This research is concerned with the mediation of the relationship between co-creation and trust by emotions. Data is generated from responses to questions posed after panellists read a structured scenario. Emotions are found to partially mediate the relationship between co-creation and trust. The mediation effect is stronger in B2C situations than B2B, in services rather than products and for women more than men. In a services context there is full mediation of the relationship between co-creation and trust by emotions for women and for a business-to-consumer context. The strategic imperative that co-creation is vital in the services industry is underscored, particularly in a consumer situation or when dealing with women.

While conspicuous consumption received much attention from marketing scholars, the focus has largely been on what motivates consumers to engage in these types of behaviors rather than on what prevents conspicuous consumption. Yet, psychological research shows that the individuals who purchase conspicuous products may suffer low subjective well-being overall because there are never-ending discrepancies between the actual and ideal self. Simply put, excessive conspicuous consumption can be detrimental for the consumers’ well-being. Accordingly, from the perspective of cause-related marketing, it is equally important (if not more) to understand how such behaviors can be discouraged. Informed by the literature on the self-concept, selfcongruence, and psychological distance, our study addresses this issue by establishing a novel psychological mechanism that discourages consumers to engage in conspicuous behaviors. Specifically, we establish that: Because self-transformation motivation induces individuals to pursue their ideal-self, this will lead them to seek conspicuous products that reflect an ideal-self. On the contrary, because selfexpression motivation induces individuals to pursue their actual-self, this will lead them to seek non-conspicuous products that more closely represent their actual-self. This research provides important insights for cause related marketing campaigns that want to help people to control the purchase of conspicuous products.

In real life most are searching for ways to pursue happiness through positive affirmation from others. This practice includes conspicuous luxury consumption in capitalist societies. Veblen Thorstein critically describes this construct as lavishing money on unnecessary evident goods as a means to gain social status and recognition from others (Veblen, 1899). Following Veblen, researchers have examined various antecedent and consequent factors of conspicuous luxury consumption behaviour from broad research streams such as power, social class, culture and materialism (e.g., Berger & Ward, 2010; Han, Nunes, & Drèze, 2010; Lee & Shrum, 2012; Rucker & Galinsky, 2008, 2009; Sivanathan & Pettit, 2010; Wang & Griskevicius, 2014). Though research on conspicuous luxury consumption has received great attention over the past decade, and previous research discovered how various factors affect conspicuous luxury consumption, the ways in which core factors influence conspicuous luxury consumption are still not well understood. In this research, we revealed two important factors; self-focus versus other-focus and self-transformative versus self-expressive motivation. In multiple experiments, the major dependent variable is the logo size of luxury brands, which is generally accepted to reflect the conspicuous consumption intentions of the purchaser. This research reveals the following two important findings. First, individuals have a greater desire for conspicuous luxury products when they focus more on others than themselves, because of brand logo visibility of luxury consumption. This is because focusing on others makes individuals more concerned about others’ opinions of them and social criticism (Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975), thus leading individuals to gravitate towards the products that can guard against potential social criticism. This in turn, makes other-focused individuals place more value than self-focused individuals on conspicuous luxury products that have socially favourable indicators. Secondly, the current research shows that individuals who are motivated to transform themselves into the person they wish to be prefer conspicuous luxury products more than those who are motivated to express their actual selves. This is because conspicuous luxury products are highly associated with an ideal self. The current research offers several important contributions. First, the studies reported here will enrich the extant conspicuous luxury consumption literature by unveiling the fundamental motivations lying behind the various factors that have been shown to influence conspicuous consumption in previous research (e.g., Lee & Shrum, 2012; Rucker & Galinsky, 2008, 2009). Second, the findings of this research highlight ways to attenuate conspicuous luxury consumption that affect the happiness of individuals; the self-focused and self-expression. Consequently, this research’s findings advance understanding of luxury consumption as most research has focused more on antecedents that increase conspicuous luxury consumption behaviour (e.g., Lee & Shrum, 2012; Sivanathan & Pettit, 2010; Wang & Griskevicius, 2014) than factors that decrease conspicuous luxury consumption behaviour (Stillman, Fincham, Vohs, Lambert, & Phillips, 2012).