Consumer Regulation Strategies: Attenuating the Effect of Consumer References in a Voting Context

Consumption cues (e.g., brands, money, and advertisements) can have powerful effects on cognition, perception, and behavior, yet how people regulate responses to such cues is not well understood. This is surprising given that consumption cues are increasingly present in nontraditional consumer contexts, such as healthcare, education, and politics. This research develops a measure of two types of consumer regulation strategies, cue-based and budget-based (studies 1–4), and demonstrates that these strategies influence how people respond to consumption cues in a political context (study 5). Specifically, in a study involving the 2012 American Presidential Election, priming survey participants as consumers (versus citizens) influenced both voting intentions and self-reported voting behavior, and the newly developed consumer regulation scale was instrumental in detecting this effect. These findings suggest there may be merit in the escalating debate and concern over referring to voters as consumers. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. With the rise of the modern economy after World War I, many industrial democracies began to view politics and citizenship “through the lens of consumerism” (Delacourt & Lenihan, 2010). Nowhere is this more apparent than in the media, where the term consumer has become synonymous with citizen (Bauer, Wilkie, Kim, & Bodenhausen, 2012). For example, in the media discourse leading up to the 2012 American Presidential Election, The New York Times and U.S. News & World Report ran headlines including, “Caught up in Voting, Ads Ask Consumers to Cast a Ballot,” “What the Obamacare Ruling Means for Consumers,” and “Gloomy Consumers Foresee a Weak Economy on Election Day” (Elliott, 2012; Handley, 2012; Newman, 2012). Though the choice of terminology may seem insignificant, research shows that environmental cues, like the term consumer, can prime or activate certain concepts, making them more likely to influence behavior (for a review, see Bargh & Ferguson, 2000). In particular, research finds that exposing people to various consumption cues (e.g., reminders of money, images of luxury goods, and consumer terminology) can activate a mindset that is more materialistic, present-focused, and exchangeoriented (Bauer et al., 2012; Chen, Ng, & Rao, 2005; Heyman & Ariely, 2004; Vohs, Mead, & Goode, 2006, 2008). Given this, the current research investigates if political preferences, specifically voting intentions in the 2012 American Presidential Election, would be affected by a common and seemingly innocuous practice: referring to voters as consumers. To test this possibility, a two-part experiment was conducted with American voters. Prior to conducting this experiment, this research developed and validated a scale to assess individual differences in strategies used to control when and how people respond to consumption cues. Termed the consumer regulation scale, this metric assesses the use of two types of strategies: cue-based strategies include rules and behaviors designed to manage when and where consumption cues are encountered outside conventional purchasing contexts, and budget-based strategies involve the use of monetary constraints to manage responses to consumption cues. This newly developed consumer regulation scale is instrumental in showing that referring to survey participants as American consumers (versus American citizens) affected self-reported voting intentions and behavior in the 2012 American Presidential Election. This research contributes to the marketing literature by developing a psychometrically valid measure of consumer regulation strategies and demonstrating that it moderates consumption cue effects in a political context. In addition, despite the common practice of treating voters as consumers and extensive discussion Psychology & Marketing, Vol. 33(11): 899–916 (November 2016) View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/mar © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/mar.20927