Gavan Fitzsimons

• Keisha M. Cutright, Eugenia C. Wu, Jillian C. Banfield, Aaron C. Kay, Gavan Fitzsimons (2011), When Your World Must be Defended: Choosing Products to Justify the System, Journal of Consumer Research (2011). Abstract

  Consumers are often strongly motivated to view themselves as part of a legitimate and fair external system. Our research focuses on how individuals adopt distinct ways of defending their system when it is threatened and, in particular, how this is revealed in their consumption choices. We find that although individuals differ in how confident they are in the legitimacy of their system, they do not differ in their motivation to defend the system when it is threatened. Instead, they simply adopt different methods of defense. Specifically, when an important system is (verbally) attacked, individuals who are the least confident in the legitimacy of the system seek and appreciate consumption choices that allow them to indirectly and subtly defend the system. Conversely, individuals who are highly confident in the system reject indirect opportunities of defense and seek consumption choices that allow them to defend the system in direct and explicit ways.

• Ron Shachar, Tulin Erdem, Keisha M. Cutright, Gavan Fitzsimons (2011), Brands: The Opiate of the Non-Religious Masses?, Marketing Science (2011). Abstract

  Are brands the “new religion”? Practitioners and scholars have been intrigued by the possibility, but strong theory and empirical evidence supporting the existence of a relationship between brands and religion is scarce. In what follows, we argue and demonstrate that religiosity is indeed related to “brand reliance,” i.e., the degree to which consumers prefer branded goods over unbranded goods or goods without a well-known national brand.
  We theorize that brands and religiosity may serve as substitutes for one another because both allow individuals to express their feelings of self-worth. We provide support for this substitution hypothesis with U.S. state-level data (field study) as well as individual-level data where religiosity is experimentally primed (study 1) or measured as a chronic individual difference (study 2). Importantly, studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that the relationship between religiosity and brand reliance only exists in product categories in which brands enable consumers to express themselves (e.g., clothes). Moreover, studies 3 and 4 demonstrate that the expression of self-worth is an important factor underlying the negative relationship.

• Eugenia C. Wu, Keisha M. Cutright, Gavan Fitzsimons (2011), How Asking “Who Am I?” Affects What Consumers Buy: The Influence of Self-Discovery on Consumption, Journal of Marketing Research (2011). Abstract

  Are you type A or type B? An optimist or a pessimist? Intuitive or analytical? Consumers are motivated to learn about the self, but they may not always accept what they learn. This article explores how the desire for self-discovery leads people to seek but not necessarily accept the feedback they receive and the implications this has for consumption behavior. Specifically, this article examines the case of consumers who value being unconstrained: people with independent self-construals and those who have high levels of reactance motivation. The authors argue that these people often view self-knowledge as a constraint on the self and subsequently reject it—even when the self-knowledge has neutral or positive implications for self-esteem. Results across five studies demonstrate that independents and high reactants feel constrained by self-knowledge, and this causes them to reject and make consumption choices inconsistent with it even as they actively seek to learn about themselves. In contrast, interdependents and low reactants do not feel constrained by self-knowledge, and consequently, they accept and incorporate it into their consumption decisions.

• Gavan Fitzsimons, Joseph C. Nunes, Patti Williams (2007), License to Sin: The Liberating Role of Reporting Expectations, Journal of Consumer Research, 34 (June), pp. 22-31. Description
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• David E. Sprott, Eric R. Spangenberg, Lauren G. Block, Gavan Fitzsimons, Vicki G. Morwitz, Patti Williams (2006), The Question Behavior Effect: What We Know and Where We Go From Here, Social Influence, 1 (2, June), pp. 128-137.
• Gavan Fitzsimons, J. Wesley Hutchinson, Patti Williams, Joseph W. Alba, Tanya L. Chartrand, Joel Huber, Frank R. Kardes, Geeta Menon, Priya Raghubir, J. Russo, Baba Shiv, Nader T. Tavasolli (2002), Non-Conscious Influences on Consumer Choice, Marketing Letters, 267-279. Description
  While consumer choice research has dedicated considerable research attention to aspects of choice that are deliberative and conscious, only limited attention has been paid to aspects of choice that occur outside of conscious awareness. We review relevant research that suggests that consumer choice is a mix of conscious and nonconscious influences, and argue that the degree to which nonconscious influences affect choice is much greater than many choice researchers believe. Across a series of research domains, these influences are found to include stimulus that are not consciously perceived by the consumer, nonconscious downstream effects of a consciously perceived stimuli or thought process, and decision processes that occur entirely outside of awareness.

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