The Vulnerable Consumer

People experience obstacles and challenges on a daily basis. Some of these obstacles and challenges threaten our well-being and remind us of our vulnerability. The goal of this issue is to provide novel insights into the threats that consumers experience, and how experiencing these threats shapes consumers’ cognition, emotions and behavior. Prior to the Great Recession, scant academic research in marketing directly examined the role(s) of threats in consumers’ lives. The financial crises in the last two decades motivated some research that centered on threats emerging from micro-level socioeconomic factors, such as poverty, social class, and/or power. The nine articles in this issue on “The Vulnerable Consumer” adopt a wide lens to examine different types of consumer vulnerability that are the result of a range of factors such as poverty, low literacy, aging, underdeveloped cognitive or emotional systems, the lack of a clear sense of the self, and goal pursuit failures. Whereas some of the threats that consumers face are temporary, some are more persistent. Prominent scholars in the fields of marketing, management and psychology have reviewed relevant literatures, offered valuable insights into the risk factors and consequences of different types of consumer vulnerabilities, and provided directions for future research.