The spread of COVID-19 changes consumer preferences and behaviors greatly across the world. Extant literature has demonstrated that when there is a threat to disease, people stay away from those who do not seem healthy as they can be potentially infectious. Based on the previous literature, this research shows that individuals exposed to disease threat avoid products of which designs are high in visual complexity. When disease threat was present, individuals had lower purchase intention for products with complex designs. The perceived uncleanliness mediated the effect of visual complexity and disease threat on purchase intention. The findings provide a novel insight into the effect of disease salience on consumer perception of product design.

Do unhappy people drink alcohol or does alcohol make people unhappy? This research utilized cross-national data (Study 1) and a daily diary survey (Study 2) to investigate the link between alcohol consumption and happiness. In Study 1, at the national level, we examined the relation between alcohol consumption and happiness in 113 nations. The results revealed that there was an overall negative correlation between alcohol consumption and subjective well-being (SWB), positive affect, and generosity. In Study 2, at the individual level, we validated the findings of Study 1 by using the multilevel modeling method via the daily diary reports of Korean participants (N = 480). This method allowed us to investigate further whether alcohol consumption affected the level of happiness or whether happiness affected the level of alcohol consumption. The results showed that SWB increased the likelihood of alcohol consumption on that day, however, drinking alcohol decreases the level of SWB on the next day.

This research was conducted in order to examine the effect of brand status and brand crisis types on consumers’ forgiveness intention. In this research, we proposed and found that the favorable attitude toward the underdog referred as underdog effect (Paharia, Keinan, Avery, & Schor, 2011) would be diluted especially in relational-related failure. When relationship efforts and perceived warmth of the brand are particularly critical, service failure caused by highly identified underdog brand can be perceived to be more serious (Vandello, Goldschmied, & Richards, 2007). Four of the studies consistently demonstrated our assumption in that people expressed less forgiveness intention on underdog brands when the crisis is in a service failure (vs. product failure): study1 and 2, service process failure (vs. service outcome failure): study 3, and human service process failure (vs. non-human service process failure): 4. Further, the mechanism underlying this negative effect toward the underdog was revealed as perceived anger. These findings can give insights to marketers that the types of crisis and the way of brand positioning are very critical to influence customer’s forgiveness intention.

New product entails risk, causing resistance to adoption. The recommendation system may decrease the psychological risk by guiding decision making process to be more efficient (Häubl and Trifts, 2000). AI (Artificial Intelligence) has been getting smarter and smarter and widely applied to the recommendation system. Even while you are browsing on your Facebook, AI recommends you the products that you may like based on the customized analysis of your interest. However, do people always love to adopt the smart recommends from AI? Definitely no! Then when and why people reluctantly accept AI recommendation? We assume that the product or service where the sense and feeling is important, people might be reluctant to accept the recommendation from artificial intelligence. This is because people might feel threatened when the AI challenges against human uniqueness (Gray and Wegner, 2012). Thus, in this study we investigated how the recommendation system types (AI vs. Human) affect brand attitude depending on the brand image (Symbolic vs. Functional). We found consumers are reluctant to accept a recommendation from AI in symbolic brand where human sense and feel are considered to be critical factors (Study1). This effect was further explained by uncanny-feeling toward the AI recommendation system (Study2). This research is meaningful in that it is the first attempt to apply the artificial intelligence recommendation concept to the marketing strategy by incorporating the concept of brand image. We predicted and found AI based recommendation system is reluctantly accepted for symbolic brand. Furthermore, we discovered the underlying process for this phenomenon as uncanny feeling. People seemed to have uncomfortable feelings against AI recommendation when the brand image is related to sense and feel considered as nature of human uniqueness. Thus, marketers should be very cautious when utilizing the AI recommendation system not to threaten human uniqueness area.