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The present research aims to examine selfie-marketing from a consumer behavior perspective. Creating and sharing selfies are gaining popularity among millennials. The authors seek to understand how this popularity relates to classic research on narcissism and self-concept and to determine the effectiveness of selfie-marketing in visual user-generated content.

A mixed methods approach is used across two studies. Study 1’s qualitative exploration uses the grounded theory method by analyzing semi-structured interviews with millennials. The findings produce three research propositions. These propositions are further developed into testable hypotheses in Study 2’s quantitative investigation, featuring analysis of the variance of online survey data collected from millennials.

The findings suggest that narcissism positively relates to millennials’ attitudes toward and intent to participate in selfie-marketing on visual content-sharing apps. Results also demonstrate that millennials seek to use selfies to present their self-concepts differently in various visual content-sharing environments.

The present research is among the first to focus on the importance of self-presentation and narcissism in regard to consumers’ attitudes and behavioral responses toward selfie-marketing. For marketers, this underscores the importance of understanding the unique nature of user-generated visual content on social media.

Previous research indicates the aversive effect of low consumer ratings on consumers’ purchasing decisions. This paper aims to apply decision justifiability theory to investigate how price promotions – price discount and price bundling – can reduce this effect.

Two scenario-based experiments were administered among college students (Experiment 1) and online consumer panels (Experiment 2) to test the research hypotheses.

When time-to-purchase is long (vs short), a large discount is more effective in alleviating consumers’ negative responses toward products with low consumer ratings. However, when a price discount is presented as a bundle rather than a separate deal, a small discount size becomes as attractive as a large discount size for consumers with a longer time-to-purchase.

This paper identifies two controllable factors, price discounts and price bundling, that could help to alleviate the negative impact of low consumer ratings. Marketing managers can apply the findings of this paper as guidelines to deal with the aversive effect of low consumer ratings.

This paper makes an initial attempt to examine situations where consumers would be less averse to products with low consumer ratings. It identifies the roles of two price promotions (i.e. price discount size and price bundling) and an important contextual factor (i.e. time-to-purchase) that influence consumers’ decision justifiability and, subsequently, alter consumers’ online purchase decisions for such products.

This paper aims to examine how two non-price cues – consumer rating and number of purchased social coupons (SCs) – serve as risk-relievers for high and low variety-seekers and subsequently impact their purchase decision for SCs offered by unfamiliar brands.

Participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk online panels participated in three scenario-based experiments.

Low (vs high) variety-seekers perceive greater risk and indicate lower likelihood of purchasing SCs offered by unfamiliar brands. Both high and low variety-seekers utilize the two non-priced cues – consumer rating and number of purchased SCs – as risk-relievers sequentially. That is, consumer rating constantly has a substantial impact on purchase likelihood for such SCs, whereas number of purchased SCs is influential only when consumer rating becomes ambiguous. Specifically, low (vs high) variety-seekers have a greater tendency to rely on number of purchased SCs in addition to consumer rating as a risk-reliever.

This paper examines cue utilization process in the SC context and suggests that high and low variety-seekers respond to the two non-price cues differently and sequentially. This provides theoretical insights on consumers’ cue utilization process and managerial insights regarding how managers could strategically handle the cues on SC provider websites. Further, this paper identifies situations where high variety-seekers may not prefer unfamiliar experiences and low variety-seekers may become more likely to embrace unfamiliar experiences.