substantial growth in research in this area among consumer behavior and behavioral economics scholars in recent years, including in areas such as budgeting, spending, saving, investing, and borrowing and repaying credit card debt. The aim of the current chapter is to provide an overview of some of the most exciting developments in this area over the last decade that advance our understanding of the psychology underlying financial decisions. Key concepts we examine as influencing financial decisions include categorization, goals and motivation, choice architecture and nudges, social context, wealth perceptions, financial literacy, financial well-being and financial scarcity. In addition, we provide a call to action and roadmap for future research in the area.

This chapter proposes a triadic framework that offers a fresh lens on recent advances in luxury consumption at three distinct levels. First, we review broad systemic forces shaping the contours of the “luxury space” which governs the extent to which certain types of items and practices become more (or less) tightly associated with status over time. Second, we discuss strategies and tactics that firms use to enter the luxury space and make their offerings more appealing within that space. Third, we turn to individual-level dynamics that guide how consumers engage in, internalize, and respond to luxury consumption. We then suggest that integrating these three levels of forces – systemic, firm-level, and individual-level – can inform future research on luxury consumption. While the bulk of research to date has examined how these forces influence individual consumers and their luxury consumption, we propose that focusing on how forces at different levels interact to shape one another may offer promising opportunities for future work in the area.

Research on goals and motivation started almost a century ago and continues to thrive today. In this chapter, we distill the rich literature on consumer goals and motivation by presenting recent works against the backdrop of foundational theories. We start with a discussion of how consumers initiate goal pursuit. Next, we examine the factors that help consumers stay motivated in the face of internal and external obstacles, and what happens once consumers attain their goals. We then explore research on how consumers’ goal pursuit interacts with the surrounding social world. Finally, we suggest some broad areas for future inquiries on consumer goals and motivation.

In this introduction to the Cambridge Handbook of Consumer Psychology, the editors provide an overview of the chapters included in the Handbook as well as their rationale for editing a follow-up volume to the first edition, in light of post-COVID shifts in behavior, variance in methodological practices, and increasing complexity of consumer behavior.

People regularly advocate on behalf of their attitudes. They post online reviews of hotels and restaurants, they recommend new apps and movies to friends, and they share their opinions on political candidates and social issues. What drives advocacy behavior? In this chapter, we review a fast-growing literature on the antecedents of advocacy – including attitude strength, compensatory motives, perceived efficacy, emotions, attitude framing, and more – and we consolidate this literature into a set of core insights. In addition, we discuss two promising directions for ongoing work. First, when people advocate, what do they say or do? Second, what other actions do people undertake to advance their views (e.g., censorship)? We review the nascent literature on these topics and chart new directions for research in this area.

This chapter discusses when, how and why consumers interact with corporate sustainability, both responding to it and, ultimately, shaping it. The chapter first outlines the two types of consumer behaviours that a company’s sustainability actions seek to impact: pro-company behaviours and pro-sustainability behaviours. Because the former is more directly critical to the survival and success of companies, this chapter focuses primarily on pro-company behaviours. The bulk of the chapter then explores the psychological processes that determine when consumers respond most favourably to corporate sustainability, and why. The different thoughts, feelings and motivations consumers have about a company’s sustainability efforts come together as the 3 U’s: Understanding, Utility and Unity. Understanding is how well consumers understand a company’s sustainability efforts. Utility is the value consumers get from such efforts. Unity is the sense of connection consumers feel with a company based on these efforts. The 3 U’s need to work synergistically for the key sustainability-guided behaviours to be obtained. Finally, the chapter discusses the key consumer, company and contextual factors that determine the exact nature of the 3 U’s and the extent to which these come together to produce pro-company behaviours.