Each day consumers engage in a variety of behaviors driven by their goals. Such goals can be set by consumers themselves, such as to lose weight, advance professionally, or save for retirement. Goals also can be set by influential others, such as companies that devise loyalty programs to keep consumers motivated to use their products and services. What factors affect the degree to which consumers stay motivated to enact behaviors that facilitate attainment of these goals? Prior research has focused on consumer motivation to attain a single, static goal, such as a goal to lose weight. However, recent work has begun to explore how consumers pursue their multiple goals and how their goal pursuit changes over time. This curation includes a set of five articles that advance understanding of goals and motivation. How do consumers’ goals change over multiple periods as a function of performance? How can consumers develop successful plans to attain their multiple goals? How do consumers’ thoughts about their goals allow them to resist temptations and stay on course? The first article in this set, by Wang and Mukhopadhyay, presents a framework for understanding the overall process of goal setting, performance appraisal, and goal revision. This work asks what is the content of a consumer’s goals and how will a consumer revise that based on performance relative to the initial goal. The authors develop a mathematical model, which they test and support in a series of lab experiments. A model such as this provides a basis for extensions and future research on the dynamic nature of goal setting. Once a consumer has set a goal, how will goal pursuit be affected by whether the consumer develops plans for goal attainment? The article by Dalton and Spiller investigates the role of forming implementation intentions, which prior research finds has a positive effect on motivation and goal attainment. The article reveals a context in which creating implementation intentions does not benefit goal pursuit: when consumers are making plans for multiple (vs. single) goals. Forming implementation intentions for multiple goals makes salient the difficulty of pursuing these goals simultaneously, which reduces consumers’ commitment to those goals. The two articles that follow investigate how a consumer can frame goal pursuit to enhance motivation and resist temptation. The article by Patrick and Hagtvedt draws from research on linguistics and shows how the language consumers use to describe their own motivation affects their ability to resist temptations. Using the phrase “I can’t” (vs. “I won’t”) to describe why they will not engage in a tempting behavior makes it harder subsequently to resist the temptation. The authors demonstrate these effects in a field study following consumer participation in a health and wellness seminar, and they explore when the pattern obtains and reverses. The next article, by Sussman and Alter, also examines how a consumer can frame goal pursuit to resist goal-impeding temptations. This article examines adherence to financial goals and demonstrates a phenomenon that can lead to overspending. Consumers exhibit a cognitive bias through which they think of unusual or infrequent (“exceptional” purchases) as one-of-a kind and therefore worth spending extra money to obtain. Encouraging consumers to think about such exceptional purchases more broadly as part of a category of purchases that occurs more often helps them to rein in spending. The final article in this set investigates where consumers should focus their attention in order to facilitate goal attainment. Should consumers focus on what they have accomplished or what they have left to go to attain the goal? Koo and Fishbach examine how the way consumers monitor their progress affects motivation and propose that focusing on the smaller amount (what has been done vs. what is left to go)

Results from four experiments indicate that people expect to enjoy an experience more when it will follow a worse experience. We find that consumers expect hedonic contrast effects even when they do not experience such effects. Whereas individuals remember the absence of contrast effects after a short delay (study 1), individuals reporting retrospective judgments after a long delay (study 2) recalled that they had experienced contrast effects. These biased memories about contrast effects are eliminated when individuals focus on enjoyment during the experience. The present experiments document the time course of erroneous beliefs about contrast effects, mechanisms underlying their resistance to change, and the impact of these expectations about contrast effects on consumer choice.

Consumers often have a variety of products that they may use to help them pursue their goals. These products constitute a set of means toward consumers’ goal attainment. This article investigates (1) how the amount of variety (high vs. low) among a set of means affects motivation to pursue the associated goal and (2) how this relationship changes over the course of goal pursuit as progress is made toward goal attainment. Five studies demonstrate that when progress toward goal attainment is low, having more variety within a set of means to goal attainment increases motivation to pursue the goal. However, when progress toward goal attainment is high, having less variety within a set of means to goal attainment increases motivation to pursue the goal. These findings suggest perceived variety among means is an important determinant of motivation in goal pursuit.

Compatibility between the degree of similarity among means to goal attainment and the anticipated timing of goal pursuit increases goal-directed motivation. Six studies demonstrate that consumers are more motivated and willing to pay for means to goal attainment in the near term when they plan to use a set of different (vs. similar) means. In contrast, consumers are more motivated and willing to pay for means to goal attainment in the long term when they plan to use similar (vs. different) means. For example, consumers paid more for a personal training session when told it would include exercises for different (similar) muscle groups and would take place this week (next month). These effects are driven by the ease of processing differences (similarities) when considering the near (far) future. Similar results were obtained across various domains, including health and fitness, saving money, and academic performance.

The present research demonstrates that consumers often feel inhibited from engaging in hedonic activities alone, especially when these activities are observable by others. When considering whether to engage in a hedonic and public activity such as going to a movie alone, individuals anticipate negative inferences from others about their social connectedness that reduce their interest in engaging in the activity. Notably, consumers seem to overestimate how much their enjoyment of these activities depends on whether they are accompanied by a companion. Cues that attenuate consumers’ anticipation of negative inferences by making an activity seem more utilitarian or by reducing the anticipated number of observers systematically increases interest in engaging in unaccompanied public activities.

Three experiments demonstrate that people incorporate more variety into their consumption decisions when their behavior is subject to public scrutiny. Studies 1 and 2 indicate that consumers expect others to evaluate their decision more favorably if they choose variety and that this sometimes leads individuals to incorporate more variety into their public than private decisions. Results of study 2 confirm predictions that a relevant individual difference variable (self-monitoring) moderates the effects of expected evaluation on variety seeking. The final study demonstrates that pressure to choose variety in public is eliminated when a social cue signals the appropriateness of consuming one's favorites.

When considering the purchase of a new product, will consumers be more likely to make the purchase if they think about using it every day or if they think about using it every week? From an economic perspective, using a durable product more frequently should increase its perceived value. However, we show that perceived usage frequency relative to other consumers can influence product interest more than absolute usage frequency. In five studies, we use scale labels, advertisements, and customer reviews to invoke either a high-frequency or low-frequency norm. We show that high-frequency cues create less product interest and lower willingness to pay than low-frequency cues because consumers infer that their relative usage frequency will be lower, reducing the product's perceived fit. This effect is moderated by the consumer's perceived similarity to the standard of comparison and the consumer's own characteristics.

We present five studies supporting our strategic memory protection theory. When people make decisions about experiences to consume over time, they treat their memories of previous experiences as assets to be protected. The first two studies demonstrate that people tend to avoid situations that they believe will threaten their ability to retrieve special (rather than merely pleasant) memories. The next three studies demonstrate that people seek to obtain memory pointers to help them cue special memories at a later time when they anticipate interference from subsequent events. These preferences are driven by people's lay theories about the importance and difficulty of obtaining and retrieving special memories.

Data from several experiments show that, contrary to traditional models of variety seeking, individuals choose to switch to less-preferred options even though they enjoy those items less than they would have enjoyed repeating a more-preferred option. Two explanations for this finding are tested. Results indicate no evidence of a benefit to more-preferred options due to the contrast to less-preferred alternatives. However, the results of three studies suggest that retrospective global evaluations favor varied sequences that also include less-preferred items as opposed to sequences that only include more-preferred items, even though these more varied sequences result in diminished enjoyment during consumption.