| The emergence of nostalgic phenomenon stems from the phenomenon at the end of the century and the aging of the "baby boom" generation.It is a universal emotion.It has been more and more applied in the field of literature and art,commercial circulation and urban and rural construction.Tangible products,art products,books and toys with the theme of nostalgia are more and more popular in the consumer market,especially in today’s era.Consumers at all levels feel increasing pressure,and all kinds of disappointments in real life make people look forward to a better past,and people get a deep sense of comfort from the memory of people and things in the past;Not only do individuals occasionally feel nostalgic,the generation of a specific clue often stimulates the collective nostalgia of people in a certain era.For example,the opening of "tmall memories supermarket" in Luogu lane,Beijing in2017 successfully triggered the collective nostalgia of the post-80 s generation.In addition,in the field of marketing,nostalgic marketing is also widely used,such as nostalgic snacks,nostalgic toys,nostalgic clothing,nostalgic films,and even nostalgic cars and nostalgic buildings.At present,the academic research on nostalgia is mainly from the perspective of psychology and sociology,and the research content mainly involves the definition of nostalgia,nostalgia stimulus,nostalgia antecedent variables and consequence variables.Nostalgia is an individual’s longing for the past or yearning for yesterday.Previous studies on the consequence variables of nostalgia mostly focused on the fields of sociology and psychology.For example,nostalgia can enhance people’s happiness,enhance people’s patience and compassion,reduce people’s loneliness and provide support for people’s social connection.There are relatively few studies on the impact of nostalgia on consumer behavior.Zhou and other scholars proposed that nostalgia can enhance people’s compassion and increase charitable donation behavior.Some scholars also demonstrated that nostalgia can enhance individual empathy and increase the tolerance of service failure.There are relatively few studies on the impact of nostalgia on other consumption behaviors.According to the research of previous scholars,when people are nostalgic,they often miss some good things.Most of them are also more positive and beautiful.For example,when they are nostalgic,they will feel that the past is better than now.When they are nostalgic,they produce more positive emotions,such as happiness,warmth and so on.According to priming theory,once a concept is activated in the subject’s mind,it will increase the possibility of applying the concept in the subject’s subsequent behavior.Therefore,this dissertation infers that when people are nostalgic,they will activate the goal of goodness.For example,I hope to be a good person,a kind person and a simple person,and this goal will correspondingly reduce consumer non-ethical behavior,because the subjects think these behaviors are not "good".So far,the research on marketing ethics has received more and more attention from scholars,but the research on ethics in the field of marketing used to focus on the enterprise level,discussing the reasons,motives,consequences and consumers’ reactions to ethical and non-ethical behaviors,such as consumers’ evaluation of corporate image related to ethical behavior and consumers’ purchase behavior of relevant corporate products.On the other hand,as consumers become more and more convenient in online and physical stores,the conversion cost of consumers’ shopping is getting lower and lower,and the possibility of consumers engaging in non-ethical behavior is also increasing.For example,in online shopping,consumers give merchants bad comments without reason,provide false addresses to merchants paying on delivery,blame commodity problems caused by improper behavior of buyers to sellers and ask for returns,etc.It is more common for some consumers to take advantage,such as trying food at will in supermarkets,inadvertently destroying goods without compensation,etc.These behaviors will not cause any loss to consumers.On the surface,the impact of these behaviors on enterprises is not obvious,but in the long run,consumer non-ethical behaviors will have an impact on enterprise performance and even image.According to the survey data of the United States,nearly 700000 people in the United States suffer from non-ethical behavior of online consumers every year,with a total annual loss of US $4 billion.Therefore,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to study consumer non-ethical behavior,explore the influencing factors of consumer non-ethical behavior and how to prevent and reduce consumer non-ethical behavior,whether for enterprises,consumers or the construction of spiritual civilization of the whole society.Based on the theory of nostalgia and priming,this dissertation constructs a research model of nostalgia affecting consumer non-ethical behavior.In this model,nostalgia activates individuals’ goal of goodness,because when individuals feel nostalgic,they think that the past is better than the present.Most of the people and things they miss are good.Individuals’ mood is also good and pleasant when they feel nostalgic.According to the priming theory,the activation of related concepts in an individual’s mind will have an impact on the subsequent behavior of the individual.There are two mechanisms for this impact.One is the direct cognitive behavior model,that is,an individual subconsciously changes his behavior according to the priming concept.For example,the manipulation of the concept of "old people" will activate the concept of "slow",which makes the subjects walk more slowly;The other is the goal motivation model,that is,an individual takes the concept of priming as his behavior goal.This dissertation holds that the activation of the concept of goodness will enable individuals to activate the "the goal of goodness",that is,they hope to become a good person,so as to reduce consumer non-ethical behavior accordingly.Through a qualitative study,a pilot study and six experiments,this dissertation discusses the goal of goodness that nostalgia activates subjects,so as to reduce consumer non-ethical behavior.In the qualitative research,the subjects were asked to write down a "nostalgic event" and "ordinary event" respectively,and write down four key words and psychological feelings about this event.The most frequent words in the nostalgic group were good,happy,nostalgic and pleasure.The frequency of positive valence words in the control group was lower.In the pilot study,the subjects in the nostalgic group and the control group completed a word association test after completing the recall tasks of nostalgic events and ordinary events respectively.The results showed that the number of words related to goodness listed by the nostalgic group was significantly higher than that in the control group.The data of experiment 1a showed that the subjects who recalled nostalgic events were more willing to tell each other the real information of the position than the subjects who recalled ordinary events,and were more willing to send the real income information to each other rather than seeking their own personal interests;In experiment 1b,nostalgic pictures were used to trigger the subjects’ nostalgic mood.The results showed that the subjects in the nostalgic group were more likely to give up buying and wait for the goods to return to the original price than those in the control group,verified that nostalgia reduces consumer nonethical behavior;The results of experiment 2 showed that the subjects in the nostalgic group were less likely to not pay back in the drugstore than those in the control group.The mediating role of the goal of goodness is established.The results of experiment 3 excluded the possible alternative explanation of empathy;The results of experiment 4 showed that the subjects in the nostalgic group were less likely to return the worn clothes to the merchant than those in the control group,but the test item of borrowing CNKI account password from good friends is not tenable,which reflected the problem that consumers in China still have weak awareness of intellectual property rights.This experiment also excluded possible alternative explanations of self-control.In experiment 5,the independent variable was set to collective nostalgia in order to verify the boundary.The results showed that the subjects in the collective nostalgia group were less likely to steal food without paying in the store and unpack the books in the bookstore and put them back on the shelf,and the boundary effect was established.The theoretical innovation and contribution of this dissertation can be summarized as follows.Firstly,in terms of the influencing factors of consumer non-ethical behavior,the influencing factors of consumer non-ethical behavior in the past involve many factors such as social culture,environment,individual and so on.In terms of personal influencing factors,previous studies mainly discussed the impact of consumer demographic characteristics(such as age,gender,etc.)and individual psychology(risk perception,risk-taking,business attitude,etc.)on consumer non-ethical behavior.This dissertation discusses the impact of nostalgia,a bittersweet and mainly positive emotion,on consumers non-ethical behavior,Thus,it enriches the research on the pre variables of consumer non-ethical behavior;Secondly,for the contribution of nostalgia theory,the previous research on nostalgia consequence variables mainly involves individual psychological response and prosocial behavior.This dissertation discusses the impact of nostalgia on consumer non-ethical behavior,which further enriches the research on nostalgia consequence variables.Finally,this dissertation further expands the research on the application of priming theory in the field of consumers.This dissertation discusses the goal goodness of nostalgic priming,so as to reduce consumer non-ethical behavior,and further expand the application of priming theory in the field of consumer behavior.The research conclusion of this dissertation also has certain practical significance.For enterprises,especially those vulnerable to losses due to consumer non-ethical behavior,such as supermarkets and online stores,nostalgia activates the goal of goodness,so as to reduce consumer non-ethical behavior.Enterprises can reduce consumer non-ethical behavior to some extent by inserting certain clues of nostalgic themes in marketing practice,such as nostalgic packaging and nostalgic music,so as to reduce the loss of interests of enterprises accordingly.It is conducive to the long-term and healthy development of the enterprise and to creating a clean and positive marketing environment;For consumers,the reduction of non-ethical behavior will help significantly improve consumers’ physical and mental health quality and ideological and moral quality.In the long run,it is of great significance to promote citizens’ moral construction and enhance citizens’ cultural literacy. |
