special Session Summary A Forum On Health-Related Consumer Behavior

Howconsumersmake and implement health-related decisions can have literally life and death consequences. Health-related behaviors are conceptually different from the more usual phenomena we study—the decision to eat nutritiously is remade every time you pass Mrs. Field's Cookies. Implementation is often difficult and involves continual tradeoffs. In fact these tradeoffs are often intimately related to life satisfaction. Diverse paradigms have been used to explain these behaviors. But, no one has brought them together. To further complicate the issue—people are studying different parts of the elephant—such as nutrition detection, stress reduction, exercise behavior —which may not involve the same target market, but are all health-related consumer behaviors. This special session was designed to bring together diverse perspectives on consumer health-related behaviors and in so doing enrich our understanding of this complex area of investigation. The goal ofthe proposed session was to bring together divergent theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding how consumers make decisions about health-related products. Issues were approached from several theoretical perspectives, including prospect theory, information processing, and systems theory. Methodological issues such as message framing, dynamic behavior modeling, and longitudinal analysis were discussed. It is hoped that by examining health-related behaviors from these divergent perspectives, we as consumer researchers will be able to move toward a richer understanding of the motivators and structural components behind this important aspect of consumer behavior. By studying health-related behaviors from within a consumer behavior framework, we hope to gain a richer understanding of health-related behavior from the perspective of why people purchase the products they do, and how they act, think, and feel during the process of buying and consuming these products. It's through the act of studying healthy lifestyle decision making along a continuum ranging from goal formulation to purchase and consumption behaviors that distinguishes this form of inquiry from that of investigating health-related behavior in general. Stephen Hoch led an engaging discussion with the audience on the issues raised in the following papers.