Three essays of transformative consumer research.

The dissertation compromises three essays which touch upon the field of transformative consumer research. Across all essays, the aim is to induce desirable behavioral change or to explore antecedents to undesirable behavior. In essay 1, we explore a way to strengthen self-regulation of children in the face of temptation. In two studies, we expose children either a consumable or to a non-consumable temptation and meanwhile endorse the non-consumption of the temptation. In a subsequent phase we measure children’s self-regulation. We find that those children who had been exposed to a consumable temptation display more self-regulation in a later phase. In essay 2, we focus on how situational cues can be one way to stimulate ethical purchases. Here, we manipulate the degree of prestige of the store and measure willingness to buy ethically. We find an increase in willingness to buy ethically in the prestigious store relative to the unprestigious store. In addition, we illustrate that this stems from the ability of the prestigious store to efface the expected negative attributes of the ethical product, making it a superior product to purchase. In the third essay we focus on an intrinsic driver of luxury consumption among consumers with financial constraints. In two studies, we find that financial constraints makes luxuries more special. Two additional studies show that financially constrained consumers buy luxuries in function of how special luxuries are, which is not the case for non-financially constrained consumers.nrpages: 147status: publishe