Management and Marketing - Theses
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ItemConsumed by consumption: exploring healthy eating addiction( 2018)Limited understanding exists about when and how do seemingly benign and even beneficial everyday consumption behaviors transform into an addiction. Taking the lens of consumer fanaticism, this thesis aims to understand the pre-addiction process of healthy eating addiction by investigating how consumers’ adoption of clean eating diets, can turn addictive and detrimental to their overall well-being. Specifically, I aim to 1) understand the experiences of consumers’ clean eating diets and 2) examine the process through which healthy eating addiction develops among health fanatics. I design a research project founded on an interpretative epistemology and undertake data collection by conducting non-participant observation and in-depth interviews to interpret the underlying meanings that health fanatics ascribe to their food consumption. Findings reveal three phases of clean eating experiences illustrating consumer’s increasing commitment and intensity towards healthy eating. Fanatic consumers can find healthy eating so entrenched into one’s sense of self that it becomes impossible to disentangle the two. Further, these phases underlie the transcending process through which a sacred relationship is formed between consumption object and fanatic’s sense of self. Findings contribute to the literature on both addictive consumption and fanatic consumer research. It provides theoretical insights into understanding the relationship between self and healthy food consumption. It also explains why attitude and addictive consumption behavior varies among consumers. From the managerial standpoint, the insights may help the marketers and policymakers in developing effective communication strategies to prevent such behavior.