What We Know and Don’t Know About Consumer Happiness: Three-Decade Review, Synthesis, and Research Propositions

Abstract

The recent rise of consumer happiness research in marketing literature is noticeable. This article presents a systematic review of consumer happiness research from 1991 to 2020. From an initial pool of 600 articles on consumer happiness from 158 marketing journals in the ABS and ABDC lists, 71 articles were selected. The procedure was as follows: (1) search of articles, (2) quality assessment, (3) extraction of data from articles, and (4) thematic synthesis. The review concluded that the term “consumer happiness” does not have a standardized definition in the existing literature. However, happiness has been studied in a variety of contexts, and consumer research is one of these contexts. Further, the review concluded that consumer happiness research is largely segregated across three themes: marketing beyond satisfaction, marketing for health and mind, and digital felicity. Seven areas of future research on consumer happiness are also proposed. The authors present academic and managerial contributions with scholarly implications for the literature in the areas of consumer well-being, the role of marketing/interactive marketing, and the positive side of marketing. The authors also suggest that marketers not only seek consumers’ need fulfillment and satisfaction from their product or service consumption but also try to elicit hedonic associations with their products or services.