Harmful Journeys: A Consumer Vulnerability Perspective on Drinking and Driving

Alcohol-impaired driving is a major public health and safety problem with far-reaching consequences for individuals and communities. Despite these persistent harms, identifying measures to prevent alcohol-related driving incidents remains a challenge for marketing and public policy stakeholders. In response, this work introduces the consumer impairment journey, a novel framework that conceptualizes this risky behavior as a process that unfolds over time rather than as an isolated, poor decision. Using the lenses of consumer journeys and vulnerability, the authors outline five stages—planning, consumption, impaired decision, incident, and outcomes—to understand how alcohol-impaired driving emerges as a result of accumulating individual (e.g., cognitive impairment), interpersonal (e.g., peer influence), and structural (e.g., rideshare availability) resource deficits. In doing so, they extend prior research on consumer vulnerability and introduce the notion of a harmful journey that is meant to be disrupted. Importantly, this novel framework highlights diverse stage-specific marketing and public policy interventions to mitigate consumer vulnerability to impaired driving and resulting harms, and charts avenues for future research in both marketing and public policy.