The Influence of Consumer Altruism on Complaining Behavior

This paper examines the effects of consumer altruism on complaining behavior in the context of a dissatisfactory marketplace experience. Complaining behavior is conceptualized as consumer voicing directed at the company at fault and negative word-of-mouth communicated to others (Singh 1988). Altruism can be conceptualized as a constellation of actions performed by individuals to assist others that make people performing these acts feel good about themselves. Price, Feick, and Guskey (1995) introduced the concept of market helping behavior defined as “acts performed in the marketplace that benefit others in their purchases and consumption. ” Although market helping behavior was studied in the context of consumers helping each other in shopping tasks and providing marketplace information, this construct also captures altruistic tendencies that might motivate dissatisfied consumers to warn others of negative experiences in the marketplace context. Past research has investigated a number of antecedents of complaining behavior including severity of dissatisfaction leading to complaining (Singh and Wilkes 1996), consumer self-confidence (Bearden and Teel 1980), a psychological need to vent dissatisfaction (Kowalski 1996) and culture (Huang 1994, Keng 1995). Altruism examined in ABSTRACT Beer consumption is an extremely important consumer phenomenon. Given this importance, the lack of research examining the determinants of consumer beer consumption is striking. Further, research has never investigated the role of culture orientation in consumers’ beer consumption decision. In this paper, we propose that individualism versus collectivism culture orientation has a systematic impact on beer consumption and consumers’ self-construal and the consequent consumption impulsivity are two factors that systematically affect consumers’ likelihood of engaging in beer consumption. Examining the role of self-construal in impulsive consumption decision like beer consumption is a unique contribution of our work. More generally, this research is important for four reasons. First, we fill a conceptual gap in the beer consumption literature by investigating the role of culture orientation. Second, we provide ways to reconcile the seemingly conflicting results in the literature. Our results provide a plausible conceptualization to reconcile the divergent results in the literature. Third, we provide both managerial and public policy implications. Through demonstrating the impact of culture orientation and self-construal on beer consumption, we provide a constructivist view on beer consumption, suggesting that beer consumption is a malleable process and there is ample room for policy makers to exert efforts. Fourth, we offer the first ever experimental evidence on the relationship between self-construal and consumption impulsiveness. Abstract We explore how consumers deal with feelings of disgust in consumption situations. We look at the common elicitors of disgust, and discover two categories not previously documented in the literature: (1) ignorance, and (2) things that did not work out as planned, desired, or imagined. In Study 2 we use scenarios to look at responses to disgust in consumption situations, and in Study 3 we manipulate scenarios to see if reported responses in study 2 are how people actually behave.