SPECIAL ISSUES

Previous research attributes vulnerability to financial hardship either to structural inequities or to poor financial behavior. Less attention has been paid to the role of social psychological factors or to the relative contribution of demographics, behavior, and social psychology in understanding an individual's vulnerability to financial hardship. While studies have examined psychosocial factors in financial outcomes, we argue that these factors represent a missing perspective in the construction of interventions to lessen vulnerability. We further argue that a holistic perspective considering all three factors is needed to address vulnerability to financial hardship. Capitalizing on the richness of the CFPB National Financial Well-Being Survey data (n = 6394), we examine the unique contribution of psychosocial factors in explaining an individual's financial vulnerability over and above demographics and behaviors. Using four different measures of financial hardship, we find that all three types of factors play important roles in understanding vulnerability to financial hardship. Our findings suggest that more holistic measures and interventions are needed to enhance consumer financial well-being.

Mindless use of social media may lead to negative mental health outcomes for consumers.In this research, the authors focus on the fear of missing out (FOMO) as a key determinant of those negative outcomes by illustrating how repeated social media use forms a habit loop termed “social media FOMO.” The authors introduce a “Social Media FOMO to JOMO” framework, where they describe how mindless use can lead to social media FOMO and propose a novel Social Media Mindfulness Practice (SMMP) as a remedy to help consumers reduce FOMO and adopt a path called the joy of missing out (JOMO) that provides greater well-being.Based on the “Social Media FOMO to JOMO” framework and the SMMP, the authors suggest future research and highlight implications for consumers, marketers, and policy makers to promote more mindful social media use.

Political polarization is a marked political division in the population, characterized by multiple manifestations. The authors argue that it can affect consumer psychology, which in turn influences marketers, policy makers, and consumer welfare. The present work introduces the construct of political polarization to the marketing literature and shows how it serves as a novel challenge for various marketing stakeholders. For consumers, the authors propose that political polarization increases the salience of political identities, alters inter- and intragroup dynamics, and amplifies cognitive biases. These effects negatively affect consumer welfare, including financial welfare, relationships, mental and physical health, and societal interests. For marketers, polarization introduces a challenge to both be more sociopolitically engaged while also navigating competing political interests. Polarization also creates new opportunities and challenges for segmentation, targeting, loyalty, and product offerings. For policy makers, political polarization creates policy gaps, impedes the implementation of policy, and obstructs governance. Building from these insights, the authors consider the drawbacks and overlooked benefits of political polarization, potential remedies, and directions for future research.

This article demonstrates symbiotic academic-social enterprise (SASE), a bottom-up approach intertwined with the subsistence marketplace research stream. The SASE approach is unique in coevolving academic and social initiatives in parallel for the express purpose of achieving dual objectives: societally relevant research and social impact over an extended period. Distinct from typical action research approaches, the directionality between research and practice in this approach is circular or mutual rather than linear, the time frame continuous rather than discrete, and the unit of analysis the entire enterprise rather than a single project. Thus, SASE is fundamentally a bottom-up, learning-by-doing approach that developed in contexts characterized by a confluence of uncertainties for communities and a confluence of unfamiliarities for researchers and practitioners. The authors demonstrate this approach in the context of creating sustainability literacy education in Tanzania based on unique climate change impacts in the region.The academic research enterprise provides bottom-up insights about climate change and potential approaches to sustainability literacy education. A sustainability literacy education pilot project demonstrates an initiative in the social enterprise aspect of the approach.Finally, the authors derive public policy and marketing implications of SASE.

Race is integral to the functioning and ideological underpinnings of marketplace actions yet remains undertheorized in marketing.To understand and transform the insidious ways in which race operates, the authors examine its impact in marketplaces and how these effects are shaped by intersecting forms of systemic oppression. They introduce critical race theory (CRT) to the marketing community as a useful framework for understanding consumers, consumption, and contemporary marketplaces. They outline critical theory traditions as utilized in marketing and specify the particular role of CRT as a lens through which scholars can understand marketplace dynamics.The authors delineate key CRT tenets and how they may shape the way scholars conduct research, teach, and influence practice in the marketing discipline. To clearly highlight CRT’s overall potential as a robust analytical tool in marketplace studies, the authors elaborate on the application of artificial intelligence to consumption markets. This analysis demonstrates how CRT can support an enhanced understanding of the role of race in markets and lead to a more equitable version of the marketplace than what currently exists.Beyond mere procedural modifications, applying CRT to marketplace studies mandates a paradigm shift in how marketplace equity is understood and practiced.

Contemporary consumers, societies, and ecologies face many challenges to well-being.Consumer researchers have responded with new attention to what engenders happiness and flourishing, particularly as a function of wiser consumption. Consumer wisdom has been conceptualized as the pursuit of well-being through the application of six interrelated dimensions: responsibility, purpose, flexibility, perspective, reasoning, and sustainability. However, up to now, the roles of marketing management and government policies with respect to enabling and supporting consumer wisdom have not been thoroughly and systematically considered. To do this, the authors adopt an integrative approach based on a range of theoretical and empirical insights from both consumer research and wisdom research in the social sciences. They weave these insights into the stages of an expanded version of the circular economy model of the value cycle, within which they also include the traditional four Ps of the marketing mix. This approach allows the authors to identify how marketing practices and public policies can enable and support consumer wisdom, resulting in advancements to well-being and the common good, as well as restorations to the missions and reputations of business and government.

Within an institutional theory framework, this article identifies three interconnected fields of the marketing institution—research, education, and practice—that contribute to advancing the diversity and inclusion discourse in promoting multicultural marketplace well-being. Conducting three studies, one in each field and across contexts in three continents, the authors identify barriers that inhibit effective implementation of diversity and inclusion initiatives in today’s multicultural marketplaces. These barriers exist within and across fields and pertain to cultural-cognitive (shared meanings), normative (normative factors), and regulatory (rules and systems) pillars supporting the existence or transformation of institutions. From the research findings, the authors provide specific guidance for institutional work within marketing’s fields and policy developments needed to advance diversity-and-inclusion-engaged marketing for enhancing multicultural marketplace well-being.

Environmental disruptions, such as extreme weather events or poisoning of natural resources, are increasing in frequency and intensity. These critical global problems demand market- and policy-based solutions.Adopting a Transformative Consumer Research perspective, this article examines the effects of environmental disruptions on the livelihoods of a very vulnerable group: nature-dependent prosumers. Nature-dependent prosumers often live in subsistence markets, but the impact of environmental disruptions on their lives can have repercussions throughout local and global systems. This article thus offers practitioners and researchers a framework, the “cross-scale intersectionality matrix” (CSIM), to better understand the differing impacts of environmental disruptions and envisage effective solutions. The CSIM reveals how environmental disruptions affect marketing systems’ exchanges of production and consumption (1) across multiple spatiotemporal scales, resulting in cross-scale impacts (per ecosystems theory) and (2) in diverse ways for groups/individuals experiencing intersectional power asymmetries such as geopolitical/economic power, classism/ableism, and sexism (per intersectionality theory). Building on insights from the CSIM framework, the authors propose improvements to research as well as policy and market-based solutions intended to enhance the well-being of nature-dependent prosumers.