Understanding Consumers in the Here , the Now , and the Tomorrow

The words of Confucius define the architecture of this handbook. As editors, we made a decision to seek out a set of scholars that we agreed had conducted some of the most exciting and novel research in their areas of expertise in recent years, and who we felt were likely to play a leading role in shaping the agenda for consumer behavior research in the years to come. Although we left details of the chapter contents to our authors, as editors we gave all authors the same core blueprint to build the foundation of their chapters. First, we asked our authors to look backward into the literature to offer a discussion of key developments, theoretical arguments, and empirical findings to provide readers with a critical summary of a subject central to consumer psychology – with a focus on research conducted over the last decade, to make each chapter a tour of those research papers likely to become “classics” in the years to come. Second, we asked each author to set a research agenda to address unanswered questions and topics of study that they felt should become part of the future canon of their research area. As a result, while each chapter has its own particular feel and design, the volume as a whole is linked by the common motifs of both the past and future of a research area. In this introduction, we provide a brief overview of the chapters to come. The handbook is divided and organized by three central lenses on consumer psychology: individual, social, and societal. Chapters in Part I of the volume emphasize consumer decision making and behavior at the level of the individual. The first five chapters explore the building blocks of consumer behavior from a variety of theoretical orientations, from understanding consumer well-being (Mogilner and Norton), to persuasion (Tormala and Briñol), to predictions about the future (Morewedge and Hershfield), to emotions (Andrade), to evolutionary perspectives (Griskevicius and Durante). Two chapters focus on promising, yet underutilized, approaches to consumer psychology, from neuroscientific techniques (Plassmann and Karmarkar) to developmental approaches (Chaplin and Connell). The final two chapters discuss novel developments in two areas of marketing with rapidly changing landscapes: branding (Avery and Keinan) and co-creation (Townsend, Kaiser, and Schreier). Part II emphasizes interpersonal and social aspects of consumer psychology. Here the focus shifts to understanding how consumer behavior is affected by the real or