Our research team defines “immersive services” as those in which consumers are deeply embedded for a period of time, with their experiences largely constructed by the service. This includes industries like healthcare, education, hospitality, and eldercare. We identify four key characteristics of these services that can challenge consumer agency:

1. Encapsulation: Consumers are deeply immersed in the service, often separated from other parts of their lives.
2. Positionality: Hierarchies and power dynamics create stark differences between consumers and service providers.
3. Protocolization: Rigid routines and protocols dictate consumer behavior.
4. Multivocality: Multiple voices and perspectives within the service influence how consumers are expected to act.

These characteristics can make it difficult for consumers to act freely, thus affecting their well-being. For instance, consider healthcare settings where patients are required to follow strict protocols, or eldercare facilities where residents may feel constrained by rigid schedules. As polarization and AI-driven decision making become more common, these challenges are becoming even more pressing.

We discover, however, that consumers are not passive participants in immersive services. Instead, they actively work to regain their sense of agency through “improvisations”—creative strategies that allow them to navigate the constraints of the service. Specifically, consumers use five pathways to reclaim agency:

1. Expanding the figured world: Shaping their experience on their own terms by exerting control over time and space.
2. Voicing: Speaking out to challenge rules or advocate for changes in how they are treated.
3. Seeking task responsibility: Taking on meaningful tasks to assert independence and purpose.
4. Challenging protocols: Pushing back against rigid processes to co-create a service experience that better fits their needs.
5. Playing and imagining: Using creativity and imagination to reframe their experience and celebrate life.

For service managers, these findings offer clear strategies to empower consumers while maintaining necessary structure. Two key managerial approaches stand out:

1. Leverage technology to expand consumer freedom: Virtual tools and personalized digital platforms can help consumers navigate encapsulation and protocolization by providing more choices and flexibility.
2. Develop empathy-driven relationships: By fostering stronger interpersonal connections, service providers can address positionality and multivocality, helping consumers feel valued and heard.

We recommend a two-pronged approach to assess and address gaps in consumer agency. First, managers should analyze how the four structural characteristics—encapsulation, positionality, multivocality, and protocolization—impact consumers. Second, they should evaluate how effectively their services support the five pathways consumers use to regain agency.

Immersive services are critical to modern life, but they must evolve to meet the needs of consumers. By empowering consumers to reclaim their agency, service providers can enhance customer satisfaction, foster loyalty, and improve overall wellbeing.

Source: Laurel Anderson, Catharina Von Koshull, Martin Mende, and Johanna Gummerus, “,” Journal of Marketing.

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Fillingness, Taste, and Healthiness

• The Role of Food Attributes in Choices
  
  Our study highlights three key attributes—fillingness, taste, and healthiness—that shape food choices. While all consumers value taste, low-SES individuals place a much greater emphasis on fillingness, often at the expense of healthiness. In contrast, high-SES consumers prioritize healthiness, reflecting their access to more abundant and diverse food options.
  
  
• Perceived Relationships Between Attributes
  
  Low-SES consumers often associate healthy foods with being less filling and less tasty, reinforcing their preference for high-calorie, less nutritious options. These beliefs stem from limited exposure to healthy foods and fewer opportunities to experiment with cooking. High-SES individuals, who face fewer resource constraints, are less likely to hold these negative associations.
  
  
• Fillingness as a Critical Factor
  
  Fillingness, while often overlooked in public health strategies, is crucial for low-SES consumers. For individuals facing food insecurity or limited resources, satiety is a pressing concern. Policies and campaigns that ignore this dimension risk promoting foods that low-SES consumers perceive as unappealing or insufficient.

Implications for Policymakers

Our findings suggest that addressing nutritional inequality requires more than just making healthy foods affordable and accessible. Policymakers should focus on creating and promoting healthy options that are perceived as both filling and tasty.

• Expand the Availability of Filling Healthy Foods: Increase access to options like whole grains, legumes, and lean proteins, which are both nutritious and satiating.
  
  
• Incorporate Fillingness in Subsidies: Subsidize filling healthy foods to make them more affordable and attractive to low-SES consumers.

Public health campaigns should also work to reshape perceptions. By emphasizing the satisfying and flavorful aspects of healthy foods, marketers and policymakers can challenge the belief that “healthy equals unsatisfying or bland.”

Marketing and Industry Applications

From a marketing perspective, our research offers actionable strategies to encourage healthier eating habits:

• Reframe the Narrative: Highlight the filling and tasty qualities of healthy foods through advertising and packaging.
  
  
• Product Development: Design healthy food options that cater to low-SES preferences for satiety and flavor.
  
  
• Retail Strategies: Promote healthy, filling meals in stores, particularly in low-income neighborhoods, to align with consumer priorities.

These approaches borrow from the tactics used to market unhealthy foods but reapply them to encourage better choices.

Nutritional inequality is a complex issue that cannot be solved by supply-side solutions alone. Our research shows that consumer preferences and perceptions—particularly regarding fillingness and taste—play a critical role in shaping dietary habits. Addressing these psychological and cultural factors is essential for making healthy foods more appealing and accessible to low-SES populations.

For policymakers, marketers, and public health advocates, the path forward lies in promoting the fillingness and flavor of healthy foods, ensuring that they meet the needs and expectations of disadvantaged communities.

Source: Bernardo Andretti, Yan Vieites, Larissa Elmor, and Eduardo B. Andrade, “,” Journal of Marketing.

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Public policy makers are grappling with the question of whether to abolish the biannual time change and, if so, whether to make standard time or daylight saving time permanent. While sleep scientists call for year-round standard time because it best aligns with humans’ circadian rhythms, many retailers and outdoor industries support permanent daylight saving time, arguing that longer sunlight in the evenings supports their business. It is thus crucial to further illuminate the consequences of the current policy to better inform policy makers, managers, and consumers.

In a , we explore whether the onset of daylight saving time leads consumers to engage in unhealthy behaviors. Are there contextual and individual moderating factors that might amplify the potential deleterious consequences of switching to daylight saving time?

We examined social media data from X (formerly Twitter) to study consumer responses to the onset of daylight saving time. We find that the number of tweets with keywords related to the disruptive nature of the switch to daylight saving time peaked around 12 hours after the change occurred. We also find that the volume of negatively toned tweets rose more substantially, indicating a stronger increase in negative sentiment toward the time change. Overall, our preliminary findings suggest that consumers respond negatively to the switch to daylight saving time.

Snack Consumption and Fitness Center Visits

Next, we examine two unique disaggregate level datasets that capture two different consumer behaviors: snack consumption and fitness center visits. The first dataset captures consumers’ real-time snack consumption in their natural environments, while the second dataset tracks the attendance records of customers visiting fitness centers. For understanding consumer behavior following the onset of daylight saving time, we compare consumers’ calorie consumption from packaged snacks and visits to fitness centers across two customer groups: those who are affected by the onset of daylight saving time (the treatment group) and those who are not affected by the onset of daylight saving time (the control group), before and after the onset of daylight saving time.

We find that:

1. calorie consumption from largely unhealthy snacks increases following the time change and
2. visits to fitness centers decrease.

The effect on calorie consumption is amplified during the evening hours and for cloudy days. Further, visits to fitness centers are reduced among fitness center members who live farther away and who do not visit the fitness centers regularly. Finally, we also examine the effect of the transition from daylight saving time to standard time (during fall) and find that there is no effect of the fall transition on calories consumed from unhealthy snacks. Our results highlight the role of sleepiness caused by the one-hour setback, which impairs consumers’ self-control and leads to less healthy consumption behavior.

Lessons for Public Policy Makers

Our study indicates that the onset of daylight saving time is an obstacle to consumers’ health goals, suggesting that policy makers should continue trying to end the time changes. Further, from a consumer well-being perspective, public health campaigns promoting healthy eating and exercise might be especially necessary around the time change.

“Our study indicates that the onset of daylight saving time is an obstacle to consumers’ health goals, suggesting that policy makers should continue trying to end the time changes.”

Lessons for Consumers

We suggest that consumers follow self-control strategies such as avoiding stocking up on unhealthy snacks before the time change. Conversely, fitness center members might plan activities close to the center to reduce the effort required to visit it following the time change. Consumers vulnerable to self-control failures might also seek support from peers (e.g., online social networks) and platforms incentivizing healthy behavior (e.g., through gamification).

Novel technologies, such as smart circadian lighting systems, might also help consumers reset their circadian clocks in a less disruptive fashion. Apps originally designed for travelers to reduce jet lag can be used to minimize the effect of the time change.

Lessons for Chief Marketing Officers

Firms involved in health-related industries can use the insights from the study to anticipate demand and to better serve their customers around the onset of daylight saving time. For instance, when daylight saving time starts, fitness centers could offer promotions like free coffee or a competition or event to bring people in and counter their tendency to skip exercising.

Overall, policy makers, consumers, and firms can benefit from our study by anticipating the likelihood with which people will be thrown off course due to the disruption caused by the time change and discussing steps that might be taken by stakeholders to mitigate the negative consequences.

Source: Ramkumar Janakiraman, Harsha Kamatham, Sven Feurer, Rishika Rishika, Bhavna Phogaat, and Marina Girju, “,” Journal of Marketing.

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“Known as a shareholder derivative complaint, such legal actions seek to hold company officials responsible for alleged missteps and could result in defendants or their insurers paying monetary damages to a corporation and prompt internal governance changes,” according to . However, what happens when legal changes aimed to prevent frivolous lawsuits diminish such litigation risk? In a , we document the unintended consequence of firms becoming less likely to recall products.

At the heart of our study is a legal change called Universal Demand (UD) laws, which different states across the U.S. adopted between 1989 and 2015. UD laws make it more difficult for shareholders to file a derivative lawsuit to hold managers liable for breaching their fiduciary duties. In particular, these laws require shareholders to first demand that the firm’s board of directors takes legal action against the wrongdoers. As board members themselves are often defendants in the proposed lawsuit, they typically refuse such requests. Because judges tend to follow the decisions of boards, the case is often dismissed.

UD laws are intended to prevent frivolous derivative litigation from disrupting a firm’s normal business operations and to sort cases with merit from those without. UD laws are well-intended and linked to some positive consequences such as increased corporate innovation. However, the reduced threat of shareholder litigation as a governance mechanism disciplining a firm’s managers could have unintended negative consequences. We examine this notion in the context of managerial decision making around product recalls by combining theoretical insights from agency theory with a business ethics perspective. 

What Should Managers Do?

Managers of publicly-listed firms should ideally strive to safeguard the long-term value of the firm, but in practice, they often face incentives and pressures leading to an overemphasis on short-term goals. Accordingly, managers are motivated to avoid recalls to avert immediate costs such as lost sales, an impaired reputation, and consumer compensation. However, this could lead to even bigger long-term damage to firms’ future stock price. Consequently, shareholders might sue managers for neglecting their fiduciary duties. UD laws reduce the risk of being held personally liable by shareholders, and we explore whether this changes firms’ likelihood to recall products.

Analyzing over 30 years of data, we find robust evidence that the reduction in shareholder litigation risk caused by UD law adoption leads to a substantial drop in product recall likelihood. Firms incorporated in states that have adopted UD laws are almost 30% less likely to announce a product recall. Importantly, the effect holds even when controlling for potential improvements in product quality.

Firms incorporated in states that have adopted UD laws are almost 30% less likely to announce a product recall.

We also find that managers’ opportunistic response to UD law adoption is less pronounced when organizational mechanisms mitigate agency conflicts between shareholders and managers. In particular, we find that the negative relationship between UD law adoption and product recall likelihood is less pronounced for more customer-focused firms or those subject to more stringent monitoring by institutional investors.

A Plan of Action for Legislators, Policymakers, and Firms

To alleviate the potentially detrimental effects of UD law adoption on consumer welfare and the future viability of the firm, we suggest the following action plan for legislators, public policymakers, firm owners, and consumer advocates.

• To enhance consumer protection in the near term, legislators need to overhaul UD laws to allow shareholders to claim demand futility when bringing a lawsuit concerning consumer safety. Demand futility enables shareholders to avoid the demand requirement if they can allege with particularity that demand will be futile because company directors have a conflict of interest.

• Public policymakers need to take a more holistic view when considering and implementing legal changes. That is, legislators tasked with revising corporate law should coordinate with regulators in charge of consumer protection. While doing so, these stakeholders should leverage insights from behavioral economics to anticipate unintended consequences of well-intended laws. 

• Shareholders and consumer advocates need to stimulate firms to increase their customer orientation. This is because a more pronounced customer focus reduces the level of managerial opportunism around product recall decisions. Firms can achieve this by appointing (more) marketing executives to the board, such as Chief Marketing Officers. 

• Finally, strategizing around the ownership composition of the firm can be beneficial. In particular, initiatives to attract more institutional investors to take a meaningful ownership stake in the firm are likely to pay dividends in terms of reducing managerial opportunism around product recall decisions.

From: Arvid O. I. Hoffmann, Chee S. Cheong, Hoàng-Long Phan, and Ralf Zurbruegg, “,” Journal of Marketing.

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