Ronald Paul Hill

• American University

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present an alternative perspective to the article on consumer vulnerability recently published in this journal by Russell-Bennett et al. (2024). Design/methodology/approach The approach is collegial but firm in its analysis of their discussion about how vulnerable consumers feel and react, as offered without...

Legality of abortion has been one of the most controversial political initiatives in modern times, which also impacts the healthcare delivery system especially for women. The debate often devolves into disagreement on either access to services on demand from healthcare providers or service refusal regardless of the circumstances. However, the reali...

This research challenges the entrenched belief that financial vulnerability only affects low-income consumers. Instead, most consumers, across the socioeconomic spectrum, experience varying degrees of financial vulnerability at different points during their lives, whether sporadically or chronically; vulnerability is dynamic and heterogeneous. The...

Judith Butler compellingly argued in favor of fluid gender identity, which, when interpreted, indicates the eternal human struggle for adjusting the self around the dominant norms. A little slip results in being labeled as the (stigmatized) ‘other’. Individuals tend to cope continuously with such norms and sometimes modify and conceal their identit...

Resource scarcity is a powerful construct in social sciences. However, explanations about how resources influence overall wellbeing are difficult to generalize since much of the research on scarcity focuses on relatively affluent marketplace conditions, limiting its usefulness to large segments of the global population living in poverty. Conversely...

That skin color has an impact on self-images of women has long been a consequence of racial discrimination and dominance, as well as the use of light-skinned models in advertisements and other forms of communication throughout modern times. While not all women aspire to greater ‘whiteness’ of complexion, this standard has influenced many countries...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to inspire research at the intersection of marketing and mental health. Marketing academics have much to offer – and much to learn from – research on consumer mental health. However, the context, terminology and setting may prove intimidating to marketing scholars unfamiliar with this vulnerable population. Here...

We examine the interaction effect of country-level aggregate advertising spending and internet access on women’s development. We explain why this interaction effect either enhances or discourages women’s development. Our empirical analysis of aggregate advertising spending across forty-eight countries over five years uncovers a conditional effect....

Trump’s frustration with mainstream “fake news” media led him to focus his communications on social media and Twitter in particular. An analysis of his tweets shows that they can be interpreted as major stages of the classic “hero’s journey.” At the end of his presidency, Trump refused to return and failed to become a master of the political and hi...

It looks at the marketization of consumable humans in the libidinal market space.

Poor women can face stigmas about indolence, moral turpitude, and substance abuse. This stigmatized condition includes female sex workers, who live and work in situations that exacerbate impoverishment and bring societal exclusion and shame. We situate our arguments at the nexus of poverty and stigma and examine the value of identity formation and...

In this JPPM article for the 40 th Anniversary of the Journal of Public Policy … Marketing, the authors first share what is meant by “policy,” “public policy,” and “marketing and public policy” for researchers in our field. The authors then offer examples of JPPM research informing policy across different stages of the policy making process: proble...

Many faced with mental health issues do not seek care, especially individuals working in high-risk occupations. This research reports on two studies that investigated the relationships between military service-induced mental health issues and utilization of professional mental health services, and whether the perceived organizational support receiv...

Although the idea that people should save some portion of their incomes is undisputed, much extant consumer and public policy research on this topic concentrates on citizens in the developed world. Whether saving behavior is similar or different in developing countries has yet to be adequately explored. To address this research gap, the authors inv...

There is a long-standing interest in business ethics around the concept of free will, but study of its possible influence on consumer behavior is only in the nascent stage. This lack of research is particularly acute in certain consumption contexts, especially ones based on highly restricted access that appear to suggest abrogation of the will. In...

Consumer vulnerability affects billions of consumers worldwide, yet there is no consensus about what constitutes this state or about its consequences for consumers. Indeed, while consumer vulnerability is often invoked in consumer research, it is usually discussed informally, with little conceptual anchoring. The goal of the current work was to adv...

The consumer behavior field has a long history of looking at impoverished persons with low socioeconomic status, as well as the circumstances within which they seek, acquire, and use goods and services. Over time, these investigations have moved from studies of domestic or US subpopulations to global investigations at the base-of-the-pyramid. The u...

Thirty‐five years after completing my Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, publishing academic research on consumer well‐being, or any field for that matter, is on the precipitous of major changes that will make it almost unrecognizable during Gen‐Y's scholarly lifetime. There are many possible causes, from technological advancements in publishing...

As more states legalize marijuana, policy makers are left with a “brave new world” and little direction regarding how to navigate this burgeoning marketplace. Comparisons to currently controlled substances such as alcohol and tobacco are helpful but incomplete, as consumers use and distribute cannabis differently than these products, and these prod...

Stanley Cavell’s moral perfectionism places the task of cultivating richer self-understanding and self-expression at the center of corporate life. We show how his approach reframes business as an opportunity for moral soul-craft, achieved through the articulation of increasingly reflective inner life in organizational culture. Instead of norming co...

Whereas most anticonsumption research focuses on middle- to upper-class consumers who reduce, avoid, or control consumption, this study analyzes anticonsumption among materially deprived consumers. Such an anticonsumption focus runs contrary to the conventional subordination of homeless people to the status of inferior and deficient, whose survival...

Research in marketing often begins with two assumptions: that consumers are able to choose among desirable products, and that they have sufficient resources to buy them. However, many consumer decision journeys are constrained by a scarcity of products and/or a scarcity of resources. We review research in marketing, psychology, economics and sociol...

Scholarship involving impoverished consumers and consumption is an important part of consumer research on well-being. Investigations have looked at domestic (US) poverty as well as its global manifestations at the base of the pyramid. Together they form a body of scholarship with underlying assumptions about what scholars, policy makers, and consum...

Morality related to the marketplace has been studied in interdisciplinary contexts as well as the marketing and consumer behavior domains. This research has resulted in prescriptions and proscriptions that seek to right what is perceived as wrongful marketer actions. Yet this work has had little influence on marketing theory. Thus, we seek to advan...

Our research shows that serving sizes influence perceptions of healthfulness of restaurant foods. This context is important as more restaurants begin to post nutrition information on menus. Yet, some restaurateurs use serving sizes smaller than what consumers normally consume at a sitting. We find that when nutritional information is framed using s...

Leaders in a variety of organizations are beset by challenges that test their commitments to ethical behavior in interactions with stakeholders who make up their working environments. Situations that present themselves include complex management of expectations, people, and resources, which require novel solutions that also test the boundaries betw...

Many marketing professionals have a myopic vision of their responsibilities to various constituencies as they are focused almost exclusively on their consumers. This strategy should come as no surprise, given their external orientation and responsibility for sales and revenue flows. Yet, this concentration ignores individuals who would like to be i...

In this essay, the authors explore the emergence, growth, and future of the transformative consumer research movement. The notion of a social movement is used to conceptualize the organizing activities of research performed with the goal of enhancing consumer well-being. The authors trace the informal/formal and individual/collective actions that s...

There are taken-for-granted assumptions about how consumer acquisition and ownership take place in typical consumption environments. However, there are also extraordinary contexts that disallow everyday access to and use of goods and services that barely meet essential needs for basic survival. One poignant example is total institutions, described...

Most of humankind lives in poverty. Over 1.2 billion people survive on less than $1.25 per day, and around 2.7 billion people survive on less than $2.50 per day. Of course, these statistics do not take into account those living in relative poverty within the very highest development nations in the world. Yet few within entitled sectors of the globa...

The 2012 presidential election reached new heights in dollars spent and the rancorous nature of advertisements emanating from candidates and other interested parties. While ‘going negative’ has become a well-known tactic in political campaigns, several observers believe that the level of acrimony crossed the line between civil discourse essential t...

Perhaps in no other field is the employee-manager relationship as important as in sales. Given the performance-driven nature of the profession, firms seek managers who can optimize individual performance while providing a work environment that leads to satisfied employees. Using data collected from salespeople and sales managers, this study suggest...

Although much saving research has been conducted in affluent nations, little is known about consumer saving and well-being at the base of the pyramid, which includes over 3 billion people who live on less than US$2.50 per day. Research evidence suggests that financial situation, and especially saving, is central to well-being in impoverished societ...

Recent modifications in the metrics for reimbursement have reinforced the importance of radiology service-delivery experiences of patients. Evaluating current radiology practices calls for reflection on the various touch points with patients, as well as their overall satisfaction. If problems occur during encounters, service failure, or lack of sat...

The service literature is replete with theoretical and practical paradigms to improve service quality and advance goals of service providers as well as their customers. Often taken for granted is the assumption that organizations and their actors are interested in the well-being of those they serve as a way to bolster corporate images and engender...

The Journal of Consumer Research has completed four decades as one of the top journals in the larger field of marketing as well as the premier outlet for research on consumer behavior. This elite status is based, in part, on its stated objective as a multidisciplinary journal that allows for a variety of topics, methods, and populations that are ce...

The marketing and public policy field has a long history of examining consumer decision making under conditions of abundance, but less effort has been dedicated to learning about restrictions to choice, especially as imposed by institutional forces. To help fill this gap in the literature, the authors offer an ethnographic investigation of a maximu...

“Shopping While Black” refers to negative experiences that African American consumers endure in the marketplace. The term was coined before the turn of the century and the tabulation of the 2000 census. However, this term may be antiquated—not because African Americans no longer have disparate consumer experiences, but because these experiences imp...

This article explores the logic underlying alternative marketing exchange systems in community and the conditions under which each operates. Through ethnographic work in a town impacted by a tornado, we observe how a local exchange system morphs and evolves to reveal the functions, mechanisms, and meanings of two different yet complementary exchang...

Social entrepreneurship has emerged as a field of considerable interest over the past two decades. Unfortunately, its rapid growth has come at the expense of a unified definition of this construct. In response, Dacin et al., Nicholls, and Santos recently proposed how efforts at theorizing might take shape and stimulate more robust scholarship in th...

Developing and implementing a meaningful code of conduct by managers or consultants may require a change in orientation that modifies the way these precepts are determined. The position advocated herein is for a different approach to understanding and organizing the guiding parameters of the firm that requires individual reflection and empowerment...

Abuse may characterize some most important relationships, and it is estimated that 20 million Americans face abusive work situations on a daily basis. Given this statistic, there is a clear need to investigate this topic within the marketing literature. As a result, the purpose of this study is to explore antecedents and outcomes of abusive supervi...

The academic discipline of marketing faces concerns of relevance, which scholars ignore at their peril. These concerns evolve from three sources: (1) theoretical disregard of the majority of people in favor of a narrow, affluent socioeconomic subset; (2) languages of research and practice that dehumanize people with whom marketers engage and exchan...

Concerns about materialism have been elevated to a public policy issue, with consumer activists and social scientists calling for restrictions on marketing to children. A recent UNICEF report on the welfare of children suggests that those from low-income families may be particularly vulnerable to marketing efforts. The current research provides a f...

Consistent with the goals of the special issue of Journal of Business Research, this paper examines the 1986 pastoral letter of the U.S. Catholic bishops titled, Economic Justice for All, and its impact on marketing practice for the last 25 years. The brief literature review places this text within the larger context of Catholic Social Teaching and...

The Internet has revolutionized the retailing landscape and how goods and services are sold and distributed to consumers. One avenue of significant growth in online selling comes from multichannel retailers who offer products in stores as well as over the Web. These hybrids may leverage their "brick" locations by allowing customers to pick up or re...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the continuing search for evidence that good corporate governance leads to positive organizational outcomes, and it presents a unique perspective on this issue based on firm size. Design/methodology/approach The study utilized a comprehensive measure of governance as well as a risk‐adjusted measure o...

What do material goods intended for personal consumption mean to community? We use the extreme example of natural disaster recovery in a community to explore this question. Our work describes how members make sense of material objects that transition from private to public possessions (damaged goods) and public to private possessions (donated goods...

Games such as sweepstakes and contests have become increasingly popular parts of promotional and advertising campaigns. Despite their wide use, very little academic theory or research exists about how consumers perceive and respond to promotional games. This paper presents a conceptual model of why consumers decide to participate in games, and how...

This research investigated the relationship between AIDS-related anxiety and the evaluation of condom advertisements. Data suggest that subjects' attitudes toward condom ads and brands may have been the product of different causes of state anxiety. Attitudes toward the condom ads may have been based on a subject's level of anxiety concerning the sp...

This study was designed to investigate the reactions of voters to political advertisements. Using the 1988 presidential campaign as the focus, advertisements were developed for both the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Results suggest that the use of comparative (sponsor-positive and opponent-negative) or simple opponent-negative...

This investigation examines the relationships among advocacy groups, the media, national advertisers, and advertising agencies. The discussion is framed in governmental and self-regulatory literature, as well as communication research involving conflict, and depth interviews are used to collect data. Findings suggest that the current modes of inter...

Understanding the impact of portrayals of violence and abuse by advertising media, especially when directed at women, requires our going beyond concerns about effectiveness of such marketing communications. Previous research finds an unequivocal and harmful increased acceptance of cross-gender aggression and rape within society as a result of sexua...

While most racial discrimination has manifested historically as explicit exclusion, its contemporary iteration may be an implicit failure to include. Both forms of discrimination affect the way racial minorities interact with the marketplace. After providing a conceptual grounding in relevant literature, the authors propose a novel examination of h...

Our purpose is to examine the evolving public policy and marketing domain of consumer privacy as it relates to current and future advertiser strategies and activities. After a brief introduction, the paper discusses major privacy concerns identified in the literature, focusing on tensions between advertiser interests and consumer needs. The regulat...

Analysis with reports from more than 56,000 consumers across 38 countries reveals that social comparison (upward/downward) moderates the relationship between consumption restriction and life satisfaction. Specifically, insufficient access to goods and services combined with the likelihood of making upward social comparisons lowers life satisfaction...

Considerable effort has been devoted towards the understanding of the ways in which people interact with brands. However, little attention has been paid to the personal differences that may impact these interactions. The framework for brands as intentional agents by Kervyn, Fiske, and Malone (this issue) is the groundbreaking application of almost...

Concentration on consumption in material environments characterized by too much rather than too little creates important gaps in the understanding of how much of the earth’s population navigates the marketplace. This study investigates bottom-of-the-pyramid, or impoverished, consumers to better comprehend the relationship between societal poverty a...

Our premise is that researchers have much to gain from an understanding of the global marketplace experiences of impoverished consumers. We argue that influences of absolute and relative restriction, across peoples and societies, are particularly critical. Therefore, this research makes progress by evaluating consumer data from diverse cultures and...

The purpose of this investigation is to examine the explanatory powers of a consumer complicity framework that uses counterfeit products and five emerging country markets (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). A web survey was administered to 1,600 consumers in Brazil, Russia, India, and China to test whether demographics, national origin, perceived q...

Marketing morality as oxymoron or good business practice is the primary focus of this research and is a topic deserving of attention by the field. Much theory on morality involves issues like salesperson behavior that fails to examine the impact on important goals. For instance, ethicists evaluate and provide recommendations and prohibitions withou...

This study examines the impact of marketing-oriented corporate social responsibility (CSR) communications on perceptions of the firm and its brands among consumers in two diverse cultures, economies, and political landscapes. The authors' main hypotheses are based on global brand positioning theory, which posits that consumer perceptions are enhanc...

Advertisers involved with social marketing are beginning to recognise the sea change that is coming due to the spread of interactive media usage throughout many subpopulations of interest. Unfortunately, models of how social marketing theory and practice should evolve have not been forthcoming, severely limiting the development of appropriate media...

Marketing as exchange has been the sine qua non of the field for over thirty years. While buyer–seller dyads dominate traditional conversations, other forms of transactions are included as long as value transfer occurs. The most logical extension is Stakeholder Theory, an approach with the same basic structure for understanding, maintaining, and ad...

Understanding the impact of portrayals of violence and abuse by advertising media, especially when directed at women, requires our going beyond concerns about effectiveness of such marketing communications. Previous research finds an unequivocal and harmful increased acceptance of cross-gender aggression and rape within society as a result of sexua...

While the field of entrepreneurship is relatively young compared to most other social sciences, the area of social entrepreneurship is even younger. In fact, it was not until 1991 that the term “social entrepreneur” was first used in the academic literature (Waddock and Post, 1991). Since that time, scholarly interest in social entrepreneurship has...

The dynamic and interactive SUGARSCAPE simulation is adapted to represent agent-based relationship marketing models in business-to-business exchanges. Computer-generated selling agents operate in complex environments using relationship marketing approaches that may or may not be uniformly distributed inside their organizations. The intricate nature...

This study significantly expands upon previous research by Hill and Watkins [Hill, Ronald Paul and Watkins, Alison, (2007), “A Simulation of Moral Behavior within Marketing Exchange Relationships,” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 35 (2), 417–429] involving business-to-business exchanges through the use of a more sophisticated simulatio...

The presentation and paper for this conference go to the heart of the relationship between globalization and poverty worldwide. Data from the United Nations reveal the dramatic increase in exports and imports from 1990 to 2004, along with the uneven economic performance/quality of life across development groupings and geographical regions. Thus, fi...

This article examines the impact of discoveries and methods of neuroscience on marketing practices as they relate to the exercise of individual free will. Thus, our focus centers on ethical questions involving consumers’ awareness, consent, and understanding to what may be viewed as invasion of their privacy rights. After a brief introduction, the...

This research seeks to inform the developing macromarketing theme of restricted consumer behavior. Nazi concentration camps were selected because they provide an extreme example of external control and constraint. Multidisciplinary scholarship is reviewed, with an emphasis on relevance to the understanding of consumer restrictions. A brief descript...

This essay presents my research stream on impoverished citizens as it relates to transdisciplinary work at the intersection of consumer behavior, applied ethics, public policy, and marketing practice. The original studies that inform this discussion were conducted using ethnographic methods with subpopulations that included the homeless, rural poor...

This article explores the intimate relationships between pet owners and their animal companions from the extended-self and sacred consumption perspectives using a unique method that Morris Holbrook inspires. The article opens with a brief introduction that includes a summary of the relevant literature. A description of the study's protocol follows....

This article represents an attempt to expand understanding of and dedication to global social justice through presentation and extension of the Rawlsian philosophical tenets regarding the definition and provision of basic commodities. The first section provides a literature review of Rawl's outlook on distributive justice, modifying his conceptual...