Review of Marketing Research

Volume 2

Naresh K. Malhotra, Naresh Malhotra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780765613059
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351550987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

This book provides current, comprehensive, state-of-the-art articles in review of marketing research. It describes a detailed framework for consumer action in terms of automaticity, purposiveness, and self-regulation. The book presents a review of affective forecasting and misforecasting.

CHAPTER 1
Consumer Action

Automaticity, Purposiveness, and Self-Regulation

RICHARD P. BAGOZZI

Abstract

This chapter investigates the nature and etiology of consumer action with an aim toward specifying the conceptual foundations of consumer action and providing a framework for its study. A dual process theory of consumer action is sketched wherein automatic and deliberative processes are hypothesized to undergird consumer action. In addition to information processing and related cognitive processes, the framework incorporates impulsive, emotional, motivational, volitional, social, and self-regulative elements to describe and account for consumer action. Philosophically, consumer action is taken to be both deterministic and subject to free agency, depending on the nature and history of the consumer and the situations in which consumers find themselves.

This chapter presents a framework for thinking about consumer action. The framework is rather complex with many variables and processes arranged in a particular way, but the general idea underlying the approach is simple and is summarized in Figure 1.1. Briefly, it is plausible to consider consumer action (defined below) as a dual process consisting of two modes of information processing, both of which are initiated by either internal representations of states of affairs or external cues or stimuli. One mode of information processing is reflective or deliberate; the second is automatic and preconscious. The two modes are connected to each other in ways that will be described below. Although I have been working on major portions of the framework for over a decade and have proposed a number of related integrative expositions of it (e.g., Bagozzi, 1992, 2000a, 2005; Bagozzi, Gürhan-Canli, and Priester, 2002), the presentation herein is more comprehensive, detailed, and unified, and includes a lot of reinterpretation and new thinking as well.

Brief Reflections on the Field of Consumer Research

Before elaborating the framework, it is useful to provide some perspective drawn from an assessment of the contemporary state of affairs in consumer research. Two issues will be considered: the dominant paradigm and the prevalent method in inquiry.

Figure 1.1 Outline of Proposed Dual-Process Model of Consumer Action

The Dominant Paradigm

For more than three decades, the nucleus of consumer research has focused on cognitive processes, information processing, or cognitive responses. Everything else—the study of motivation and emotions, consumer actions, social behavior, and collective consumption phenomena, to name a few—has been at the periphery of inquiry.

The aim of research under the dominant paradigm is to understand how consumers process market-related information (e.g., prices, product attributes and performance, advertising appeals, and store environments). This has led to a wealth of knowledge that might be roughly grouped under such headings as attention processes, perception, memory, information search, categorization, cognitive schemas, judgment and evaluation, inference drawing, and choice.

Much of this research seeks to address antecedents of consumer action or the bases for consumption, but seldom has action ever been investigated as a dependent variable. Rather, in the majority of cases, beliefs, attitudes, or similar mental states have been used as the dependent variables to be explained or predicted by the cognitive processes under study. Occasionally, intention is used as a dependent variable but is taken to be a “proxy” for action, assuming the intention-to-action relationship to be nonproblematic. The few attempts to use actual action as a dependent variable have been made without grounding predictions on a well-developed theory of how cognitive responses lead to, result in, or determine action. We have been seduced into thinking that an observed empirical link between a cognitive state or event and an observable action implies that the event causes the action. The observation of bodily movements or outcomes of action all too often serve as the evidence for a causal process without the process being identified per se. Indeed, theoretical and empirical gaps typically exist in research to date between cognitive processes and decisions and between decisions and action (Bagozzi, 1992, 2000a, 2005).

We might identify two superordinate aims of research under the dominant paradigm. One is to describe and understand cognitive processes experienced by consumers as an end for study in and of itself. The second is to provide a basis for predicting, explaining, and, for researchers or practitioners interested in management issues, influencing or controlling consumer action.

Both superordinate aims rest on little understood assumptions and leaps of faith. First, there is the implicit belief that each individual study, each contribution to knowledge, fits into a larger pattern or representation of the total cognitive system. But what the domain and scope of this larger system looks like and what criteria should be used to assess its validity are seldom considered. A pioneering treatise in this regard was done by Bettman (1979), who not only mapped out key mental processes but proposed a novel theory of information processing and decision making that has remarkably stood the test of time. Nevertheless, the many advances of the past 25 years in the cognitive response tradition cry out for updating and perspective-taking worthy of Bettman’s tour de force.

Second, and closely related to the above point, we seem to lack guidelines for determining the relative importance of the many cognitive states and processes identified to date. Are all findings concerning information processing equally important and central to our understanding and explanation of consumer behavior? To what extent do such findings duplicate or contradict each other? Have essential processes been neglected for inquiry, including not only cognitive processes but motivational, emotional, social, and others?

Third, what are the conceptual and philosophical foundations upon which contemporary knowledge of consumer behavior rests? Does our knowledge presume a reductionistic outlook? Must group and social phenomena be incorporated through the filter of cognitive processes for us to understand and explain consumer behavior? How do the cognitive processes that have been identified to date relate to physiological processes and what we know from neuroscience? Can cognitive states and processes be represented by what philosophers term propositional attitudes (e.g., Goldman, 2000)?¹ What does the dominant paradigm assume or have to say about mental causation (e.g., Bishop, 1989; Heil, 1992; Kim, 2003)? These and other philosophical issues have implications for our theories, measurements, and hypothesis testing but are rarely discussed.

Fourth, how are consumer cognitive processes related to more specific and more general cognitive processes? Or are our ideas and knowledge of consumer behavior totally dependent upon or derivative from cognitive science? Consideration of the demarcation between what consumer behavior is and what cognitive psychology, cognitive anthropology, and so on are might lead to identification of understudied areas and what, if anything, is unique to consumer behavior. Such inquiry might lead to a better conceptualization of the field and what constitutes consumer behavior beyond that found in the dominant paradigm.

Finally, an argument can be made for broadening the dominant paradigm to include in its domain volitional and emotive processes. The study of volitional processes seems ripe ground for applying and developing ideas from what we know about information processing and the like to the more conative side of consumer behavior. Similarly, explicit theorizing and research are needed into the linkage between the bases for decision making, which include cognitive processes, and decision making and volition. This would seem to require consideration as well, of other noncognitive content (e.g., motivation, emotion, sociality) under the label of “bases for decision making.” Moreover, how and why cognitive and other mental and physiological processes serve to transform volitional processes into action provide important opportunities for future research.

We seem to have arrived at a crossroads in contemporary consumer research. The dominant paradigm has yielded a wealth of knowledge to date, but this knowledge is highly fragmented and the current approach to research is so piecemeal that we risk losing sight of what is central to the understanding of consumer behavior. The proliferation of so many theories and findings in so many subareas of the dominant paradigm is in need of integration and focus. At the same time, unguided, ever deeper inquiry solely into cognitive processes keeps intellectual focus and empirical research from going beyond the cognitive to consider emotional, motivational, and social processes, and especially the phenomenon of consumer action, a topic we will turn to shortly in the section below, entitled Consumer Action.

The Prevalent Method in Inquiry

How new knowledge is unearthed and how hypotheses are tested should not be separated from either the theories upon which the research rests or the interpretation of findings thereof. At least it is important to recognize the intimate relationships among theory, method, observation, and interpretation.

The experimental method, particularly randomized experiments, has been nearly exclusively the procedure of choice by researchers working in the dominant paradigm. This is easy to comprehend when the virtues of experimentation are noted. By randomly assigning people to experimental conditions, defined by specific levels of one or more independent variables, we gain a certain degree of confidence that changes in the dependent variable(s) are caused by the manipulations and not by preexisting differences among the people, such as individual differences, or by differential situational conditions impinging on the groups.

Putting aside the normal threats to validity characteristic of the use of experimentation (see Shadish, Cook, and Campbell, 2001), I feel that it is important to point out boundary conditions with the procedure. By its nature, controlled experimentation tends to be most useful for the investigation of relatively simple phenomena. There are few variables that can be studied in any experiment, and the processes under scrutiny are relatively circumscribed. This is necessary to gain control over contaminating factors. It is often presumed that the causal processes identified in an experiment also occur under conditions outside the laboratory context. Although this may often be true, how and when these processes occur are seldom studied formally, for the conditions under which the causal processes operate in naturalistic circumstances are seldom specified. This issue is related to but different from the question of how all the findings across many experiments in the dominant paradigm articulate to represent consumer behavior from a cognitive perspective.

Another boundary condition of controlled experiments is that it addresses states or processes that occur over relatively short periods of time. It is difficult to study prolonged information processing, processing that entails extended reflection or deliberation, or ongoing and interconnected cognitive responses, with the experimental method.

In short, complex individual and social behavior pose challenges for inquiry by researchers. The experimental method can be used here, but it is important to recognize its limitations in this regard. Exclusive reliance on experimentation risks restricting and even undermining the potential for the field of consumer behavior because how we investigate phenomena shapes its conceptualization and interpretation.

A Call for a New Dialogue

If we are to achieve a true science of consumer behavior, we have to do more than give lip service to the value of pluralism in ideas and approaches in the field. We have different traditions that share and sometimes compete for space in journals, faculties, and the application of knowledge, but there seems to be little learning crossing the boundaries of the various camps. The benefits of pluralism have not spilled over into the theories, findings, and interpretations found in each camp. What seems to be needed are special efforts to span boundaries. This will of necessity mean that the mind-sets and standards of each camp that is bridged must be changed and transformed if true learning is to occur. Means of knowing other than experimentation must also be recognized. In addition to experimentation, knowledge can be gained from survey research, participant observation methods, application of literary principles (e.g., analogical thinking), linguistic analyses, simulations, historical analyses, and other modes of systematic inquiry. Room should be made for research based on what Rozin (2001) terms “informed curiosity,” as a complement to model- or hypothesis-driven research. The results of a formal dialogue and openness to different modes of learning can be more insightful theories and more valid findings that enrich the camps involved and the field as a whole.

In this chapter, I attempt to develop a framework that bridges the dominant paradigm and action theory. There are other lacunae to address to be sure, but we have to begin somewhere with pressing issues. I simply suggest herein that not only are theories and findings from the dominant paradigm essential in accounting for decision making targeted at consumer action, but the dominant paradigm can supply needed content to volitional processes and for how these processes influence action. Of course, it will be emphasized that the dominant paradigm needs to be supplemented by ideas from research in emotions and social behavior and that a framework is needed for identifying and linking the concepts and processes in a way that explains consumer action and facilitates its interpretation. The overall framework captures deliberative as well as automatic processes, as determinants of consumer action, to which we now turn.

Consumer Action

Because we lack a well-defined and commonly accepted conceptualization of consumer action, considerable confusion exists in the literature in this regard. One sense of confusion occurs between the meaning and usage of the terms consumer behavior and consumer action. I suggest that the psychological processes that consumers undergo be termed consumer behavior, so as to differentiate these phenomena from consumer action, which we will define in a moment. It is consumer behavior that researchers primarily study in the tradition of the dominant paradigm, both as independent and dependent variables.

Consumer action has received little conceptual specification in the field and has been used rather loosely and in varied ways. To show the need for a philosophical grounding of consumer action, consider the case of a consumer living in a condominium with three floors, each with its own zoned air conditioning system. The consumer’s action with respect to replacing the air conditioning filters might consist of (a) walking down the aisle of a hardware store in search of three filters, (b) reaching for the filters on a shelf and placing them in a shopping cart, (c) making a payment, (d) installing the new filters and disposing of the old, (e) improving the air quality in the home, and (f) adding to the amount of refuge in the environment. Echoing a classic problem raised by...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Review of Marketing Research: Some Reflections
• 1. Consumer Action: Automaticity, Purposiveness, and Self-Regulation
• 2. Looking Through the Crystal Ball: Affective Forecasting and Misforecasting in Consumer Behavior
• 3. Consumer Use of the Internet in Search for Automobiles: Literature Review, a Conceptual Framework, and an Empirical Investigation
• 4. Categorization: A Review and an Empirical Investigation of the Evaluation Formation Process
• 5. Individual-level Determinants of Consumers’ Adoption and Usage of Technological Innovations: A Propositional Inventory
• 6. The Metrics Imperative: Making Marketing Matter
• 7. Multilevel, Hierarchical Linear Models and Marketing: This Is Not Your Adviser’s OLS Model
• About the Editor and Contributors
• Index