Ad campaigns target consumers with information about the company, its products, and sometimes its employees. Ads also reach the organization's employees and may contain information useful to employees in meeting customer needs. Results from a study involving a high-tech firm indicate that when employees believe ads are effective and value congruent, their customer focus increases. Pride completely mediates the effects of value congruence and effectiveness on customer focus. Organizational identification of employees generally results in a more favorable reaction to ads. A second study involving a regional health facility replicates and extends these findings to include employee portrayal accuracy when employees are featured in ads. Employee portrayal accuracy affects promise accuracy, effectiveness and value-congruence. In addition, employee portrayal accuracy has a direct effect on customer focus.

SPRING 2012 VOLUME 46, NUMBER 1 63 1. The Big Five personality factors are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (Digman 1990). These broad domains are used to describe human personality.

This study examines the experience of temptation through the accounts of consumers who have entered a debt management plan (DMP). During 12 weeks, participants reported weekly temptations. The results are consistent with socio-cognitive theory; participants with higher selfefficacy are better able to manage their emotions, resist justifications connected with entitlement, and perceive their difficult circumstances as providing them the opportunity to develop new financial skills and an improved financial identity. The results show that DMP consumers engage in three patterns of responses to temptation that vary in degree of self-efficacy: mindlessness, acceptance, and mindfulness. The highest level of self-efficacy and success in the DMP is associated with mindfulness, as these participants feel pride when they "work the program" and resist temptation. 1 IntroductionEvery year, millions of consumers in the United States seek out credit counseling in an attempt to dig themselves out of debt and repair their credit scores (National Foundation forCredit Counseling [NFCC], 2015). Approximately one-third of those are counseled to enroll in a debt management plan (DMP). 1 To avoid bankruptcy, consumers in a DMP work with counselors to design budgets so that their unsecured credit card debts can be paid off in three to five years. Clients who can live within a tight budget can successfully pay off their debts by the end of the program. Yet, despite providing clients with financial education and information in an introductory seminar, along with one-on-one credit counseling that includes co-creating a workable budget, DMPs have limited ability to create lasting behavior change. Maintaining a reduced budget after engaging in a lifestyle of over-spending is a challenging experience.Industry statistics (see footnote 1) and recent research (Brown, Link, & Staten, 2012) suggest that the overwhelming majority of DMP clients ultimately fail.The underlying phenomenon-consumer debt-is a long-standing problem that research views through the lenses of three different streams. The first perspective comes from research on consumer financial decision-making, which primarily examines the role of education and information in improving spending and saving decisions (Fernandes, Lynch, & Netemeyer, 2014;Richins, 2011). The second perspective, self-regulation theory, addresses consumer domains in which behavioral change might be necessary-for example, weight loss and gambling. In selfregulation theory, willpower, goal setting, and self-monitoring are necessary to prevent selfcontrol failures (Baumeister, 2002 2 that fuel the tension between giving into and resisting financial temptation (Belk, Ger, & Askegaard, 2003;Bernthal, Crockett, & Rose, 2005;Peñaloza & Barnhart, 2011). Collectively, research suggests that educational, psychological, and institutional factors influence how consumers pay off their debts. However, none of these approaches provides an integrative approach to addressing consumer indebtedness or offers integrative...

This research examines how budget flexibility-in the form of disposable income and malleable budget categories-affects debt repayment behavior. Researchers have traditionally assumed that possessing greater financial resources increases consumers' debt repayments. Through a series of three field studies with members of a debt management program (DMP), we find evidence for a counterintuitive proposition: while borrowers with larger financial resources have a greater repayment capacity, in practice they are actually less likely to repay their obligations. In study 1, we find qualitative evidence that DMP members were more likely to give in to financial temptation when they had disposable income or when they could misappropriate funds from their grocery budgets or emergency savings accounts. In study 2, we show quantitatively that DMP members with greater disposable incomes were more likely to report missing financial goals. In study 3, we model the long-term outcomes for DMP members and find that members with larger grocery budgets, larger emergency savings budgets, and larger disposable incomes were more likely to default on their debt obligations. This research extends the literature on mental accounting and self-regulation and offers insights into consumer decision making and debt repayment behaviors for financial counselors and public policymakers.