The Influencing Mechanism Of Interpersonal Relationship Between Buyer And Seller On Villager’s Purchase Decision

The interpersonal relationships and interactions between buyer and seller has a general impact on buyer’s purchasing decisions.Existing researches are based on the context of urban transactions to explore the impact of the relationship between buyer and seller on consumer purchasing decisions.However,these interpersonal relationship between buyer and seller are embedded in an urban community environment,and usually established,deepened and developed based on repeated transactions due to the high quality products and services provided by the seller.Therefore,the existing research often explores the influencing effect of interpersonal relationships between buyer and seller on consumer purchasing decisions from the perspective of trust and other factors like that,these research perspective are relatively homogeneous.In rural communities,buyer and seller,also known as villagers and retailers is quite different from the transaction relationship between consumers and retailers in the context of urban consumption environment.More concretely,as the villagers and retailers live in the same rural community which have the characteristics of Acquaintance Society,they inherently got an in-group membership based on the kinship and geography.Moreover,as compared with the general urban consumption environment,the potential interaction between villagers and retailers are more diverse for situation and happens more frequent,they all made their relationship between the two more closer.It means that in rural communities,the influencing effect of interpersonal relationships and interactions between villager and retailers on purchasing decisions are more specific and complex.However,as the existing research has neglected this important environmental characteristics,its findings and conclusions are not accurate and comprehensive to explain the villager’s purchasing decisions and behaviors in rural communities.Consequently,the current study based on the theory of social exchange and social comparison theory,using grounded research combined with quantitative research to construct and verify the influencing effect of interpersonal relationship and interactions between villagers and retailers on buyer’s purchasing decision,aiming to reveal the multi-path,dynamic intrinsic mechanism of interpersonal relationship and interactions on purchasing decisions in rural acquaintances.First of all,this paper based on the perspective of social comparison theory,exploring the effect of comparison between villagers and retailers in the village on the villager’s willingness to patronize the store,and then the boundary of the internal mechanism are discussed.This could be seen as a single path study of the impact of the interpersonal relationship on villagers’ purchasing decisions.We use 170 questionnaires from 8 rural communities in Hubei Province to conduct an empirical research,the results show that the comparison between the villagers and the retailers in the village will reduce their willingness to patronize the retailer’s store,consciousness of interpersonal relation play a moderating role in this process.Specifically,for those villagers with higher levels of consciousness of interpersonal relation,the negative impact of the upward social comparison on their willingness to patronize will be decreased.Secondly,take our previous study’s result and existing research conclusion into the comprehensive consideration,we explores the inherent complexity of the process of interpersonal relationship between buyer and seller in rural communities affecting the purchase decision of villagers.We suggest that trust and social comparison in interpersonal relationships can affect villager’s purchasing decisions simultaneously.After that,the boundary of the dual-path model is discussed.We call this a dual-path research on the interpersonal relationship between buyer and seller in rural communities.The dual-path conceptual model was validated by conducting a formal survey of large-scale questionnaires collected by 328 rural residents in Henan and Shandong provinces.The results show that the interpersonal relationship between the villagers and the retailers on the one hand promoting the villagers’ trust which will positively affect the willingness of their shops to visit,and on the other hand,let the villager generate upward social comparisons with retailer,and this will decrease their willingness to visit the retailer’s store.The dual path effect of this interpersonal relationship on shop patronage is regulated by product type.That is,compared with search goods,when villagers purchase experience goods,trust plays a strong mediating effect in the impact of interpersonal relationship on willingness to patronize;Compared with the experience goods,when the villager purchase the search goods,the upward social comparison play a stronger mediating effect in the impact of interpersonal relationship on the willingness to patronize.In addition,the villagers’ reciprocal beliefs can alleviate the inhibitory effect of the upward social comparison which generated by interpersonal relationships on the villager’s willingness to patronize.Compared with villagers with low levels of reciprocal beliefs,the upward social comparison’s negatively effect on villager’s retail store patronage will be effectively alleviated among villagers got high levels of reciprocal beliefs.Finally,the third study of this paper aims to examine the multi-path and cross context influencing effect of interpersonal relationship between buyer and seller in rural communities on individual’s purchase decision.This can be called the study of the multi-path effect of the interpersonal relationships between villager and retailer on purchasing decision-making.Using the grounded theory method to encode and analyze the semi-structured interviews of 17 villagers from Shandong,Hubei and Henan Provinces,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)In consumption context,the interaction between rural villagers and retailers may generate cognition and emotion,which can directly affect villager’s purchasing decisions;(2)In daily life,the interaction between rural villagers and retailers may generate cognition and emotion too,which has a cross-contextual impact on villager’s purchasing decisions;(3)Combined consumption context with daily life,i.e.in a panoramic perspective,we found that the interaction between rural villagers and retailers has a cyclical impact on purchasing decisions.The theoretical significance of this paper is that,we construct the internal mechanism of the influencing effect of interpersonal relationship between buyer and seller and their interaction on villager’s decision-making process in the social environment of acquaintances society.The current study has important exploration significance for future research which aimed at revealing the compound influencing mechanism of the relationship between buyer and seller on individual purchasing decisions.The conclusions obtained in this paper can provide direct reference value for how small retail store operators in rural communities can use the acquaintance relationship with villagers to promote buyers’ purchasing decisions and purchase loyalty.At the same time,the conclusion also have practical significance to the socialized marketing environment.