Abstract: People often lack adequate sleep. Marketing scholars have long neglected the issue of how consumers' lack of sleep affects their consuming behavior. Lack of sleep decreases consumers' vitality, and cute products are closely related to vitality and youth. This paper conducts four studies (2 surveys and 2 experiments) to explore the influence of consumers' lack of sleep on their preference for visually cute products, its mechanism and boundary conditions. Study1 finds that sleep-deprived consumers prefer visually cute products. Furthermore, study 2a and study 2b find that the influence is moderated by consumers' implicit self-views. When suffering lack of sleep, substantialistic consumers tend to choose cute products because they strongly believe that such products can help enhance their vitality, but this tendency does not apply to gradualistic consumers, who do not believe so. Study 3 finds that cute products restore consumers' vitality level after they touch cute products. The current paper makes several important theoretical advances. First, this paper adds to the existing researches on sleep, via showing that individuals' preference for baby-schema cute products is a new way for them to cope with the threat of inadequate sleep. Second, through focusing on individuals' physiological and psychological predictors of cute product preferences, this paper moves forwards past researches on cuteness. Practically, this paper has reference value for the market positioning and advertising of enterprises that sell cute products.

Key words: lack of sleep, vitality, implicit self view, cute products, belief in vitality-enhancing products