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Abstract
Although consumers typically expect organizations to profit from marketing goods and services, they also believe that certain organizations, like those that focus on religion and health, should prioritize communal obligations. Indeed, consumers may find it morally distressing when communally focused organizations use overtly commercial marketing strategies like rebranding or value-based pricing. We demonstrate how moral distress and consumer backlash result from such taboo trade-offs and investigate when communal-sharing rhetoric for religious and pharmaceutical marketing reduces distress. Communal justifications used by communally focused organizations are particularly effective when consumers are not closely monitoring the motives of the organization or when the product is need-based. However, communal justifications become less effective and market-pricing justifications become more effective when consumers are attuned to the persuasive intentions of the organization. Implications for consumer goals are discussed.

Two studies demonstrated preference reversals using consumer products. Some subjects made a choice between a pair of food or hygiene products while others assigned minimum selling prices to each product. Product pairs were selected such that one item had a high market price but was undesirable (e.g. eggplant roulettes) while the other item had a low market price but was desirable (e.g. a can of soda). As predicted, most subjects choose the low market price/desirable item, but the high market price/undesirable item was assigned a higher minimum selling price. Experiment 1 used a hypothetical questionnaire, while in Experiment 2 responses had real consequences. The results suggest a market value heuristic such that when decision makers are unsure of how to translate their preference into a specific dollar amount they substitute the product's market price for their own preference. The implication of this heuristic is that if merchants consistently set the retail price of a particular product at a certain level, consumers will use that retail price as the basis of their pricing evaluations and will come to value the product at the retail price.