ESSAYS ON SOCIETAL ISSUES IN THE MARKETPLACE

Abstract

This dissertation proposal comprises a series of three essays that examine the intersection of societal issues and marketing. The first and second essays speaks to the increasingly centrality of controversial sociopolitical issues, like LGBTQ rights and abortion access, in the marketplace. In Essay One, we examine how consumers react to companies staying neutral on sociopolitical issues when asked. Contrary to practitioners’ intuitions, we show consumers use companies’ perceived ideological extremity (i.e., the extent to which the company is strongly associated with a particular political ideology) as a cue to infer an underlying ideologically congruent stance. Consumers then evaluate the company based on the extent to which the inferred company stance matches their own ideological values. Essay Two investigates the psychological processes that underlie consumer activism, namely boycotting (avoiding purchasing from brands that oppose their values) and buycotting (deliberately purchasing from brands that support their values). Prior literature has found that consumers are more likely to boycott than to buycott, but it has yet to provide a clear answer to why this is the case. We show that this is, in part, because consumers perceive boycotting, versus buycotting, (1) to be more instrumental in influencing brands’ actions and (2) to better satisfy self-enhancement motives. Essay Three investigates consumers’ reaction to the pricing strategy of tiered pricing in public services, where the government explicitly offers different levels of service quality at different price points (e.g., TSA PreCheck versus standard TSA security screening). We demonstrate that, compared to a no tiered pricing condition, consumers find tiered pricing in public services less acceptable due to heightened perceptions of the government’s profit motive, which is at odds with the communal sharing norms that govern public service provision.