The Communal Consumer: Longitudinal Evidence for the Distinction between Nurturing and Affiliative Motives

Abstract

Consumer behavior is influenced by both consumers’ chronic motivations and salient environmental or situational cues. Consequently, marketers are in interested in knowing how naturally occurring phenomena alter the salience of different cues and interact with consumers’ chronic motivations. This work uses the context of prosocial spending to understand how two distinct communal motivations—nurturing and affiliative—are responsive to different salient cues. First, we use the Communal and Agentic Motives with Standards scale to measure consumers’ chronic nurturing and affiliative motives. Second, we leverage longitudinal designs to capture the salience of different environmental and situational cues and demonstrate how consumers’ chronic motivations interact with these cues in a dynamic and systematic way. Specifically, consumers with strong nurturing motives increased prosocial spending when cues related to compassion were salient. In contrast, consumers with strong affiliative motives increased prosocial spending when cues related to the value of relationships were salient.