Rui Juliet Zhu

Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business | CKGSB · Marketing

Creativity is an important element in today’s consumption environment. Recently, the field has observed an increasing interest in examining how sensory experiences that people have while interacting with the external environment might affect creativity. While this line of research offers significant theoretical and practical implications, it is in...

This research examines when and how consumers' product attitudes and their subsequent word-of-mouth behaviors are impacted by negative information about a brand that is associated with their social group. We find that negative information about an in-group brand threatens the in-group members' social identity, which in turn results in derogation of...

https://hbr.org/2015/01/why-a-messy-workspace-undermines-your-persistence

Existing inquiry on self-control reveals an inconsistency. The mainstream research on myopic behavior suggests that consumers' use of a high versus low construal level should lead them to exhibit less indulgence. However, more recent work on hyperopia implies the opposite. This research attempts to resolve this discrepancy. In particular, it is pro...

This article examines the influence of environmental orderliness on consumers' self-regulation. It is proposed that a disorganized environment threatens the individual's sense of personal control. Because experiencing this control threat depletes resources, individuals exposed to a disorganized (vs. organized) environment are more likely to exhibit...

This article demonstrates that the spatial proximity between visual representations of cause and effect in an advertisement can influence consumers' judgments of the product effectiveness. Five studies show that the more proximal is the distance between the image of a potential cause (e.g., a facial cream that treats acne) and that of the potential...

Despite the common belief that seating arrangements matter, little research has examined how the geometrical shape of a chair arrangement can impact persuasion. Across three studies, this research demonstrates that the shape of seating arrangements can prime two fundamental human needs which in turn influence persuasion. When seated in a circular s...

This paper examines how ambient noise, an important environmental variable, can affect creativity. Results from five experiments demonstrate that a moderate (70 dB) versus low (50 dB) level of ambient noise enhances performance on creative tasks and increases the buying likelihood of innovative products. A high level of noise (85 dB), on the other...

Despite the popularity of social networks and technologies that intend to enhance social interaction, more Americans feel lonely now than before. This research examines how loneliness affects consumers’ responses to consensus-related social cues in marketing contexts. Results from three studies show that lonely consumers prefer minority-endorsed pr...

Music can convey two meanings: one referential that consists of descriptive associations, and another embodied that is purely hedonic. We reasoned that consumer characteristics such as one's gender and Need for Cognition (NFC) can affect which meaning(s) of ad background music people use when forming product perceptions. Yet, are such meanings and...

When consumers shop, the flooring underfoot can prompt bodily sensations-a sense of comfort from soft carpeting or fatigue from hard tile flooring. Like moods, such bodily sensations may foster context effects on the products shoppers observe. However, whereas moods prompt only assimilation effects, we demonstrate that consumers' bodily sensations...

This article examines the effect of spatial confinement on consumer choices. Building on reactance theory and the environmental psychology literature, we propose that spatially confined consumers react against an incursion to their personal space by making more varied and unique choices. We present four laboratory experiments and one field study to...

Existing research reports inconsistent findings with regard to the effect of color on cognitive task performances. Some research suggests that blue or green leads to better performances than red; other studies record the opposite. Current work reconciles this discrepancy. We demonstrate that red (versus blue) color induces primarily an avoidance (v...

When consumers decide to upgrade to a new or better product, they often trade in their currently owned or used product for the new one. The authors examine whether such trade-in behavior, in which consumers must negotiate the price for both the new and the used product, affects their willingness-to-pay price for the new good. Drawing on research on...

Three studies investigate the influence of empathy and the level of fictionality of short stories on consumers' evaluations of emotional melodramatic entertainment. We find that high empathizers' evaluations are more favorable when the story is low in fictionality (i.e., real) versus high. In contrast, low empathizers' evaluations do not differ, re...

This article proposes that compared with a promotion regulatory focus, a prevention focus increases sensitivity to the advertiser's manipulative intent. Specifically, when message cues make manipulative intent moderately salient, prevention-focused people are more likely to activate persuasion knowledge and give less favorable brand evaluations tha...

This article demonstrates that variations in ceiling height can prime concepts that, in turn, affect how consumers process information. We theorized that when reasonably salient, a high versus low ceiling can prime the concepts of freedom versus confinement, respectively. These concepts, in turn, can prompt consumers' use of predominately relationa...

Much research has explained regulatory focus effects via the alternative psychological states (eagerness vs. vigilance) people experience when they adopt different regulatory foci. This article identifies for the first time the cognitive mechanism that underlies regulatory focus effects. We propose that promotion-focus individuals engage in relatio...