Journal of International Marketing

Among the myriad challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic, many touched on how individuals chose to utilize their resources to protect their personal well-being and the downstream impact on society. Marketing researchers rose to the challenge, and much work in the 2020–2022 period has been devoted to improving well-being by using marketing theory to create better health messaging, develop effective interventions, understand mechanisms that shift purchasing patterns, motivate cooperation and compliance, and speak to the high-impact decisions that people and organizations are being forced to make each day. Here, the author introduces the Protection Knowledge Model to synthesize much of the research to date on COVID-19 response. This model highlights the individual–institution interaction in how people choose (and institutions promote) protective strategies and focuses on the dangers of misalignment in individuals’ and institutions’ knowledge of each other and of the situation.

How does culture influence vaccination acceptance? This is an important question facing managers, policy makers, and global health organizations. Even with effective vaccines for highly contagious diseases, humankind remains at risk from vaccine hesitancy. The authors conduct a large-scale multilevel analysis of more than 400,000 survey respondents and find that COVID-19 vaccination intentions are higher among people from countries that are higher in cultural collectivism (Study 1). Follow-up studies indicate that vaccination acceptance is higher among people who endorse collectivistic values because they feel more empathy for those afflicted by the disease (Studies 2a, 2b, 3), especially when victims of the disease have characteristics (e.g., political affiliation, lifestyle, personality) similar to themselves (Study 3). To encourage vaccination acceptance, the authors suggest promoting collectivistic values and empathic concern, as well as homophily through the portrayal of victims with characteristics like those hesitant to accept vaccination.

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 (coronavirus) outbreak a pandemic. In the following days, media reports showed that consumers increasingly stockpiled groceries and household supplies. Interestingly, behavioral data show that this stockpiling exhibited considerable heterogeneity across countries. Building on cultural dimension theory, the authors theorize that this heterogeneity can be explained by countries’ cultural values: consumer stockpiling after the World Health Organization's announcement was more pronounced in countries whose residents show high uncertainty avoidance, low long-term orientation, low indulgence, and high individualism. The authors confirm these propositions using global mobility data from Google matched with country-level data on cultural values, pandemic reaction policies, and other key variables. This research note thereby integrates the previously disconnected literature on cultural dimension theory and consumer stockpiling in general, as well as provides new and significant knowledge about cross-cultural consumer behavior in crises. Furthermore, the authors provide actionable insights for international policy makers and business managers who aim to predict or control consumer stockpiling in future global crises to enhance consumer well-being.

Through two studies conducted with cross-cultural samples (the United States and China), this research examines the psychological mechanism of consumer hoarding during COVID-19. Findings from Study 1 suggest that consumer hoarding is differently affected by legacy and social media information seeking, perceived scarcity, and scarcity attributions in the United States versus China. For China, while social media information seeking has a negative downstream relationship to hoarding, legacy media information seeking has a positive relationship with hoarding. In the United States, only social media information seeking has a positive relationship with hoarding. Further, these effects are significant when consumers attribute the scarcity responsibility to insufficient supply but not high demand. Study 2 shows that when the cause of scarcity is stated directly, perceived scarcity increases hoarding intention for Chinese consumers when the scarcity cause is due to supply but not demand, whereas U.S. consumers’ hoarding intention does not vary with the scarcity cause. The findings underscore cross-cultural differences in how legacy and social media information seeking influence consumer hoarding and highlight implications for situations in which hoarding is likely.

Mental health issues are increasingly prevalent worldwide, emphasizing the need to research antecedents and consequences of well-being. Prior research shows that within organizations, higher levels of subjective well-being (SWB) promote productivity performance. Building on this research, the authors hypothesize that recreational dance positively influences productivity through higher SWB. Survey data from Brazil, Italy, and the United Kingdom reveal that recreational dancers are more productive than nondancers due to their higher intrinsic motivation and SWB. Dancing has an additional direct effect on productivity, beyond the mediating role of SWB. The results indicate well-being and productivity improvements in all three countries, although they show a moderating effect such that the relationship between recreational dance and SWB is stronger when social norms are perceived to be looser. This study indicates potentially far-reaching benefits that could be achieved by including recreational dance in corporate well-being programs. International dance organizations could market dance classes as a pathway to increase productivity at work and explore synergies with public health marketing to promote the benefits of recreational dance in joint international campaigns.

Global crises have become increasingly more frequent and consequential. Yet the impact of these crises is unevenly distributed across countries, leading to discrepancies in (inter)national crisis-regulating institutions’ ability to uphold public trust and safeguard their constituents’ well-being. Employing the paradigm of citizens as customers of political institutions, drawing on attribution and sociopolitical trust theories, and using the COVID-19 pandemic as an empirical context, the authors investigate how consumers’ relative perceptions of local impact following a global crisis affect the psychological processes of institutional trust formation and consumer well-being. Conducting one survey-based study in two countries affected disproportionately by the pandemic’s first wave (the United States and Greece) and one experimental study in a third country (Italy) during the pandemic’s second wave, the authors find that institutional trust declines more in countries whose citizens hold perceptions of higher relative local impact following a global crisis; institutional blame attributions explain trust erosion; institutional distrust decreases consumer well-being and adherence to institutional guidelines; consumers’ globalization attitudes immunize international institutions from blame and distrust; and political conservatives transfer blame and distrust from national to international institutions amid global crises. The findings enrich the institutional branding and trust literatures and have implications for stakeholders involved in global crisis management (e.g., policy makers, political marketers, institutional brand managers).