The Fresh Start Mindset: Transforming Consumers’ Lives

Abstract

This article introduces the fresh start mindset, defined as a belief that people can make a new start, get a new beginning, and chart a new course in life, regardless of their past or present circumstances. With historical roots in American culture and neoliberalism, and with contemporary links to liquid modernity and global consumer culture, this mindset structures reasoning, experience, and everyday language, and guides behavior across self- and other-transformative consumption domains. We develop a six-item scale (FSM) to measure the fresh start mindset and situate it within a broader nomological network, including growth mindset, personal capacity for change, optimism, future temporal focus, internal locus of control, self-efficacy, perseverance, resilience, and consumer variety seeking. Individuals with a stronger (vs. weaker) fresh start mindset invest in transformative change through changing their circumstances, including their own consumption choices (e.g., buying a new pair of sunglasses and getting a new self); they also are more supportive of transformative programs that assist those who are challenged to get a fresh start (i.e., disadvantaged youth, at-risk teens, veterans, and tax-burdened adults). Our work significantly contributes to transformative consumer research with attention to self-activities and programs for vulnerable populations that enable new beginnings.

How to SHIFT Consumer Behaviors to be More Sustainable: A Literature Review and Guiding Framework

“…It is also possible that a certain mindset (beyond rare major life changes) can lead to habit change (Price et al 2017). Individuals who have a "fresh start" mindset exhibit more positive attitudes toward products that allow for a fresh start, and they hold more positive intentions to donate to charities focused on giving recipients a new beginning (Price et al 2017). The authors define a fresh start mindset as "a belief that people can make a new start, get a new beginning, and chart a new course in life, regardless of their past or present circumstances" (p. 22), and they show that it can be both measured and manipulated.…”

In Times of Trouble: A Framework for Understanding Consumers’ Responses to Threats

“… Phipps and Ozanne (2017) show that some consumers whose norms, beliefs, routines, and practices were disrupted by the worst and longest drought in Australian history developed trajectories of new practices to reassert ontological security and that some of these continued even after the threat eased. Other research suggests that an event that creates a disjuncture between before and after may promote a fresh start mindset ( Price et al. 2018 ).…”

Crossing Bridges: Assembling Culture into Brands and Brands into Consumers' Global Local Cultural Lives

“…Much of our own work has described the power of global brands as resources for consumers envisioning participation in a global community. Pursuit of global citizenship is integrally coupled with use of global brands; and the transformation of individual identity through brands (Price et al, ; Strizhakova et al, ). Branding as a cultural model proliferates shifting, continually changing mini‐masses, lifestyles, tribes, groupings of various kinds that are “demanding, open and incomplete” (Lury, ).…”