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This paper aims to examine the interplay of emotions and consumption within intergenerational exchanges. It shows how emotions pervade the trajectories of grandmothers’ relational identities with their grandchildren through consumption practices.

This study analyses qualitative data gathered via 28 long interviews with French grandmothers and 27 semi-structured interviews with their grandchildren. This study draws on attachment theory to interpret the voices of both grandmothers and their grandchildren within these dyads.

This study uncovers distinct relational identities of grandmothers linked to emotions and the age of the grandchild, as embedded in consumption. It identifies the defining characteristics of the trajectory of social/relational identities and finds these to be linked to grandchildren’s ages.

This study elicits the emotion profiles, which influence grandmothers’ patterns of consumption in their relationships with their grandchildren. It further uncovers distinct attachment styles (embedded in emotions) between grandmothers and grandchildren in the context of their consumption experiences. Finally, it provides evidence that emotions occur at the interpersonal level. This observation is an addition to existing literature in consumer research, which has often conceived of consumer emotions as being only a private matter and as an intrapersonal phenomenon.

The findings offer avenues for the development of strategies for intergenerational marketing, particularly promotion campaigns which link either the reinforcement or the suppression of emotion profiles in advertising messages with the consumption of products or services by different generations.

This study suggests that public institutions might multiply opportunities for family and consumer experiences to combat specific societal issues related to elderly people’s isolation.

In contrast to earlier work, which has examined emotions within the ebb and flow of individual and multiple social identities, this study examines how emotions and consumption play out in social/relational identity trajectories.

This paper aims to examine how ambivalence and intergenerational support intersect with consumption in experiences of sharing within the family.

Consumer research studies usually use one of two family paradigms (i.e. solidarity and conflict), but the role of ambivalence in family ties is often neglected. This paper examines how ambivalence relates to adult intergenerational support, specifically within the context of sharing, consumption and family identity. In contrast to consumer research studies, sociological studies identify the intersection between intergenerational ambivalence and intergenerational support within family life. This study draws on sociology literature to interpret data from phenomenological interviews with downwardly mobile Greek consumers involved in familial intergenerational support and sharing. The voices of adult recipients and providers of resources are captured, and the transcribed interview texts are analysed using a phenomenological-hermeneutical process.

Three types of consumer ambivalence were identified that reflected different types of conflicts between consumption choices and different levels of family identity (collective, relational and individual).

Future research should explore ambivalence and family sharing in different family structures and during different transitions. Future research should also investigate how this study’s findings resonate in societies less affected by austerity measures with stronger welfare states that nevertheless experience a rise in intergenerational support.

The study problematises previously somewhat polarised (i.e. positive vs bleak) views of the family in consumer research. Family sharing is highlighted as a major antecedent to consumer ambivalence, and different types of consumer ambivalence within intergenerational relationships within families are conceptualised. This paper proposes an extended typology of coping strategies aligned along a practical–emotional continuum.

This study aims to address the challenge of encouraging customers to join hotels’ green loyalty programmes (LPs) by examining the impact on customers’ decisions of their trait reactance, anticipated guilt and the physical attractiveness of service employees.

The authors conducted three preliminary studies and one main study using scenario-based online surveys targeting Chinese hotel customers. The first two preliminary studies (N1A = 100, N1B = 158) explored the negative emotions (guilt vs. shame) linked to non-participation in green LPs, while the third study (N1C = 110) examined gender’s role in perceived physical attractiveness. The main study (n = 836) tested the three-way interaction effect.

This analysis confirms that guilt, rather than shame, plays a significant role in the decision-making process for participating in green LPs. The results reveal that trait reactance strongly deters participation intention when customers anticipate low guilt and perceive service employees as less attractive. Notably, higher anticipated guilt renders trait reactance ineffective in influencing intentions, regardless of employees’ attractiveness.

The results reveal that a high level of anticipated guilt is the key to boosting customers’ intention to participate in a hotel’s green LP, which can mitigate the negative impact of customers’ trait reactance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate how anticipated guilt can lessen the negative effects of customers’ trait reactance on their intention to participate in green LPs. In addition, the findings reveal that guilt not only narrows customers’ attentional focus but also influences how the attractiveness of service employees affects their decision-making processes. the work introduces a new angle on how emotional responses (anticipated guilt) interact with physical cues (employee attractiveness) in shaping customer decisions concerning the hotel’s green initiatives.

Literature from across the social sciences and research evidence are used to highlight interdisciplinary and intersectional research approaches to food and family. Responsibilisation emerges as an important thematic thread, as family has (compared with the state and corporations) been increasingly made responsible for its members’ health and diet.

Three questions are addressed: first, to what extent food is fundamentally social, and integral to family identity, as reflected in the sociology of food; second, how debates about families and food are embedded in global, political and market systems; and third, how food work and caring became constructed as gendered.

Interest in food can be traced back to early explorations of class, political economy, the development of commodity culture and gender relations. Research across the social sciences and humanities draws on concepts that are implicitly sociological. Food production, mortality and dietary patterns are inextricably linked to the economic/social organisation of capitalist societies, including its gender-based divisions of domestic labour. DeVault’s (1991) groundbreaking work reveals the physical and emotional work of providing/feeding families, and highlights both its class and gendered dimensions. Family mealtime practices have come to play a key role in the emotional reinforcement of the idea of the nuclear family.

This study highlights the imperative to take pluri-disciplinary and intersectional approaches to researching food and family. In addition, this paper emphasises that feeding the family is an inherently political, moral, ethical, social and emotional process, frequently associated with gendered constructions.

Although there has been some research into young consumers, for instance their approaches to product categorization; their decision‐making strategies; and their role in family decision making, considerable work remains to be done to understand how young consumers develop brand loyalty, brand preference and reliance. This paper reports the initial findings from an exploratory study of over 200 young consumers (aged 7‐10) which examined perceptions of branded fashion clothing; and the impact of social influences on young consumers’ evaluations of branded fashion products. The findings indicate that product/brand imagery is clearly established among young consumers, particularly for branded fashion sportswear; and the results suggest that research design must take account of both age and gender differences when choosing methods for eliciting data from young consumers.

The purpose of this paper is to address the meaning of food consumption practices in maintaining intergenerational relationships between young university students and their parents.

Student food consumption has been mainly studied through quantitative methods, treating students as a homogenous group, more or less living in a vacuum, and often with the focus on nutrition. This paper gives voice to young adults to unpack the significance of cooking and food consumption in relation to maintaining or changing family ties. The study is based on 12 qualitative interviews, five focus groups and a workshop, with Danish and international students in Denmark. Theoretically, the study draws on family, consumption and transition research.

The authors identify four realms of intergenerational relationships in the context of food. The relationships range from a wish either to maintain the status quo in the relationship, or to change and rethink the relationship, and importantly, the act of maintaining or changing the family relationships may be initiated either by the grown-up child or by the parent. The study concludes that the act of moving away from home is a period of intense (re)construction of food consumption habits and skills, which draw several threads back to the family home, and relationships undergo change in various ways.

The limitations of this study are that it has been carried out only in a Danish context.

The contributions of the study are capturing the children’s view of this transition, and providing insights into how apparently mundane consumption can be full of symbolic meaning. The paper will be of interest for researchers and practitioners seeking to understand intergenerational relations and consumption.

Purpose: This chapter seeks to understand ethnic identification among second-generation consumers by drawing upon the lived experiences of British Indian migrants in England.

Methodology/Approach: The authors analyze interviews with middle-class, Hindu, second-generation British Indian women through Bourdieu’s key concepts of capital, field, habitus, and distinction.

Findings: Through resources such as Bollywood cinema, and Indian schools for language, music, and dance, second-generation consumers acquire, use and (re) produce situationally prized subcultural capital for distinction from other ethnic consumers and members of the white majority group. Ethnicity is central to second-generation consumers’ identity projects, and their everyday social interactions. Ethnicity is considered in uplifting and empowering terms, and first-generation consumers play a key role in reinforcing this belief.

Research Limitations/Implications: Due to our small sample size, limited by class, religion, and gender, the findings of this chapter might not be generalizable to the wider population. Instead, they can be used to develop new theoretical ways of understanding ethnicity in multicultural settings with long-established migrant populations.

Social Implications: Ethnicity can play a central and positive role in the everyday lives of second-generation consumers. By investigating this further, we can improve our understanding of contemporary, multicultural societies.

Originality/Value of Paper: Prior work in consumer research has focused on understanding first-generation migrant consumers through the lens of acculturation, and foregrounding experiences of stigma and tension. Instead, the authors foreground the positive and uplifting lived experiences of second-generation consumers in relation to their ethnicity. This chapter extends the literature on second-generation ethnic consumer identity work.

Mixed emotions (i.e. consumer ambivalence) play a central role in approach‐avoidance conflicts in retailing. In order to assess how consumer ambivalence impacts shopping behaviour, this paper seeks to conceptualize and investigate the multi‐dimensional antecedents of approach‐avoidance conflicts, experienced by shoppers in changing retail environments, and the importance of approach‐avoidance conflicts for consumers' decision to stay and complete their purchase in that particular shopping channel.

Using a cross‐country study, which compared online and offline consumers, the paper tested the influence of the situation, product, and reference group on shoppers' intentions; and identified how consumers' mixed emotions influenced approach‐avoidance conflicts in different retail settings.

Whereas some distinctions could be drawn between online and offline contexts when examining the impact of market‐related, product‐related and social factors on consumers' decision to shop (H1, H2, H3 and H4), no clear distinction could be drawn between online and offline channels in terms of mediating effects of mixed emotions (H5, H6 and H7). Mixed emotions (ambivalence) did mediate the impact of certain product‐related, market‐related and personal factors on consumers' intention to purchase.

Retailers need to reduce the impact of consumers' emotional responses to the retail setting where mixed emotions are likely to lead to consumers leaving the stores. For online shops, those retailers are successful who are able to induce behavioural reactions that make consumers return and explore the web site and not use it for search only.

Responding to calls for further research on mixed emotions and their consequences, the paper captures the complex impact of consumers' mixed emotions on approach‐avoidance conflicts, and thereby extends earlier work on consumer ambivalence.