No abstract

Purpose-The aim of this study is to explore some specific, current social phenomena in China that may influence consumers' ethical beliefs and practices, focusing on how some top-down, social and political changes could shape consumer behavior that needs to be understood in the Chinese context. Design/Methodology/Approach-Extensive literature was critically reviewed to explore recent macro-societal reforms in China and their impact on consumers' (un)ethical practices.Findings-We lay out how China, a government-led society, underwent a series of political reforms resulting in demographic shifts that differentiate it from its Western, industrialized counterparts. We connect these societal changes with Chinese characteristics to consumers' ethical evaluations, forming a new angle to understand consumer ethics in China. We also draw on two empirical examples to illustrate our argument.Originality/Value-While consumer ethics are often explained by either cultural factors or individual variations, we discuss how one's ethical practice is shaped by one's social position, which is a product of national level public policy. Our discussions have ramifications for the study of consumers' social class and ethical practices because they take into account the elusive social positions and ambiguous social class consciousness of the Chinese population that have resulted from social mobility. Our discussions may give practitioners a better understanding of the ethical rationale behind consumers' changing lifestyles especially in the Chinese context. Paper Type-General review

Minimalism, which encourages people to live with fewer possessions, is an emerging theme in marketing communication that often appeals to the sustainable ideal of reducing consumption and waste (e.g., Patagonia's “Buy less” campaign). However, consumers' responses to this marketing approach remain under‐researched. We investigate whether consumers' responses to minimalist appeals depend on their socioeconomic status. We find that consumers with lower socioeconomic status report less favorable evaluations of brands that adopt minimalist appeals, because these consumers tend to prefer quantity over quality in daily consumption—a preference that is incongruent with minimalism. This effect is moderated by the considerations of product‐usage frequency: even consumers with low socioeconomic status can become more favorable toward minimalist brands if the benefit of minimalism, namely the increased usage of each product, is salient.

Contextualizing in the digitalization of personal finance (e.g., mobile banking), the present research explores how financial decisions made on smartphones (vs. laptops or tablets) are more likely to be shortsighted, manifesting in being unwilling to save for retirement, referring to recent information while making financial decisions, and opting for instant but smaller rewards. We trace the effect to smartphones’ affordance of ubiquity, an attribute that allows users to satisfy various needs with considerable flexibility of time and space and prompts users to seek instant gratifications. We also rule out potential alternative factors that might account for this effect, including haptic gratification, direct-touch effect, task difficulty, thinking style, concentration, and the hedonic usage of the devices by users. Furthermore, we demonstrate that prompting users to deliberate on their decisions successfully attenuates the effect. Implications for the development of interventions are discussed.

No abstract