What We Know and Don’t Know About Consumer Happiness: Three-Decade Review, Synthesis, and Research Propositions

Abstract

The recent rise of consumer happiness research in marketing literature is noticeable. This article presents a systematic review of consumer happiness research from 1991 to 2020. From an initial pool of 600 articles on consumer happiness from 158 marketing journals in the ABS and ABDC lists, 71 articles were selected. The procedure was as follows: (1) search of articles, (2) quality assessment, (3) extraction of data from articles, and (4) thematic synthesis. The review concluded that the term “consumer happiness” does not have a standardized definition in the existing literature. However, happiness has been studied in a variety of contexts, and consumer research is one of these contexts. Further, the review concluded that consumer happiness research is largely segregated across three themes: marketing beyond satisfaction, marketing for health and mind, and digital felicity. Seven areas of future research on consumer happiness are also proposed. The authors present academic and managerial contributions with scholarly implications for the literature in the areas of consumer well-being, the role of marketing/interactive marketing, and the positive side of marketing. The authors also suggest that marketers not only seek consumers’ need fulfillment and satisfaction from their product or service consumption but also try to elicit hedonic associations with their products or services.

Mind the Age Gap! How Problematic Internet Use Affects Adults’ and Emerging Adults’ Well-Being and Prosocial Consumer Behavior

“…Prosocial behaviors hold remarkable importance at multiple levels; for instance, from a societal viewpoint, they are key to transitioning to more sustainable models of development (e.g., circular economy; Ma et al 2022). More importantly, prosocial consumer behaviors hold critical significance for individual well-being: prior consumer research identifies them as powerful determinants of consumers’ well-being (e.g., Dhiman and Kumar 2022) because of their ability to foster several positive outcomes (such as emotional stability [Venhoeven, Bolderdijk, and Steg 2020] and improved interpersonal relationships and self-growth [Bauer et al 2019]). It is, therefore, not surprising that researchers (e.g., Berki-Kiss and Menrad 2022; Rapert, Thyroff, and Grace 2021) have recently called for the development of new knowledge about the antecedents and consequences of these consumer behaviors.…”

Do all brand CSR initiatives make consumers happy? The role of CSR-brand (mis)fit and sense of relatedness

“…This signifies that as consumers become more attached to a brand, they are more likely to stay close to it (Ghorbanzadeh and Rahehagh, 2021) because the presence of the attachment object provides feelings of security, comfort and happiness. This also suggests that for consumers who are attached to the brand, this attachment, if maintained, will add to the formation of happiness (Dhiman and Kumar, 2022;Shimul, 2022). While consumers may feel attached to a brand after getting involved in CSR programs (Hur et al, 2020), they may also be happy to maintain a long-term relationship with the brand.…”

“…Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that promoting happiness in various forms of advertising (e.g. TV commercials and print ads) has an impact on consumers’ happiness (Dhiman and Kumar, 2022).…”

Buying happiness: How brand engagement in self‐concept affects purchase happiness

“…in return (Kumar et al, 2021). Previous studies have shown that different types of consumption can lead to happiness, for example, car ownership, usage of luxury goods, and leisure activities (Bettingen & Luedicke, 2009; Dhiman & Kumar, 2022; Kumar et al, 2021). The first researchers who delineated a distinction between types of purchases (experiential and material) were Van Boven and Gilovich.…”