Research On The Effect Of Product Scarcity Appeals On Consumers’ Willingness To Purchase

With the development of production technology and the improvement of production efficiency,the social products are getting richer.The majority of products have been evolved from being the seller’s market with demand exceeding supply to the buyer’s market with supply exceeding demand.Facing the transformation of nature of the markets and the increasing difficulty of enterprise sales,more and more manufacturers began to use scarce marketing strategies to encourage consumers’ willingness to purchase such as hunger marketing,exclusivity for members,queued purchase,group-buying,seckilling and so on.In a wide range of scarcity marketing strategies,it is the most common way to spread the scarcity appeals to potential consumers through advertising,shelves,word of mouth,out of stock,limited edition,conspicuity,specifically,quantity-limited scarcity appeals or time-limited scarcity appeals,based-supply product scarcity appeals or based-demand product scarcity appeals,sale volume scarcity appeal or inventory volume scarcity appeal and it would have an important impact on consumers’ information processing,value judgments and consumption decisions.Many studies indicated that product scarcity appeals would affect consumers’ perceived scarcity,willingness to pay,quantity of consumption,perceived quality,perceived popularity、thought processing,thought valence,competitive arousal,impulse buying,transaction attitude,product attitude,transaction intention,perceived value,purchasing behavior,perceived exclusivity,anticipated regret,word of mouth,delay consumption,even it would be regarded as high-quality or high-value heuristic cues.Based-supply product scarcity appeals and Based-demand product scarcity appeals are the most popular scarcity strategies in numerous product scarcity appeals that often used by manufacturers.But the causes of the scarcity appeals are different,that is,the former is due to insufficient supply,while the latter is due to excessive demand.Thus they would also give different signals for potential consumers that the former is more likely to be perceived as “uniqueness”cues,while the latter is more likely to be perceived as“popularity”cues which would have different impacts on consumer’s preference and purchasing choice.Indeed,consumers who received the information will conduct active information processing that raise consumer’s awareness of manufacturers’ perceived deception and persuasion knowledge which have influence on the psychological ownership and psychological reactance,and ultimately affect the consumer’s willingness to purchase.Therefore,consumers hold mixed cognitive judgments and emotional reactivity with regard to the products scarcity appeals which may affect consumers’ willingness to purchase.Although there have been a lot of research on the effect of product scarcity appeals on consumers’ willingness to purchase,there are some shortcomings that either limited to the perspective of perceived deception or lack of multiple mediating mechanism mediation effects.In this research,it is examined internal mechanism and different effects of based-supply product scarcity appeals and based-demand product scarcity appeals on consumer’s willingness to purchase and boundary condition.In doing so,the current research has theoretical implications for deepening and improvement of product scarcity appeals and theory of product phantom.This research also has practical implications that guide manufacturers to operate scarcity marketing correctly and increase marketing effect and help consumers to treat scarcity appeals rationally and improve their consumption level.It also has referential implications for industry regulators to strengthen supervision of scarcity marketing and promote healthy development of the market order.The research divides into following seven parts.The first part mainly introduces the research background,main research questions,research significance,research method,research line and research framework of the product scarcity appeals.The second part is the research review of the effect of product scarcity appeals on consumers’ willingness to purchase which includes the concept of scarcity appeals,the type of scarcity appeals,main affecting factors and mechanism of scarcity appeals and relevant research at home.The third part mainly introduces the theoretical basis for the effect of the product scarcity appeals on the consumer’s willingness to purchase,including commodity theory,persuasion knowledge theory,psychological ownership theory and psychological reactance theory and related research.The fourth part develops the hypothesis of main effect of product scarcity appeals on consumers’ willingness to purchase,including direct effect,intermediate effect and moderating effect.The fifth part adopts the qualitative methods to examine hypothesis,including in-depth interviews with fifteen undergraduate students and the public.The sixth part examines the effect of product scarcity appeals on consumer’ willingness to purchase through five experiments.The last part summarizes research conclusions,and presents theoretical and practical significance,limitations and prospects of the further research.The results show that product scarcity appeals do have significant effect on consumer’ willingness to purchase,but it depends on the dominant path of consumer information processing,and the effect have paratactic and multiple mediating mechanisms,such as perceived scarcity,perceived deception,psychological ownership,psychological reactance and willingness to purchase.However,this effect is also moderated by self-construal,that is independent self-construal are more sensitive to the based-demand product scarcity appeals and interdependent self-construal are more sensitive to the based-supply product scarcity appeals which leads to more positive willingness to purchase.In addition,the results of qualitative and quantitative research show that the perceived scarcity caused by product scarcity appeals do not trigger psychological reactance,but the perceived deception caused by operating intentions of product scarcity appeals do enhance psychological reactance.This research has innovation points and contributions for area of research in product scarcity appeals.First of all,different types of product scarcity appeals will trigger different consumer psychological ownership of scarce product,namely,consumers perceive the object or part of the object as their own.Furthermore,the perceived scarcity will increase consumer psychological ownership,but perceived deception will decrease consumer psychological ownership.Secondly,the product scarcity appeals will not induce the psychological reactance,but perceived deception will increase the psychological reactance.Thirdly,the research carries out a systematic integration of the overall research on the effect of product scarcity appeals on consumer’ willingness to purchase and finds that there are paratactic and multiple mediating mechanisms and the moderating role of self-construal on the effect of product scarcity appeals on consumers’ willingness to purchase which have important insights on the theory of product scarcity.Restricted by the present condition and methods,the research still has some limitations,such as simplicity of research subject,lack of research methods and research validity and so on which need to be improved in the future research.