Essays on lonely consumers and social gaze

Abstract

This dissertation includes two essays. The first essay examines how two dimensions of loneliness influence brand relationships. Lonely individuals tend to use consumption to compensate for their lacking relationships. Drawing on the literature on loneliness, compensatory consumption, and brand relationship, this research suggests that lonely individuals are different in ways of connecting with brands. Emotionally lonely individuals who feel the inadequate closeness in their relationships are more loyal to brands, whereas socially lonely individuals who have insufficient connections tend to prefer having a large brand assortment. Across five studies, I develop a new scale of emotional and social loneliness and using measurement and multiple experiments, I provide supporting evidence. The second essay investigates how consumers react to the different gaze directions of a model in an advertisement. It was proposed that people would be more willing to click an advertisement that features a model's direct gaze than averted gaze because of an arousal effect. However, three studies failed to support the hypotheses. The second essay suggests that the effect of a model's gaze direction may have a nuanced effect on consumers and depend on contextual factors such as a viewer's personality.