Stigmas, or discredited personal attributes, emanate from social perceptions of physical characteristics, aspects of character, and “tribal” associations (e.g., race; Goffman 1963). Extant research has emphasized the perspective of the stigma target, with some scholars exploring how social institutions shape stigma. Yet the ways stakeholders within the sociocommercial sphere create, perpetuate, or resist stigma remain overlooked. The authors introduce and define marketplace stigma as the labeling, stereotyping, and devaluation by and of commercial stakeholders (consumers, companies and their employees, stockholders, and institutions) and their offerings (products, services, and experiences). The authors offer the Stigma Turbine as a unifying conceptual framework that locates marketplace stigma within the broader sociocultural context and illuminates its relationship to forces that exacerbate or blunt stigma. In unpacking the Stigma Turbine, the authors reveal the critical role that market stakeholders can play in (de)stigmatization, explore implications for marketing practice and public policy, and offer a research agenda to further understanding of marketplace stigma and stakeholder welfare.
Keywords: stigma, discrimination, marketplace, stereotype, intersectionality
In practice, designers sometimes give products a human-like appearance in the hope of increasing liking due to anthropomorphizing. It remains an open research question, however, whether the mere morphological shape of a product's design is sufficient to activate a human schema. To investigate the spontaneous associations that are elicited by a product's shape, we ran a lexical decision task contrasting human faces, car fronts (which may resemble faces), and car sides. We examined further the effects of anthropomorphizing on explicit product evaluations. Our results support anthropomorphizing as an automatic process that affects explicit judgments but also reveal a moderating factor.
The Internet theoretically enables marketers to personalize a Web site to an individual consumer. This article examines optimal Website design from the perspective of personality trait theory and resource-matching theory. The influence of two traits relevant to Internet Web-site processing - sensation seeking and need for cognition - were studied in the context of resource matching and different levels of Web-site complexity. Data were collected at two points of time: personality-trait data and a laboratory experiment using constructed Web sites. Results reveal that (a) subjects prefer Web sites of a medium level of complexity, rather than high or low complexity; (b) high sensation seekers prefer complex visual designs, and low sensation seekers simple visual designs, both in Web sites of medium complexity; and (c) high need-for-cognition subjects evaluated Web sites with high verbal and low visual complexity more favorably.
