Treating Consumer Depression to Create Infiniti Potential

Abstract

This paper suggests that normative marketing practices alone may be inadequate to reverse deeply negative, affect-laden perceptions of customer satisfaction, such as those commonly reported in traditional automotive purchase/ ownership research. It theorizes that pervasive consumer dissatisfaction results, built on a chronic psychological condition long reinforced by a customer-negligent industry. It posits that a negative cognitive attributional cycle develops, creating in many automotive consumers an embedded condition of consumer depression partially analogous to the unipolar depression condition widely studied in psychology. It argues that extending the cognitive therapy template commonly successful in treating depressives to consumer depression could provide a managerial tool for dislodging and reanchoring the negative/dissatisfaction schema often exhibited by automotive consumers. This consumer depression theory is introduced to help explain early success in the untraditional, customer-focused launch of a new luxury automotive franchise in the U.S., for which preliminary findings are reported.