The present research examines how a CEO exposed to the public through social media (e.g., Facebook) influences the trustworthiness of the CEO and his/her firm. In particular, we focus on and measure the consistency of a CEO’s fashion style across different occasions, and test the impact of the ‘fashion’ consistency on respondents’ perception on the CEO’s trustworthiness. Based on the previous literature on impression management, we define the consistency of a CEO’s fashion style as how similar (rather than different) the style of his/her clothes across multiple media exposures. We then manipulate the similarity of a CEO’s fashion style, which is the focal independent variable, and measure the subjects’ trust toward the CEO, which is the focal dependent variable. Study 1 is a scenario-based study in which participants read the description of either a fashion-consistent or -inconsistent CEO, and indicated the CEO’s perceived trustworthiness. We find that perceived trust is higher for the fashion-consistent CEO. Study 2 is an experiment in which participants read four news articles of a CEO featured on a social media (i.e., Facebook). Unbeknown to participants, fashion consistency was manipulated such that half of participants saw the news on a fashion-consistent CEO whereas the other half saw the news on a fashion-inconsistent CEO. Interestingly, the interaction between CEO gender and fashion consistency becomes significant, suggesting that for a male CEO, fashion consistency increased trust whereas for a female CEO, fashion inconsistency increased trust. The present research complements to the literature on the roles of fashion of employees including top managers on impression management. We also discuss other interesting and important implications of the results on the mechanism of the ‘fashion consistency’ effects.

The present research investigated whether stereotypes embedded within the luxury market (Han, Nunes, & Dreze, 2010) can undermine decision performance for lower-income consumers, who encounter negative stereotypes about their ability to make good luxury product decisions. Two studies tested the effect of stereotype salience (Shapiro & Neuberg, 2007; Steele, 1997) on lower-income consumers’ performance on a luxury good decision task. In Study 1, we manipulated the decision domain (luxury versus economy purchase) and found evidence of the predicted stereotype threat effect among lower-income consumers performing a luxury (but not economy) market decision task. In Study 2, we manipulated the extent to which the luxury market stereotype would be seen as an accurate reflection of actual income-based differences in the ability to make good luxury product decisions. We found that the gap in the decision task between lower- and higher- income consumers was attenuated when the stereotype had been portrayed as inaccurate. Together, these studies suggest that marketers and policy-makers should recognize this stereotype threat in the marketplace, which undermines the quality of important purchase decisions by lower-income consumers, and should implement interventions to protect their welfare.