EnANPAD 2017 São Paulo / SP - 01 a 04 de Outubro de 2017 Happiness and Consumer Behavior in the Marketing Field: A Literature Overview and Research Agenda Proposition Autoria Cecilia M Lobo de Araujo - [email protected] Mestr e Dout em Admin de Empresas /FGV/EAESP - Fundação Getulio Vargas/Esc de Admin de Empresas de São Paulo Resumo A systematic review of the literature that relates happiness and consumer behavior in the marketing field is made, 235 articles are classified and 36 are content analyzed. It is presented the most important aspects of the field: most influent journals, evolution of the number of publications across time, influent authors, utilized methodologies of research, target groups studied, happiness definition and measures utilized, popular topics of the field and most salient discussions. A research agenda is proposed focused on identified needs and motivated questions raised by the review. An experiment, that explore higher level of satisfaction between consumption alternatives in order to maximize happiness through consumption, developed with American undergraduate students, and published at the Journal of Consumer Research, is a typical articles of the field. The needs to explore alternative consumer targets and increase the use of qualitative methodologies are identified and Happiness as a subject matter that needs to have explored its “dark side” is one of the research propositions. EnANPAD 2017 São Paulo / SP - 01 a 04 de Outubro de 2017 Happiness and Consumer Behavior in the Marketing Field: A Literature Overview and Research Agenda Proposition Abstract A systematic review of the literature that relates happiness and consumer behavior in the marketing field is made, 235 articles are classified and 36 are content analyzed. It is presented the most important aspects of the field: most influent journals, evolution of the number of publications across time, influent authors, utilized methodologies of research, target groups studied, happiness definition and measures utilized, popular topics of the field and most salient discussions. A research agenda is proposed focused on identified needs and motivated questions raised by the review. An experiment, that explore higher level of satisfaction between consumption alternatives in order to maximize happiness through consumption, developed with American undergraduate students, and published at the Journal of Consumer Research, is a typical articles of the field. The needs to explore alternative consumer targets and increase the use of qualitative methodologies are identified and Happiness as a subject matter that needs to have explored its “dark side” is one of the research propositions. Key words: Happiness, Consumer behavior, Consumer satisfaction, Subjective well-being. Introduction In common language happiness can be something from momentary joy to something that last and is a state of inner satisfaction. The original Greek meaning of happiness and a good life is being fortunate, lucky, and blessed, which is highly contingent upon external conditions and can be achieved only by very small and extremely fortunate talented individuals. This fragile, external view of happiness was dominant for centuries (Oishi, Graham, Kesebir, & Galinha, 2013). The unattainable happiness idea starts to gradually change with St. Thomas Aquinas that claimed in the 13th century that partial happiness can be achieved through “theological virtues”, the moral obligation to advance after human happiness is a fruit of the European ‘Enlightenment’, intellectual movement on the 18th century that was centered in reason and logic and against all metaphysical entities and religious views that had dominated thinking in the European Middle age (Veenhoven, 2015). The idea that humans are entitled to pursue and attain happiness gained acceptance throughout history even having resistance of the churches and competing ideas like the nationalism. The main act representing that movement was the Declaration of Independence of USA in 1776 by Thomas Jefferson’s that includes the pursuit of happiness along with life and liberty as an unalienable right. The study of Happiness and Well-being, beyond philosophy and psychiatry, can be considered born in 1967 by Warner Wilson and his article "Correlates of Avowed Happiness" that traces the profile of a happy person and open the discussion about happiness beyond a philosophical approach (Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999); officially, the inclusion of happiness as an index term by the Psychological Abstracts International occur only in 1973. In 1974 the foundation of the journal Social Indicators Research that devote a large number of articles to subjective well-being and its association, through correlations, to income, consumption, life style, demographics, etc. materialize the discussion (Diener, 1984). According to the study of Kullenberg & Nelhans (2015) the emergence of happiness research on social science occurs after the year 2000 with Diener-Watson and respectively SWLS (Satisfaction with Life Scale) and PANAS (Positive Affect and Negative Affect Scale) scales as the established methodological tools. In the Journal of Consumer Research, one of the first articles that link consumption to happiness appear in 1978 (Goldberg & Gorn, 1978), it 1 EnANPAD 2017 São Paulo / SP - 01 a 04 de Outubro de 2017 discuss the strong influence of TV advertising on children’s and consequent unhappiness after frustrated request of advertised products. This article intends to give an overview of the field of happiness studies focused on consumer behavior and marketing, and make some propositions about future research possibilities as an invitation for colleagues to work on the theme, or at least have a perspective of possibilities. A systematic literature review is made; 235 five articles were initially selected resulting in 99 articles without duplicity, bibliometric indicators were developed and 36 articles were analyzed in content. The analysis detect the most relevant aspects of the field such as: most influent journals, evolution of the number of publications across time, influent authors, utilized methodologies of research, target groups studied, happiness definitions and measures utilized, popular topics of the field and most salient discussions. A research agenda is proposed focused on identified needs and motivated questions raised by the review. The article is organized as follow: Methodology, Results and Analysis, Research Agenda Proposition, and Conclusion. Methodology A systematic literature review was made inspired by Tranfield, Denyer, & Smart (2003) and applied for in Cacciotti & Hayton (2015) that set up the need to follow a very specific protocol and parameters, a very important need in this study based on the large volume of existing literature on happiness studies in different areas of knowledge, from health and medicine to sociology (Kullenberg & Nelhans, 2015). The first step was to define Scopus database as the source of articles, this database was chosen based on the collection of indexed journals, all relevant journals of the marketing field are listed; Next step and concern was the need to be very specific about the wording and parameters, but not too narrow, in order to have a rich overview of the marketing field. As an example: without parameters, the words “happiness” and “consumer behavior” result in almost three million references. This study decides to use the specific word “Happiness” as the term for the title or subject, even knowing that “subjective well-being” “life satisfaction” and “positive affect” are sometimes used as interchangeable words in part of the literature on happiness (Kullenberg & Nelhans, 2015). That decision was made based on the previous identification that in the consumer behavior and marketing field that term was common used, and it was also as strategy to be more specific. In short, the parameters for terms were: “happiness” on title OR subject AND “consumer behavior” as subject; extra filters were all the references should be academic articles, peer reviewed, and specifically from the marketing field. This search results in 235 articles that ended in 99 articles after the automatic removal of duplicities (Table 1). The third step was to transfer all those articles to a spreadsheet and start to classify all the references. The first classification was the source or journal of origin of each article; after, each article was ranked according to H index (Scimago 2015, SJR – Scientific Journal Rank). For the purpose of this article, the journals that have H index superior to sixty nine were considered; it is the equivalent to the top 11 journals of the Marketing field. The journals that fit those parameters and have articles represented in the sample were: Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Psychology and Marketing, International Journal of Research in Marketing and Journal of Consumer Psychology. Forty three articles were selected (seven articles were identified as duplications and were manually removed) and a bibliometric and content analysis was developed with the 36 articles. 2 EnANPAD 2017 São Paulo / SP - 01 a 04 de Outubro de 2017 The fourth step was to continue to classify those articles in content details. All the articles were fully read in order to extract the following information: name of the article; authors; journal; year of publication; methodology; description of the methodology, topic related to happiness; research question; target group of the research;