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In the last decade, customer engagement has become a key concept in service research. While the customer engagement literature has gained significant traction and is maturing, studies have predominantly focused on hedonic consumption contexts, such as social media platforms or brand communities. We argue that hedonic and utilitarian service services are fundamentally different. Therefore, existing research knowledge on customer engagement does not necessarily hold in more utilitarian contexts, such as healthcare or financial services, where greater customer engagement could increase societal and individual well-being. By synthesizing insights from the customer engagement literature and the literature on hedonic versus utilitarian consumption, we identify assumptions in customer engagement research that need revising. We extract five fundamental features that differ between hedonic and utilitarian services (affectivity, motivational focus, perception of necessity, role of risk, and relational focus). Based on these features, we derive propositions that describe the role of context for the drivers and outcomes of customer engagement, as well as their interrelationships, and provide guidelines for future research to augment the scope of customer engagement research. As its main contribution, this article problematizes the current premises of customer engagement research and demonstrates that assumptions held about customer engagement are not necessarily generalizable across contexts.

Improving and understanding financial well-being is important, as financial well-being contributes to health, happiness, and economic development. Currently, there is a global lack of financial well-being, which manifests as a variety of financial problems, such as a lack of engagement with financial services, poor financial decision-making, indebtedness, insufficient savings, and financial worries. This dissertation expands our understanding of financial well-being by bridging two main approaches to studying financial well-being - objective indicators and subjective perceptions. By combining questionnaires with microdata, the dissertation shows which objective indicators matter for subjective financial well-being. Furthermore, the dissertation focuses on improving financial well-being. First, the dissertation studies how a lack of customer engagement with financial services can be understood and improved. Next, it examines how individual differences in cognitive ability are related to financial well-being. Finally, the dissertation focuses on savings decisions and tests an intervention that facilitates forward-looking financial choices.

The increasing complexity of the modern financial landscape presents significant challenges for individuals’ financial well-being. In this study, we aim to investigate the relationship between cognitive ability and financial well-being by utilizing data from the British Cohort Study, which follows a sample of 13,000 individuals from birth in 1970 to the present day. Our objective is to examine the functional form of this relationship while controlling for factors such as childhood socio-economic status and adult income. Previous research has established a correlation between cognitive ability and financial well-being, but has implicitly assumed a linear relationship. Our analyses indicate that the majority of the relationships between cognitive ability and financial variables are monotonic. However, we also observe non-monotonic relationships, particularly for credit usage, suggesting a curvilinear relationship where both lower and higher levels of cognitive ability are associated with lower levels of debt. These findings have important implications for understanding the role of cognitive ability in financial well-being and for financial education and policy, as the complexity of the modern financial landscape poses significant challenges for individuals’ financial well-being. As financial complexity is increasing and cognitive ability is a key predictor of knowledge acquisition, misspecifying the true relationship between cognitive ability and financial outcomes leads to an undervaluation of the role of cognitive ability for financial well-being.

As the Dutch pension system will be changed in the upcoming years, there is much to learn from pension institutions that offer defined contribution (DC) products. The initial goal of this research was to find the best practices of DC pension communication. The results of fourteen interviews with pension institutions revealed characteristics of common practices rather than best practices.

As the Dutch pension system will be changed from a defined benefit (DB) system toward a defined contribution (DC) system in the upcoming years, there is much to learn from national and international pension institutions that offer DC products. Previously, we have covered the results from fourteen qualitative interviews with communication professionals from DC pension institutions in the Netherlands (Report 1). This report, Report 2, describes the results from fifteen interviews with communication professionals from pension institutions in Australia, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The coronavirus outbreak has led to abrupt changes in people’s daily lives as many state governments have restricted individuals’ movements in order to slow the spread of the virus. We conducted a natural experiment in the United States of America in April 2020, in which we compare responses from states with “stay-at-home orders” (3 states) and no such orders (6 states). We surveyed 458 participants (55.6% female, age range 25–64, Mage = 36.5) and examined the effects of these government-imposed restrictions on social, mental, physical, and financial well-being as well as the mediating role of resilience. Structural equation modeling reveals that resilience buffers stay-at-home orders’ potential side-effects on well-being. Specifically, individuals living in states with stay-at-home orders report lower functional well-being than individuals living in states without such orders, which negatively relates to resilience. Resilience in turn is associated with higher social, mental, physical, and financial well-being. Thus, resilience can be seen as an effective means of buffering stay-at-home orders’ potential negative effects on the components of well-being. Our results indicate the central role of resilience, which is crucial in dampening the effects of stay-at-home orders on well-being. Following our results, governments and policymakers should focus their efforts on strengthening individuals’ resilience, which is a key predictor of social, mental, financial, and physical well-being.

Income is considered a key driver of sustainable consumption. While descriptive studies suggest strong links between income and sustainability, its causal effect on the environmental impact of food consumption remains unclear. This study estimates the income elasticity of the environmental impact of household grocery purchases, the primary source of household food choices. Using panel data that includes (1) household-level scanner data on grocery purchases in two European countries and the United States, (2) product category-level environmental impact estimates, we report that a 1% increase in income leads to only a 0.02%, 0.04%, and 0.01% rise in food-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, respectively. We test whether this small effect masks opposing impacts on quantity versus composition of shopping baskets, but find minor effects in both dimensions. Robustness checks show our findings hold across sub-samples and time horizons, including persistence and magnitude of income changes. Administrative income data for the same households and periods in the Nether lands demonstrate our findings are not driven by imprecise measurement of income. Overall, income variation has limited influence on shifts toward lower-carbon-footprint grocery consumption, which has implications for policies to reduce environmental externalities in food consumption, and for income-based targeting strategies in the retail sector.

Consumer finances are a central construct in marketing research. Yet, its measurement is fragmented. It is unclear how measurement decisions affect conclusions on the role of consumer finances in consumer behavior. To address this issue, we construct a unique data set that links self-reported survey data on consumer finances to observed household income and wealth from high-quality administrative data based on tax registries. We compare subjective and objective financial measures and assess their reliability and concurrent validity across a range of marketing-relevant outcomes. First, we show that self-reported personal income measures are generally reliable, particularly when extreme values are winsorized or when categorical response formats with sufficient granularity are used. Second, we find that reports of household income are more error-prone than personal income but can be improved by correcting for the number of income earners in the household. Third, subjective financial well-being measures, although less frequently used in marketing research, outperform objective measures in explaining variance in consumption, financial problems, and happiness. Combining measures of income and subjective financial well-being yields the highest explanatory power for consumption behavior. We develop a decision framework that guides researchers in choosing the most suitable financial measures based on data availability and research objectives.

People save too little for their retirement. One reason for this could be that numerical retirement income projections (e.g. $2,487 per month) might hinder understanding of the consumption consequences of saving rate decisions. To address this issue, we conducted three experiments to assess how evaluative structures in the form of labels describing expected future consumption outcomes (e.g., “moderate” or “comfortable” lifestyles) and baskets (consumption possibilities per lifestyle) affect saving decisions. We find that, compared to numerical information, these evaluative structures lead to higher saving rates, but they work through different mechanisms. Labels increase savings through upward anchoring, whereas labels accompanied by baskets increase savings through both upward anchoring and enhanced mental imagery of future outcomes. Labels with consumption baskets are thus more effective at supporting individuals’ thoughtful choice. We do not find evidence of potential negative consequences of evaluative structures, such as downward anchoring, threshold effects, or satiation effects. We provide practical guidelines for implementing evaluative structures in the retirement savings context.