Towards an Understanding of Motivations Underlying the Resistance of French Consumers

Consumers increasingly display non-allegiance to the consumption system and opposition to firms’ commercial practices. They engage in various acts to proclaim their rejection of the market system through collective actions such as boycotts (Friedman, 1999) or culture jamming (Rumbo, 2002), but also express their opposition in individual everyday practices such as voluntary simplicity (Leonard-Barton, 1981), the rejection of brands (Dalli, Romani and Gistri, 2005) or certain marketing techniques (Roux, 2008a). The manifestations stemming from these various forms of resistance are expressed either in voice or in exit, as described by Hirschman (1970). Previous consumer resistance research has focused on the importance of the situational context in explaining those behaviors, with scant attention paid to the conception of the psychological reasons why some people are more likely to resist than others under the same situational context. In order to go further in the comprehension of the phenomenon of consumer resistance, we are interested in consumer resistance in an individual perspective by examining the motivational processes underlying those behaviors. In other words, what are the intrinsic motivations explaining why some consumers may adopt certain behaviors so as to counteract or defeat marketing efforts (Fournier, 1998)