The Communal Consumer: Longitudinal Evidence for the Distinction between Nurturing and Affiliative Motives

Christopher Cannon and Derek D. Rucker

Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2020, vol. 5, issue 3, 345 - 355

Abstract: Consumer behavior is influenced by both consumers’ chronic motivations and salient environmental or situational cues. Consequently, marketers are in interested in knowing how naturally occurring phenomena alter the salience of different cues and interact with consumers’ chronic motivations. This work uses the context of prosocial spending to understand how two distinct communal motivations—nurturing and affiliative—are responsive to different salient cues. First, we use the Communal and Agentic Motives with Standards scale to measure consumers’ chronic nurturing and affiliative motives. Second, we leverage longitudinal designs to capture the salience of different environmental and situational cues and demonstrate how consumers’ chronic motivations interact with these cues in a dynamic and systematic way. Specifically, consumers with strong nurturing motives increased prosocial spending when cues related to compassion were salient. In contrast, consumers with strong affiliative motives increased prosocial spending when cues related to the value of relationships were salient.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/708876 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/708876 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:jacres:doi:10.1086/708876

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the Association for Consumer Research from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().