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Research @ Schulich Podcast with Cameron Graham

Episode 6: Ela Veresiu on How Consumers Moralize Self-Care

When you hear the words “self-care” what comes to mind? A quiet walk along a lake? A luxurious bubble bath? A strict diet and workout regime? A day’s worth of retail therapy?

Self-care – which refers to actions we undertake to sustain and improve our lives, health and well-being- is a concept with a variety of meanings and interpretations.

But self-care isn’t just some random set of activities that you do when you’re trying to recover from a bad day or are working to better your health -rather, it’s a collection of moral considerations that shape your actions and, ultimately, drive your activities as a consumer to carry out a set of specific self-care “scripts”.

On the newest episode of the Research @ Schulich podcast, Schulich Associate Professor of Marketing, Ela Veresiu talks about how consumers are shaped by a variety of factors – from moral considerations to health influencers – when making decisions about what types of “self-care” we individually see as valid, and what types we see as invalid – and how this sense of internal moralizing can influence even everyday purchases.

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Ela’s paper “Moralizing Everyday Consumption: The Case of Self-Care,” was published in Journal of Consumer Research. It can be read at the link below:
“Moralizing Everyday Consumption: The Case of Self-Care”