Defining Prosocial Consumer Behavior

In preparation for submission to Journal of Consumer Research
Author

Ethan Milne, Kirk Kristofferson, Miranda Goode

Prosocial consumer behavior is an increasingly popular area of study for marketing scholars. However, definitions of prosocial consumer behavior in contemporary research are few and far between. What definitions do exist are ambiguous, confusing, and contradictory with each other. The purpose of this paper is to critique past definitions of prosocial consumer behavior and leverage such critiques to generate a new, coherent, and fruitful definition of prosocial consumer behavior that will assist future researchers in better articulating the ways in which the phenomena they study are or are not prosocial consumer behavior.