Promoting Data Richness in Consumer Research: How to Develop and Evaluate Articles with Multiple Data Sources

As stated in the mission of the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) (2022) and a recent editorial (Schmitt et al. 2022), JCR is a multi-disciplinary journal where consumer research provides insights about consumers and consumption in the marketplace in a way that meaningfully extends the knowledge from one of our core disciplines (e.g., psychology, sociology, economics) about a consumer-oriented construct. Unfortunately, the labels “consumer research” and “consumer behavior” have come to connote far more than the focus of the work—just as, somewhere along the way, “consumer behavior” and “quant” came to imply a particular type of data source (and associated analysis methods) that is primarily used to study theory and phenomena of interest (experiments vs. “field data”). Why this strong association between consumer-relevant questions, data, and methodology? One reason may be that the field rewards specialization. Another may be due to the incentive structure in business schools (Stremersch, Winer, and Camacho 2021). Nevertheless, the rigid lines dividing the artificially created sub-disciplines are our own making, for better and worse. One way to address this divide and consequently expand the reach of our research beyond those who specialize in our particular sub-disciplines is to use more than one type of data source when addressing a consumer research question. Such data richness is the key theme of this article.