Understanding factors that influence purchases in subsistence markets

International marketers face the challenge of understanding the decision making process that consumers in subsistence marketplaces go through when choosing which products to buy. The unique characteristics of these marketplaces pose distinct challenges which researchers need to address in order to understand what motivates consumers in these markets to make purchases. This paper identifies the potential influencers of purchase by subsistence consumers using a study conducted in Zimbabwe. The findings from this study indicate a set of purchase influencers which motivate consumers to buy products, discussed in terms of their order of importance.     

Visual influence on in-store buying decisions: an eye-track experiment on the visual influence of packaging design

This article describes the impact of visual attention on consumers' in-store buying behaviour. Through an eye-track experiment, it demonstrates the advantage of a behaviour model that addresses visual attention and an increase in visual stimuli during the process. It reveals that consumers exhibit a muddled search strategy where packaging design influences the decision process in several phases. Five phases were found in an in-store decision process, and the post-purchase phase seems to be essential for even low-level in-store decision processes. Further knowledge on packaging design elements is needed for a broader understanding of visual influence during in-store purchase decisions.     

You can't buy what you can't see: Retailer practices to increase the green premium

Retailers are the gatekeepers between consumers and eco-friendly products. As such, they can influence green shopping behavior. The results of an eye-tracking experiment show that retailers can attract consumers’ visual attention and increase the green premium through various practices such as providing relevant information, orienting consumers inside the store, and offering an eco-friendly product assortment. Managerial implications are to use green-colored price tags to signal eco-friendly products, while avoiding greenwashing practices that can distract consumers from finding the eco-friendly products they look for.     

Decisive visual saliency and consumers׳ in-store decisions

This paper focuses on consumers׳ in-store visual tactics and decision-making. It has been argued that many consumers shop by routine or by simple rules and justification techniques when they purchase daily commodities. It has also been argued that they make a majority of decisions in the shop, and that they are affected by the visual stimuli in the store. The objective for this paper is to investigate the visual saliency from two factors: 1) in-store signage and 2) placement of products. This is done by a triangulation method where we utilize data from an eye-track study and sales data from grocery stores. The first study takes place in laboratory settings with a simulated purchase situation, and the second research design builds on manipulated in-store settings and data from real purchases. We found optimal placement of two comparable goods (branded good and private label) to increase visual attention and sale for both goods. The use of signage increases visual attention and sale as well, yet only for the product that the label addressed, implying a cannibalization effect. The limitation of the study and implications for retail managers and for brand owners are discussed.     

Revisiting the showrooming effect on online and offline retailers: The strategic role of in-store service

This study revisits the showrooming effect on online and offline retailers and is the first to examine the strategic role of in-store service in this regard. Considering the effect of in-store service in attracting consumers to offline channels and the showrooming effect of persuading offline consumers to purchase online, we propose a model consisting of two firms, a brick-and-mortar (BM) store and an e-tailer that can invest the staff or facilities necessary to deliver in-store services to consumers. Based on the service decisions, the two firms make their pricing decisions. We compare the optimal decisions of retailers in the cases without and with showrooming to explore the interaction between in-store service and showrooming. Our findings indicate that when a customer bears a high travel cost to visit the BM store, the store should lower the price, and improving the in-store service is ineffective in countering the consumer's showrooming behavior. Moreover, the service level in the case with showrooming can be either higher or lower than in the case without, and the outcome mainly depends on the efficiency of the service investment. Interestingly, in-store services can lead to a win–win situation for both online and offline retailers with showrooming. This study can also be extended to the case of powerful e-tailers or competing BM stores.     

Decision-Making Strategies for the Choice of Energy-friendly Products

Although energy efficiency of many products has been improving constantly, residential energy consumption is not decreasing as much as desired. Therefore, the goal of the European Union (EU) and many other countries is to promote energy-friendly product choices (i.e., choice of products with low energy consumption). In a purchase situation, consumers are confronted with a wide range of energy-related information that can influence the decision-making process. Understanding how consumers reach a decision based on the information provided and identifying decision-making strategies that are beneficial or destructive in terms of energy friendliness is crucial for the improvement of existing energy-policy measures and, consequently, for the successful achievement of target energy saving goals. This paper provides insights from an exploratory eye-tracking study (N?=?59) investigating consumers’ decision-making process. Participants were required to identify the most energy-friendly television (i.e., the television with lowest energy consumption). Cluster analysis revealed three consumer segments with different decision-making strategies: the energy-directed lexicographic, unsystematic lexicographic, and unsystematic exhaustive strategies. The energy-directed lexicographic strategy resulted in 60% optimal choices in terms of energy friendliness, unsystematic lexicographic in 33%, and unsystematic exhaustive in 38%. No decision-making strategy resulted in 100% optimal choices in terms of energy friendliness. Findings emphasize that lexicographic strategies can successfully identify energy-friendly products when the correct information (i.e., actual energy consumption) is used. However, a lexicographic strategy can be very misleading and result in non-optimal choices in terms of energy friendliness when it is based on ambiguous information (i.e., energy efficiency information) that does not enable a conclusive decision. Further, this paper discusses implications for policy-makers and marketers for the promotion of energy-friendly consumer behaviour.     

Taking Fake Online Consumer Reviews Seriously

Evidence discussed in this article indicates that consumers rely heavily upon consumer reviews when making decisions about which products and services to purchase online. Sellers and their marketeers are aware of this, and as a result, some of them succumb to the temptation to generate fake consumer reviews. This article argues that policymakers and regulators need to take fake reviews seriously. This is because they undermine a (potentially) effective and efficient mechanism for overcoming information asymmetry between online sellers and buyers. Consumer reviews also offer a powerful mechanism for regulating the marketplace. Sellers who sell sub-standard products or engage in sub-standard selling practices risk reputational damage. Genuine consumer reviews can therefore moderate bad seller behaviour and assist in improving the quality and efficiency of the marketplace. Although there are laws in many jurisdictions that prohibit misleading and deceptive conduct, detecting fake reviews is complex and difficult. This article proposes that one way of increasing the effectiveness of regulatory oversight is for regulators to add an “alliance approach” to their existing arsenal of regulatory systems and mechanisms.     

How U.S. consumers view in-store promotions

Most sales promotion analysis, either at the external-to-the-store or in-store level, has been conducted based on what marketers have done and how consumers have responded in specific retail situations and for specific promotional techniques. Most studies, therefore are reported as, point-in-time and point-of-place specific, historical, after-the-fact results and imply a consumer preference for the measured activity. This paper provides a holistic view of how U.S. consumers regard all forms of promotion, both external-to-the-store in the form of 31 media alternatives and 23 in-store techniques across thirteen broad product categories. Data comes from twice a year online studies of representative groups of U.S. consumers, conducted since 2002. Consumers report on which in-store activities most influence their purchase decisions. From that, predictive models of consumer response to alternative promotional combinations are developed using CHAID analysis. This predictive approach is superior to traditional after-the-fact measures.     

Effects of Lightness‐Location Congruency on Consumers’ Purchase Decision‐Making

A considerable body of psychological and neuroscientific research has demonstrated the existence of robust sensory correspondences between various features, attributes, or dimensions of experience in different sensory modalities. Despite findings indicating the importance of sensory correspondences to human information processing, research on purchase decision‐making has not to date focused sufficiently on this phenomenon. The present study examines how the lightness of packaging colors, and the location of products on a display shelf interact to affect consumers’ purchase decision‐making via perceived visual heaviness. As predicted, a display with light (dark) colored products positioned in the upper (lower) shelf positions increases shoppers’ perceptual fluency and facilitates their visual search, thus leading to the suggestion that “light” (heavy) locations are most appropriate for light (dark) colored products. Moreover, the lightness‐location congruent display is shown to influence people's choice behavior positively as well. This research also demonstrates that when consumers consider the lightness (in terms of their weight) of the products, they are more likely to choose light (vs. dark) colored products located in the upper shelf positions. These results therefore demonstrate that consumers’ purchase decision‐making may be promoted by in‐store environments designed to be congruent with their sensory correspondences.     

Use of persuasive techniques on Internet shopping sites

Huge strides in technological development combined with marketing strategies have led to dramatic changes in the way information is transmitted and communicated to the consumers, and subsequently used by the consumers. Information has become a dominant factor in determining why, where, what, and how consumers shop, process information, and make decisions. While marketing information has always been an important factor in consumer decision‐making, its provision on demand and added convenience via the Internet has created a need to research the nature and amount of information that these technologies provide. Advertisements use different forms of persuasion to gain consumer attention, meet their economic and emotional shopping needs, to create a positive image of the product, brand, and the shopping medium, and influence consumers to purchase the product. Persuasion may be classified as functional congruity and self‐congruity routes to persuasion (Johar & Sirgy, 1991). Fifty websites were studied for utilitarian and value‐expressive forms of persuasion by product differentiation. The websites were classified as those selling tangible products only and those selling intangible products only, and those selling both tangible and intangible products. The paper will present results of the study along with a discussion and conclusion with implications on consumer well‐being.     

Different Effects of Utilitarian and Hedonic Benefits of Retail Food Packaging on Perceived Product Quality and Purchase Intention

Since consumers primarily make in-store purchase decisions, firms use product packaging to attract potential consumers. Ever-increasing market competition in many food product industries has further fueled this phenomenon in firms. However, the question of how retail food packaging affects consumer processes has received very little attention. This study investigates the benefits of food packaging on consumer responses to hedonic products by comparing different benefits (i.e., utilitarian and hedonic) of food packaging to understand which one has more impact on consumers’ perceived quality and purchase intention. The results show that both utilitarian and hedonic benefits of retail food packaging are critical predictors of consumer evaluations but play different important roles in determining customers’ reactions. Utilitarian benefits of food packaging impact perceived quality more than hedonic benefits do. Compared to utilitarian benefits, hedonic benefits of retail food packaging have more impact on consumer purchase intention.     

Vision (im)possible? The effects of in-store signage on customers’ visual attention

We used two eye-tracking field experiments to investigate the extent to which in-store signage is used during navigation and decision making, and how the viewing of signage influences customers’ visual attention and choice behavior. One hundred and seventy-five customers at a grocery store were exposed to signage stimuli while carrying out predefined shopping tasks. Experiment 1 shows that attention toward signage is affected by customers’ levels of store familiarity and in-store search stage (navigation vs. decision making). Experiment 2 demonstrates that signage has a considerable impact on the direction and magnitude of customers’ visual attention during decision making.     

Internet or store? An ethnographic study of consumers' internet and store-based grocery shopping practices

Drawing on practice theory, this paper develops an understanding of the interrelationships between where and when consumers shop (the internet, stores, and their preferred retailers), and what they purchase (via the internet and in-store). Ethnographic case studies are presented of two consumers’ internet and store-based shopping practices, and how these intersect with their everyday lives, using data generated from multiple, complementary methods over an eighteen-month period. To this end, the paper contributes to the extant internet grocery shopping literature by offering a wider understanding of internet usage, as well as to broader debates surrounding retail change and shopping practices. The managerial implications of internet shopping on the contemporary retail grocery environment are also described and discussed.     

How product aesthetics cues efficacy beliefs of product performance

Aesthetics of package design is an important consideration when consumers make purchase decisions. We argue that this is particularly the case for purchase decision of products in the beauty category. This paper advances current understanding of the role of packaging in product purchase behavior by identifying heuristic cues exhibited in packaging (i.e., that beautiful packaging is more effective at making the consumer more beautiful). Across a pilot field study and four lab studies, we demonstrate that package aesthetics informs inferences of how well the product can perform, which, in turn, drives purchase decisions. Importantly, we show that in the presence of a diagnostic cue such as a brand name, or an explicit promise (e.g. tagline of an advertisement), this effect is attenuated and rendered irrelevant. Further, we show that this effect is rendered ineffective to a category to which beauty is irrelevant. Hence, by signaling product efficacy, the beauty-in-a-bottle heuristic appears to inform purchase decisions.     

Do product reviews really reduce search costs?

The literature on online product reviews is based on the fundamental premise that reviews impact search costs and also affect consumers’ confidence in their purchase decisions. However, this proposition has not been proven in the literature. To this end, we conducted an experiment using an eye-tracking machine to measure the impact of online editorial and customer reviews on consumer’s information search costs and on decision confidence. Search costs in this study are defined in terms of time costs and cognitive effort costs. We find that when present, both editorial reviews and customer reviews separately reduce both search time and cognitive effort considerably, but not when present together. We also find that the presence of both types of reviews increases decision confidence considerably, but do not lower search costs. These results suggest that ecommerce firms can benefit from the presence of either or both editorial and customer reviews through either lower search costs, or higher decision confidence. We conclude with several managerial recommendations for ecommerce firms.     

The Recent versus The Out-Dated: An Experimental Examination of the Time-Variant Effects of Online Consumer Reviews

Conventional wisdom suggests that the most recent online reviews may have a greater impact than out-dated online reviews on consumers’ purchase decisions because of their up-to-date nature. However, building on the theory of temporal distance and construal fit, this study proposes a new perspective, suggesting that the influence of online reviews posted at different times is a function of the timeframe for the consumers’ intended purchase. Four experiments demonstrate that although recent online reviews are more influential in shifting consumer preferences towards near-future consumption decisions, the relative influence of out-dated online reviews in shifting consumer preferences increases when consumers are making distant-future consumption decisions. This effect occurs because of a construal fit between the construal level of the online reviews posted at different times and that of the timeframe of consumers’ purchase decisions. The recent reviews are represented at a relatively lower construal level, with the low-level construal matching the timeframe of the near-future consumption decision. Out-dated reviews, however, are represented at a relatively higher construal level and match the timeframe of the distant-future consumption decision. This construal fit, in turn, enhances consumer engagement and consequently exerts a greater influence on consumer preferences.     

A purchase decision support model considering consumer personalization about aspirations and risk attitudes

Ranking alternative products to help consumers make better purchase choices is a valuable research topic. Most previous decision support models cannot be well applied to heterogeneous consumers. This paper focuses on establishing a personalized interactive model to assist consumers make better buying decisions with less effort. For the alternative products provided by consumers, we collect online reviews and parameter configurations of alternative products and then obtain the fusing evaluative information. As consumers are dominated by bounded rationality, they only provide partially key attribute weights, based on which, we construct an optimizing model to obtain the optimal attribute weights of customers for products. Then, a satisfaction function is proposed by uniting aspiration levels and risk attitudes of consumers and a compensatory decision rules is established to rank and recommend the brands to consumers. Finally, practicability of this study is illustrated with a real car purchase case. Through the case study, it can be seen that the proposed decision support model generates a personalized list of alternatives based on consumer's own utility function about risk attitudes, aspiration levels, and preferences for product attributes, which further confirms that the proposed model can capture the personalized needs of consumers. Theoretical and managerial implications of this model as well as advantages are further illustrated.     

What do consumers want? A methodological framework to identify determinant product attributes from consumers’ online questions

Determinant attributes play an important role in consumers’ purchase decisions. Firms rely on them to differentiate their products. Determinant attributes are typically identified using direct methods or indirect methods. However, the voice of the customer online can also provide key insights regarding attributes that are part of the consumers’ pre-purchase search process. The purpose of this study is to propose a framework to identify determinant attributes from online consumer questions. Our method uses semi-supervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation to identify product attributes initially. This is followed by the application of sequence pattern mining to identify temporal sequences of determinant attributes. Finally, hierarchical time series is used to forecast consumer interest in determinant attributes over time. The results show that our study can be used to identify determinant attributes of competing brands and can also be used to forecast consumer interest in these attributes. Brands can use this framework to have a pulse on what consumers look for before purchase. This will aid their decisions related to promotion as well as product development processes.     

Profiling the reference price consumer

Researchers in marketing have devoted considerable attention to understanding how price impacts the purchase decision. Some individuals, termed memory-based reference price (MBR) consumers, take into account price expectations developed from past purchase behavior when making a current choice. Other individuals, termed stimulus-based reference price (SBR) consumers, make choices by constructing a reference point from the currently observed distribution of prices. Using a latent class model of structural heterogeneity applied to purchase histories from the toilet tissue category, we classify households in terms of the pricing mechanism used in buying decisions. We find strong evidence that memory-based (internal) reference price consumers are more price sensitive than other consumers. Moreover, we find that variables associated with the accessibility of price information are predictive of consumer use of memory-based reference prices. Managerial implications of these results are discussed.     

Consumer Response to Telecommunications Deregulation: The Equal Access Decision

This paper examines consumer response to equal access-the choice of a primary long-distance carrier. A model is developed that suggests that those consumers who seek information to aid in decision making may acquire it either through search or experience. The paper reports results of a survey of consumers who recently made the equal access decision. Logit analysis identified search in other purchase decisions and age as two characteristics significantly related to the extent of prepurchase search.