Almost half of all consumers read below a sixth-grade level, yet we know little about how these consumers get their needs met in the marketplace. The goal of this qualitative study was to examine the intersection of literacy skills and consumption activities and identify the coping strategies that low literate consumers employ. Those informants who could challenge the stigma of low literacy and employ a range of coping skills were better able to get their needs met. Thus, consumer literacy is conceptualized as a social practice that includes reading and writing skills but also involves the ability to manage one's identity and leverage personal, situational, and social coping skills. (c) 2005 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

This version is available at https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/57128/ Strathprints is designed to allow users to access the research output of the University of Strathclyde. Unless otherwise explicitly stated on the manuscript, Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Please check the manuscript for details of any other licences that may have been applied. You may not engage in further distribution of the material for any profitmaking activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute both the url (https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/) and the content of this paper for research or private study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge.Any correspondence concerning this service should be sent to the Strathprints administrator: strathprints@strath.ac.ukThe Strathprints institutional repository (https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk) is a digital archive of University of Strathclyde research outputs. It has been developed to disseminate open access research outputs, expose data about those outputs, and enable the management and persistent access to Strathclyde's intellectual output. Stigmas, or discredited personal attributes, emanate from social perceptions of physical characteristics, aspects of character, and "tribal" associations (e.g., race; Goffman 1963). Extant research has emphasized the perspective of the stigma target, with some scholars exploring how social institutions shape stigma. Yet the ways stakeholders within the sociocommercial sphere create, perpetuate, or resist stigma remain overlooked. The authors introduce and define marketplace stigma as the labeling, stereotyping, and devaluation by and of commercial stakeholders (consumers, companies and their employees, stockholders, and institutions) and their offerings (products, services, and experiences). The authors offer the Stigma Turbine as a unifying conceptual framework that locates marketplace stigma within the broader sociocultural context and illuminates its relationship to forces that exacerbate or blunt stigma. In unpacking the Stigma Turbine, the authors reveal the critical role that market stakeholders can play in (de)stigmatization, explore implications for marketing practice and public policy, and offer a research agenda to further understanding of marketplace stigma and stakeholder welfare.

Consumer education programs assume that consumers have the right to full product information, and well-informed consumers will be able to get their needs met in the marketplace. Adults with limited literacy abilities, however, enter the marketplace without the literacy resources of other consumers and are potentially more vulnerable. Many adult literacy programs assume adult literacy students lack both literacy and consumer skills. The results from an interpretative study suggest adult literacy learners combine a range of social skills and resources and an ability to manage the shame of the low-literacy stigma to get their needs met in the marketplace. Four consumer literacy profiles are discussed, and an alternative form of consumer education tailored to each profile is proposed. We discuss the role of a more critical consumer educational approach in literacy assistance programs and its impact on adult learners’ feelings of self-esteem, empowerment, and agency.

Improving consumers’ health literacy addresses many of the rising problems in healthcare. We empirically support a reconceptualization of health literacy as a social and cultural practice through which adults leverage a range of skills as well as social networks to meet their needs. Pierre Bourdieu's “theory of practice” guides this reconceptualization and facilitates articulation of the array of strategies used in the complex healthcare marketplace. We focus on the low literate consumers’ alternative forms of capital and the providers’ recognition and support. The findings, from an emergent research design consisting of depth interviews with low literate consumers and healthcare providers, suggest a critical, reflective approach that enhances health literacy, empowers consumers to become partners in their own healthcare programs, and improves health outcomes.

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