Purpose The purpose of this study is to present a nuanced understanding of the underlying facets of extant consumer research on narcissism and, thereafter, leverage the insights generated to propose guideposts for future research. Design/methodology/approach The study carries out systematic literature review (SLR). Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) protocol is leveraged to identify 147 journal articles pertaining to consumer research on narcissism published during 2002–2023. We follow it up with scientometric analysis technique of betweenness centrality measurement to map the network of studies and identify seminal research in the domain. Finally, the authors extract the latent themes from full text content of sampled articles by leveraging the topic modelling technique of BERTopic. Findings The study identifies the following as predominant areas of extant consumer research on narcissism: luxury branding, social media, dark personality traits and negative brand experience. The study also highlights the influential articles, predominant publication outlets and key studies representing each topic. Additionally, the guideposts for future consumer research on narcissism are delineated. Research limitations/implications The study introduces topic modelling, in general, and the advanced algorithm of BERTopic, in particular, as a productive resource for deriving insights out of extant research. Originality/value The study consolidates the extant domain knowledge on consumer research pertaining to narcissism and provides directions for future research by seamlessly integrating three methodologies: SLR, scientometric analysis and topic modelling.
Mishra et al. (Tue,) studied this question.