This article outlines a consumer-focused approach for the study of consumer behavior. I argue that much of the existing literature, by developing knowledge that focuses on the determinants of consumer purchasing, is implicitly biased toward a marketing perspective of consumer behavior. In contrast, I propose the need for a consumer-focused approach that would advance knowledge aimed at helping consumers make wiser purchases. This approach should address the most important and challenging consumer decisions, describe consumer behavior in a manner that leads to prescriptions, consider the actions of other parties in the marketplace, and identify biases unique to or exacerbated by the consumer context. This article then illustrates what such a consumer-focused approach would imply for consumer research in three areas: negotiations, financial services, and auctions.
This article examines a psycholinguistic model of bilingual concept organization and extends it to the processing of advertisements by bilingual consumers. The model suggests that second-language (L2) messages result in inferior memory as compared with first-language (L1) stimuli. These language asymmetries in memory are thought to occur because processing an L2 message at a conceptual level is less likely than processing an L1 message conceptually. Applying this notion to advertisements, this research examines picture-text congruity as a potential moderator of language effects in memory. The results suggest that a high level of congruity between picture and text facilitates conceptual processing of L2 messages, increasing memory for second-language ads and thereby reducing the impact of language asymmetries on memory.
Four experiments were conducted to examine the persuasive impact of new product appeals containing an analogy. An analogy highlights the similarity in the benefits offered by a familiar base product and an unfamiliar target product. This device is found to be persuasive when (a) message recipients have the ability to map attribute relations from some base category to understand the benefits of a target product, and (b) they allocate the substantial resources needed to complete this mapping. In the absence of either of these conditions, the persuasive impact of an analogy is more limited. A variety of devices, including expertise with the base product, training in how to process base information, and a positive mood, are shown to improve the comprehension of an analogy and to enhance its persuasiveness.
Although price-matching refund policies are common in many retail environments, the impact of such policies on consumers has largely been ignored. This article reports the results of three studies that examine price-matching policies from a consumer perspective. Study 1 shows that consumers perceive price-matching policies as signals of low store prices and that the presence of a refund increases the likelihood of discontinuing price search. Contrary to the predictions based on signaling theory in information economics, studies 2 and 3 show that when search costs are low, the number of stores searched increases in the presence versus absence of a price-matching policy. When search costs are high, consumers appear to accept the price-matching signal at face value and search less in the presence of a refund. The article concludes by discussing the theoretical implications of the findings and suggesting directions for future research.
While approaches to measuring the state of a consumer's knowledge are well developed, much less is known about the relationship between knowledge and consumer choice and information search. The purpose of this article is to explore these relationships by treating consumer knowledge as human capital, which affects the full price of consumption and search activities. Using this framework, models are presented to explain life cycle consumption patterns, lifestyles, brand loyalty, choice of features, and search behavior. This economic perspective is compared and contrasted to other consumer research on these topics, including recent qualitative research that examines consumption behavior.
“We'll buy your old suit back for $100 when you order a new suit.” “We'll trade you $15 for your old sneakers when you buy a new pair.” These offers may seem unusual, but these trade-ins can be an effective pricing tool. When a firm introduces a new and unproved product to the market, consumers who already own a product of lower quality in the same category may not be so willing to upgrade. There may be a mental cost to making a new purchase when they feel that they have not yet gotten their money's worth out of their previous purchase. Pricing tools such as trade-ins can help mitigate this mental cost. Based on the principles of mental accounting (Thaler 1985) and mental depreciation (Heath and Fennema 1996), I provide a theoretical explanation for the mental cost of a replacement purchase, and why a trade-in can be a more effective pricing tool than a straight sale of equivalent cash value. The product replacement model that I present has two unique aspects. First, it describes a replacement product purchase as a decision that involves two criteria: one based on marginal cost benefit analysis, and another based on mental accounting. Each criterion is coded as a gain or loss according to a simplified value function (Kahneman and Tversky 1979), and the net gain associated with a replacement product purchase is the sum of the gain/loss of these two accounts. The second unique aspect is the concept of a product's “mental book value”. During ownership of a product, a consumer mentally depreciates the initial purchase price, thus creating a mental book value for the product. This mental book value is written off when a replacement purchase is made, and this write-off is essentially the mental cost associated with the replacement purchase. Through three experiments, I explore trade-ins, gift opportunities, and external reference prices as three different ways to promote the purchase of a new replacement product by mitigating the write-off of the mental book value.
This ethnographic research examines consumers' cultural production at a cattle trade show and rodeo. Consumers recreate western cultural meanings and memories related to competition, naturalism, freedom/independence, and family tradition in their interactions with ranchers, booth exhibitors, animals, and artifacts of western history. Consumers' cultural production processes are documented at four levels: consumer behavior, situational positioning, subcultural interactions, and market interactions. Implications elaborate the significance of consumers' active, yet constrained production processes; the role of cultural meanings as market mediators; and issues in consuming another culture.
Four studies show that consumers have not one but two distinct learning processes that allow them to use brand names and other product features to predict consumption benefits. The first learning process is a relatively unfocused process in which all stimulus elements get cross-referenced for later retrieval. This process is backward looking and consistent with human associative memory (HAM) models. The second learning process requires that a benefit be the focus of prediction during learning. It assumes feature-benefit associations change only to the extent that the expected performance of the product does not match the experienced performance of the product. This process is forward looking and consistent with adaptive network models. The importance of this two-process theory is most apparent when a product has multiple features. During HAM learning, each feature-benefit association will develop independently. During adaptive learning, features will compete to predict benefits and, thus, feature-benefit associations will develop interdependently. We find adaptive learning of feature-benefit associations when consumers are motivated to learn to predict a benefit (e.g., because it is perceived to have hedonic relevance) but find HAM learning when consumers attend to an associate of lesser motivational significance.
The variety seeking theoretical paradigm offers little guidance regarding the attributes of a stimulus that are most likely to drive the desire to switch. We review 25 years of research in physiobehavior, arguing that it can be extended in a natural way to predict that consumers are more likely to switch between sensory attributes (e.g., flavor) than nonsensory attributes (e.g., brand). Specifically, we examine the work on sensory-specific satiety, a term used to describe the phenomenon whereby the pleasantness of a food just eaten drops significantly while the pleasantness of uneaten foods remains unchanged. These findings lead to the thesis explored in this research that consumers are more likely to seek variety on sensory attributes, which is then tested across three studies comparing flavor switching to brand switching. Study 1 uses ACNielsen wand panel data for purchases of tortilla chips and cake mixes from almost 2,000 consumers over a three-year period. Study 2 examines actual consumption behavior using a six-week consumption diary panel from over 850 consumers in two cities. Heterogeneity across the samples in terms of the observed effects is examined in both studies. Study 3 employs a survey methodology to ascertain whether the differential role of flavor-based versus brand-based variety seeking is mediated by factors other than sensory-specific satiety. The findings strongly support the relevance of sensory-specific satiety to attribute-level variety seeking. Across the three studies, consumers switched more intensively on flavor than brand in 14 of the 15 categories examined and other factors such as preference heterogeneity and perceived risk fail to explain this difference.
An overemphasis on creativity for evaluating research has lead to a serious devaluation of replication studies. However, we need a total sample size of N = 153,669 to estimate a causal effect to two digits, which is quite rare for a single study. The only way to get accurate estimation is to average across replications. If the average sample size were as high as N = 200, we would need over 700 replication studies. Scientific replications are more problematic than pure statistical replications, and so we need even more replications to achieve reasonable accuracy.