Deviating from the Majority When Resources Are Scarce: The Effect of Resource Scarcity on Preference for Minority-endorsed Products

Resource scarcity has been a very pervasive phenomenon and plays an important role in consumer behavior. To date, plenty of research has examined the consequences of resource scarcity (Mehta and Zhu 2016; Roux, Goldsmith, and Bonezzi 2015). However, little has been done about how resource scarcity influences consumers' purchase behavior. One unanswered question that arises is, how does resource scarcity influence consumer preference for minorityendorsed products? Research by Baumeister and Leary (1995) has posited that under conditions of scarcity, forming a group or conforming to the majority will bring debatable advantages, reflected in resource sharing and resource deprivation within groups. In addition, though prior research has investigated the interaction effect of resource scarcity and childhood environments on conformity, resource scarcity was operationalized as economic uncertainty and monetary expenditures (Stamos, Bruyneel, and Dewitte 2016), diverging from the classic operationalization in most literature (e.g. Mehta and Zhu 2016; Roux et al. 2015), which we adopted in this paper. To our knowledge, no research has directly addressed whether and why resource scarcity may influence consumer preference for minorityendorsed products. The current research aims to address these issues. Prior research on scarcity suggests that people in poverty are more discreet and do more trade-offs when consuming resources (Mullainathan and Shafir 2013), and become competition-oriented and unwilling to share resources with others in the face of scarcity (Roux et al. 2015). Furthermore, Rodeheffer, Hill and Lord (2012) found that during times of scarcity, individuals tend to narrow their definition of belongingness and include only people whose group membership is unambiguous. Building on these findings, we theorize that resource scarcity increases individuals' sensitivity to losses and their concern about resource deprivation. As a result, conforming to the majority may be more threatening than beneficial to individuals with scarce resources (Baumeister and Leary 1995). Since choosing minority-endorsed options blocks majority influence (Imhoff and Erb 2009), we propose that reminding consumers of resource scarcity may enhance their concern about resource deprivation, which subsequently strengthens minority preference. Furthermore, perceived economic mobility (PEM) represents individuals' belief in the changeability of current economic status contingent on their own