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Although many consumers turn to financial counseling to improve their financial well-being, the effectiveness of these counseling services remains nebulous and the exact mechanisms through which they improve consumer well-being require further research. This longitudinal research demonstrates that consumers' coproduction of financial counseling services is pivotal for increasing their credit scores and for decreasing their financial stress. Drawing on self-determination theory, this study also shows that financial literacy, consumer involvement, and attachment styles are important drivers of coproduction. Involvement plays a moderating role, such that higher involvement substitutes for lower levels of financial literacy and mitigates the negative effects of attachment avoidance on coproduction. These findings help both counseling agencies and public policy makers improve the effectiveness of financial counseling. Financial counselors should track their customers' objective and subjective financial literacy, involvement, and attachment styles, then segment customers, and, finally, tailor the service provision accordingly, to leverage coproduction as the pathway to consumers' financial well-being. From a public policy perspective, the findings suggest that efforts to improve consumer financial literacy are important but should be supplemented with programs designed to increase consumer involvement in financial counseling; this combination promises to foster coproduction and improve consumers' financial well-being.

Relational orientations vary across customers, so marketing activities should be customized to individual customers or market segments. However, little is known about the underlying processes that influence how customers bond with a service firm and its employees. This article explains customer-firm and customer-employee relationships using attachment theory. It provides theoretical and empirical evidence that customers with low levels of attachment anxiety and low levels of attachment avoidance perceive a service firm and service employee more positively—in terms of satisfaction, trust, and affective commitment—than customers with high levels. However, since a service firm and service employee are separate attachment targets, this study also tests whether customers have a similar propensity to bond with both. Insecurely attached customers who find interpersonal bonds with employees deficient, compensate for this deficiency by being more likely to bond with the service firm. Companies that measure customer attachment styles can better segment markets, manage customer relationships, and allocate resources more effectively. For example, customers with low levels of attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance toward the firm are candidates for social relationship programs, whereas customers with high levels of attachment avoidance are likely to be more responsive to financial reward programs.

A service provider's conspicuous consumption can undermine customer attitudes and behavioral intentions toward the provider—a so-called penalty effect of conspicuous consumption. Four studies investigate customer and contextual factors that moderate this penalty effect. The results show that customers low in materialism penalize service providers who consume conspicuously (e.g., decreased patronage intentions). In addition, as another facet of the penalty effect, a service provider's conspicuous consumption undermines customer cost-benefit assessments (decreased perceived value and price fairness), which function as mediating variables. However, service providers can use "service warmth" as a protective strategy to attenuate the penalty effect. Notably, materialistic customers do not react more favorably to service providers who engage in conspicuous consumption (in contrast with their established tendency to favor conspicuous goods). Taken together, the results provide a deeper and theoretically nuanced understanding of when and how customers respond negatively to conspicuous service providers, with meaningful implications for the management of services. For example, when service firms design their aesthetic labor strategy, they should consider their customers' levels of materialism accordingly. In addition, service firms need to educate their frontline employees about the potential downsides of displaying conspicuous consumption cues.

Despite the ubiquity of free e-services (e.g., free music/video streaming services), little empirical research has examined how consumers assess such service offerings. This research reveals the crucial role of consumer-perceived nonmonetary costs (NMCs; e.g., related to advertising intrusiveness) to better explain the zero-price effect (ZPE). Four experiments show that free e-services elicit positive affect in consumers, which leads to two distinct effects that drive the ZPE: a benefit-inflation effect, such that consumers overemphasize the benefits of free e-services, and a cost-deflation effect, such that they also judge the corresponding NMCs as lower. Furthermore, the authors find that the social norm of reciprocity increases consumers' acceptance of NMCs. This research provides managerial guidance on how to better market free service offerings. Companies that consider providing basic and premium offerings should include a free basic option, which increases consumers' benefit perceptions, lowers their perceptions of NMCs, and consequently increases demand for this service option. Finally, the findings help managers model the trade-off between immediate additional revenue generated by the fees consumers pay for a premium option and the revenue stream that a free basic option generates (e.g., through higher advertising revenues).

Abstract
With its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the United Nations (UN) developed 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a "blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet." This initiative raises the question: how has the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) shed light on the SDGs? This research analyzes 50 years of consumer research through the lens of the SDG and makes four contributions. First, the authors provide a content analysis of articles in JCR and how it relates to the SDGs over time; they also analyze the Journal of Consumer Psychology (JCP) and Journal of Public Policy & Marketing (JPP&M) with regard to the SDGs. Second, this research reveals where JCR has made progress and achieved impact (via Altmetric) but also identifies gaps in the literature. Thus, the analyses shed light on what research in JCR, JCP, and JPP&M understands (and does not understand) about consumer behavior and points the way to future SDG-oriented research. Finally, based on insights from interviews with thought leaders, sociology of science, UN data dashboards, and an exploratory survey in three countries (the U.S., France, and Singapore), the authors provide recommendations on how the field can (better) incorporate the SDGs in research, teaching, and service.

Tasked with a greater role in the coproduction of expert services, consumers often face an immense burden in coproducing service and well-being outcomes. While some prior research has explored customer work, we delineate unique aspects of expert services and articulate consumer efforts that transpire outside the dyadic service interaction. Through netnographic inquiry in a health care context, we find that coproduction efforts are job-like and require job crafting efforts. Upon this foundation, three major themes emerged: (1) consumers leverage their context expertise by adapting content expertise to their unique circumstances, (2) consumers develop and deploy strategies (hacks) through affordances in order to manage their coproduction jobs, and (3) consumers move through the expert service journey in a variety of ways that shift them toward or away from well-being outcomes. After assessing the transferability of our results by analyzing a second expert service context (financial services/debt management), we suggest implications for theory, practice, and future research.

Although calls for inclusiveness in services are becoming more vigorous, empirical research on how to design and implement service inclusion for stigmatized consumers remains scant. This paper draws on key questions of personalization (i.e., who personalizes what for whom?) to tailor the (a) source and (b) content of marketing messages in order to better include stigmatized consumers. The authors examine this idea in three experiments in healthcare/well-being settings. In terms of message source, the results show that, in interpersonal interactions, service companies can employ the principle of homophily to better engage stigmatized consumers (Study 1). In contrast, homophily-inspired personalized messages to stigmatized consumers can backfire in the context of consumer-artificial intelligence (AI)-interactions (human-to-avatar interactions; Study 2). Moreover, in terms of message content, Study 3 explores how, and under which conditions, companies can leverage thinking AI versus feeling AI for improved service inclusiveness. Finally, the studies point to anticipated consumer well-being as a crucial mediator driving effective service inclusiveness among stigmatized consumers. The results not only contribute to an emerging theory of service inclusiveness, but also provide service scholars and managers with initial empirical results on the role of AI in inclusive services.

Technology is rapidly changing the nature of service, customers' service frontline experiences, and customers' relationships with service providers. Based on the prediction that in the marketplace of 2025, technology (e.g., service-providing humanoid robots) will be melded into numerous service experiences, this article spotlights technology's ability to engage customers on a social level as a critical advancement of technology infusions. Specifically, it introduces the novel concept of automated social presence (ASP; i.e., the extent to which technology makes customers feel the presence of another social entity) to the services literature. The authors develop a typology that highlights different combinations of automated and human social presence in organizational frontlines and indicates literature gaps, thereby emphasizing avenues for future research. Moreover, the article presents a conceptual framework that focuses on (a) how the relationship between ASP and several key service and customer outcomes is mediated by social cognition and perceptions of psychological ownership as well as (b) three customer-related factors that moderate the relationship between ASP and social cognition and psychological ownership (i.e., a customer's relationship orientation, tendency to anthropomorphize, and technology readiness). Finally, propositions are presented that can be a catalyst for future work to enhance the understanding of how technology infusion, particularly service robots, influences customers' frontline experiences in the future.

Responsibilization, or the shift in functions and risks from providers and producers to the consumer, has become an increasingly common policy in service systems and marketplaces (e.g., financial, health, governmental). Responsibilization is often presented as synonymous with consumer agency and well-being. We take a transformative service research perspective and utilize the resource integration framework to investigate whether responsibilization is truly associated with well-being. We focus on expert services, where responsibilization concerns are particularly salient, and question whether this expanding policy is in the public interest. In the process, we develop a conceptualization of resource integration under responsibilization that includes three levels of actors (consumer, provider and service system), the identification of structural tensions to resource integration and three categories of resource integration practices (access, appropriation and management) necessary to negotiate responsibilization. Our findings have important implications for health care providers, public policy makers, and other service systems, all of which must pay more active attention to the challenges consumers face in negotiating responsibilization and the resulting well-being outcomes.