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Abstract
Purity is widely valued across different domains, with consumers increasingly gravitating towards products and services that are seen as “pure.” However, the construct of purity is understudied with little consensus on the conceptualization of the construct and its implications for consumer behavior. My dissertation aims to enhance the understanding of purity consumption by systematically organizing the different ways in which consumers perceive the construct in addition to offering researchers and marketers insights into how to approach these typologies. The first essay reviews research that taps into varied meanings of purity and conceptually identifies its dimensions. In this essay, I posit that purity consumption can be organized along two dimensions: moral purity and material purity. These dimensions then guide the development of my second and third essays. The second essay taps into the material purity dimension by examining how consumers derive purity judgments from the simplicity versus complexity of the packaging design. The third essay also focuses on the material purity dimension by exploring the consumer response to the purity of the founder’s business origin. I aim to test the proposed effects in each paper using a multimethod approach that combines experiments with archival data analyses.