Australasian Marketing Journal

Pandemics, climate warming, growing inequality, and much more bring crises that change the patterns of daily life in human communities, directly impacting the provisioning systems that form in a community to meet the needs and wants of individuals, groups, and entities for goods, services, experiences, ideas. Provisioning systems sometimes begin as leadership initiated top-down, authoritarian prescriptive supply networks, public and private. Sometimes, they originate as bottom-up, self-organized, innovative, open choice, often informal, exchange based networks, and mostly, over time, they emerge as untidy self-organized multi-level diverse assemblages of both. The diversity of provisioning systems in a community enables crisis resilience, but limits efficiency and control. The provisioning systems that form in these ways are complex, multi-level, non-linear evolutionary systems, often unpredictable, and lacking direction. Balancing a desire for stability and an appetite for diversity, innovation, and change in shaping a provisioning system is like walking a narrow corridor on the edge of chaos. Achieving balance, avoiding slipping into chaos, rests on the management of a set of complex social mechanisms. These embrace delivery mechanisms where value is produced and consumed through complex infrastructures; stakeholder action fields where trust, collaboration, cooperation, compromise, competition, or conflict are in play; technology evolution mechanisms where innovation and the recombination of existing technologies occur at all levels; and value exchange fields where community and individual values shift in response to crisis and change. Recovery from crisis is not an event, it is a complex, continuing process, often unpredictable, often unequal in outcomes, but walking a narrow corridor is episodic, uncertain and in the end possible. This is the next normal for marketing.

Digital piracy of DVDs, software, and music is a prevalent behavior worldwide and has significant financial and social costs for society. Yet legal remedies and technological ways of controlling digital piracy are expensive and often do not work. To address a need for study of moral reasoning in digital piracy decisions, we develop and test a model of moral behavior that relies on self-control. Two kinds of shame are examined in separate experiments: indirect shame, where a shamed person overhears a friend condemning digital piracy but the friend is unware that the person overhearing the criticism has in fact committed digital piracy, and direct shame where a person becomes aware that his or her friend has in fact committed digital piracy and reprimands him or her. Findings show that both kinds of felt shame can be induced to affect such behaviors as decisions to discontinue digital piracy, giving advice or discouraging others not to engage in digital piracy, giving money to anti-digital piracy causes, reporting people who commit acts of digital piracy, signing a petition against digital piracy, and supporting legislation and fines against digital piracy. We examine two boundary conditions of felt shame: values of personal ambition and equality that function as automatic cognitions regulating the shame and through it digital piracy. Hypotheses were tested on a sample of 300 adults.

Innovative visual design plays an important role in marketing for attracting consumers’ attention in-store. Drawing upon thinking styles and design literature, this research investigates how consumers’ different thinking styles influence their evaluations of and attitudes toward the innovative visual design via perceived functional innovativeness. Findings indicate that consumers with a holistic (vs. analytic) thinking style, who integrate perspectives and open-mindsets, show more favorable attitudes toward a product with an innovative visual design. The results emphasize the mediating role of visually hinted functional innovativeness on the effect of a holistic thinking style on consumer attitudes.

Understanding transformative services, where the consumer is not the primary well-being beneficiary, is fundamental to furthering the transformative service research (TSR) paradigm. Furthermore, it is imperative to understand the co-creation behaviors consumers can partake in during prosocial transformative services to improve their service experience and, ultimately, their repeat usage of the service. This study is one of the first to develop a model drawing together three key service frameworks (co-creation behavior, service quality, and consumer value), which is empirically validated using real consumers of a prosocial transformative service, namely blood donation. In addition, a key strength of the study is the objective measurement of behavioral loyalty using organizational records, which is an important extension to prior TSR studies that often measure attitudinal loyalty (behavioral intentions) as a proxy. The findings have important implications for furthering transformative scholars’ and practitioners’ understanding of how services can improve individual and societal well-being.

Managing the “fuzzy front-end” (FFE) of new product development (NPD) is critical for NPD success. To simulate this reality, we tasked self-selecting undergraduate teams of four to six students with developing a substantially innovative new product concept. Integrating Vygotskian and Piagetian perspectives on social constructivism and experiential learning, we designed an authentic assessment pushing students into the FFE of NPD, featuring a live pitch to an expert industry panel. Pre-and-post survey results suggest students prefer authentic assessment infused with real-world learning experiences such as the pitch. Encouragingly, students perceived less usefulness over time for animate (e.g., teaching staff) and inanimate (e.g., textbooks) resources, indicating increased reliance on oneself post-assessment. Qualitative characteristics noted by students were group work, academic success, and the degree of challenge. Our approach is relevant for educators seeking to infuse their teaching—and enthuse students—with authentic assessment, addressing limitations of teacher-centered andragogy.

Co-design empowers people, giving them a voice in social marketing program design; however, approaches have mostly excluded expert knowledge. An abductive approach to co-design allows for inclusion of expert knowledge, providing theoretical guidance while simultaneously investigating user views and ideas extending understanding beyond known effective approaches. We use the seven-step co-design framework and outline how an abductive inference can be applied to co-design. Social cognitive theory constructs were integrated into the seven-step co-design process. The abductive approach to co-design was tested in two co-design sessions involving 40 participants. Findings demonstrate that theory can be successfully integrated into the seven-step co-design process through utilization of theory-mapped activity cards. This article provides guidance on how theory can be incorporated into ideation and insight generation. Limitations and future research recommendations are provided.

Recent research has suggested conflicting evidence on how consumers respond to threat (from diseases) concerning their product preferences. Specifically, consumers might exhibit higher versus lower preferences for typical (vs. atypical) products. Drawing upon the literature on consumption-based affect regulation and consumers’ mindset, this research seeks to reconcile these seemingly conflicting findings by establishing the moderating role of consumers’ mindset. In three experimental studies, we show that among consumers with a fixed (vs. growth) mindset, perceived threat of COVID-19 would lead to higher (vs. lower) preferences for typical products. Furthermore, these divergent effects are explained by two distinct affect regulation strategies. The effect of threat among consumers with a growth (vs. fixed) mindset will be mediated by regaining a sense of control (vs. self-protection). These findings contribute the literature on disease cues, affect regulation, and consumers’ mindset, and offer practical implications for marketers during COVID-19 pandemic.

Extant literature in the field of subsistence marketplaces adopts a gender-neutral framing of marketplace exchanges despite the overwhelming experience of disadvantage faced by women relative to men as a consequence of patriarchal structures. The authors employ feminist perspectives to render visible constructions of power inequities. First, the authors employ a gendered lens to revisit the topics and data in four published papers in the field of subsistence marketplaces, revealing new questions for future research to answer as well as opportunities to reimagine policy responses. Second, they demonstrate how a gendered analysis was conducted in a primary research study with 21 men and women involved in microfinance programs in rural South India. The findings reveal that gender is a social construction that can be “done and undone,” to transform unequal power relations between men and women in subsistence marketplace exchanges. Several implications for theory and marketing practice are then provided.

Current research suggests that individual readiness toward technology plays a significant factor in the acceptance of technology products and applications. However, the current measure of technology readiness is too general to be applicable to digital technologies and the accompanying disruption and lifestyle changes. We offer digital readiness that consists of attitudinal and action digital readiness as a specific measure of individual readiness toward digital technology. We tested the influence of both attitudinal and action digital readiness toward the acceptance of mobile advertising among 162 millennials aged between 17 and 24 years in Indonesia. The results show that digital readiness has a significant influence on the acceptance of mobile advertising among millennials. We contribute to the theory of the acceptance of digital mobile advertising by employing digital readiness within the technology acceptance model (TAM) model. Our managerial implications highlight mobile advertising strategies for targeting millennials.