ABSTRACT Consumers are often influenced by others' achievements, triggering emotional responses that shape their subsequent preferences and behaviors. One such response is vicarious pride—an emotion experienced when others succeed and are perceived as part of one's extended identity. We distinguish vicarious pride from envy in that they lead to distinct motivational pathways to improve the self. Across five experiments, we find that vicarious pride enhances motivation to affiliate with the achiever, which leads consumers to prefer self‐improvement products similar to those used by the successful individual. On the contrary, envy stimulates motivation to differentiate, thereby increasing preferences for distinct self‐improvement products. Mediation analyses confirmed the underlying affiliative and differentiative mechanisms for the effects of vicarious pride and envy on self‐improvement product preferences, respectively. This research contributes to the literature by enhancing understanding of how socially derived emotions shape consumer preferences and provides important managerial insights for designing emotion‐driven marketing campaigns.
Yoon et al. (Wed,) studied this question.