Research On The Inhibitory Influence Of Goal Conflict Of Consumers On Impulsive Purchase

Almost all the consumers has experienced impulsive purchase.Most people reported that they had experienced impulsive purchase in the past three months.Impulsive purchase has more than eighty years of research history and now one of the international frontier types of research of impulsive purchase is about consumer’s inner activity inducing or inhibiting the mechanism of impulsive purchase.The cognitive dissonance between the two or more opposing possibilities within consumers is called a consumer’s goal conflict.Studies before showed that goal conflict was aversive,linking with depression,neuropathy,disease,etc.,and goal conflict also reduced task performance and impaired individual decision-making effects.Nevertheless,recent studies have shown that goal conflict may not impair individual perception.On the opposite,it makes positive impacts on consumers’ decision-making as well as their behaviors.Consumer goal conflict suppresses the activation of irrelevant information,focusing on zero-sum selection and less wide-angles.Goal conflict processes information deeply by encouraging the dialectical thinking of the opposite,which promotes consumers escalating the conflict from current specific goals into overall abstract long-term oriented goal.Consumer goal conflict also increases the reliance on significant reasons,boosting more detailed information searches.At the same time,Consumer goal conflict postpones the selection for subsequent irrelevant decisions,Changing the original cognitive mindset and forming more reasonable and objective evaluations。Will consumers affected by the goal conflict be more impulsive or more rational when they encounter exciting commodities?May conflicting goal promote impulsive purchase or curb impulsive purchase?Both studies on goal conflict and impulsive purchase are booming in their respective field.Nevertheless,their researches are basically independent.Researches on them together are scarce and there are less studies on their relationships among academic circles.Whether they can be put into the same consumer decision-making model and whether there are other variables affecting their relationships is not clear.There is still a theory gap between providing impulsive purchase marketing strategies for enterprise managers and marketers from the perspective of goal conflict.Studying the impact of goal conflict on impulsive purchase requires a deep understanding of cognitive processes behind consumer decision-making and behavior field,which means that now studies should focus on identifying the basic cognitive processes affected by goal conflict.This study goes deep into the connotation of goal conflict and impulsive purchase,and constructs the framework of the relationships between goal conflict and impulsive purchase,and it makes a series of analyses on the different mechanisms and boundaries of action by goal conflict affecting impulsive purchase.The study focuses on the impact of goal conflict on impulsive purchase from different mechanistic perspectives,and makes a response to impulsive purchase frontier issues and research hotspots,drawing applicability conclusions.Specifically,the study starts from the effect relationship between consumer goal conflict and impulsive purchase,and takes the impact of security requirements of mental accounting and price search tendency as the entry point,with self-efficacy as boundary condition.The study explores the intrinsic mechanism of the inhibitory effects of goal conflict on impulsive purchase through the need for closure and the construal level.In the study,we verify the inhibitory influence of goal conflict on impulsive purchase by using the normative evaluation and self-control as the core variables of impulsive purchase researches,and promote the boundary by consumer personality traits,Hofstede cultural and augmented reality(AR).The study for the specific problems involved,exerts experimental method,virtual situation research method and a combination of the two by purposeful creating situation or controlling conditions.To manipulate the psychological activities of the subjects,and reveal the causal relationship between variables,it verifies the effectiveness of the theoretical model,and ensures the robustness and effectiveness of the research conclusion.Experimental method and virtual situation research method or a combination of the two are applied to the empirical analysis of chapter 4,5,6,7 and 8 respectively.As the technical support,statistical analysis method is used to analyze experimental data and questionnaire research data.The following four conclusions are drawn from this study.Firstly,goal conflict suppresses impulsive purchase.Goal conflict facilitate consumers to accept pre-existing hypothetical bias and confirm bias,making resources appear less.Resource scarcity leads to a general directional cognition which focuses on constraints.Constraints consistently affect the performance of subsequent irrelevant tasks.Consumer attention from the current focus on a more global wide angle,which escalates the existing goals,with the previous context-activated thought patterns persisting and assessment capacity enhanced.The cognitive vigilance of goal conflict shows a more active and rational control over individuals’ own psychology and behavior.Risk prediction postpones the spontaneous and immediate short-sighted preference,which is manifested as slowing down demand,resisting temptation,and impulse suppress.As a consequence,self-prevention increases and shapes the way the information subsequently processed.The overall evaluation of the stimulus goal forms the behavioral intention in line with the ideal self,which suppresses the impulsive purchase.Temporal goal conflict,monetary goal conflict,and many other types of goal conflict experiments have consistently verified the inhibitory effect of goal conflict on impulsive purchase.Study 1 with five empirical experiments and Study 2,3,4,5 with four virtual situation researches jointly verify the robustness of the impact of goal conflict on impulsive purchase.Business managers and marketers can improve the marketing performance of impulsive purchase by reducing goal conflict.Secondly,consumer goal conflict suppresses impulsive purchase by improving the security requirements of mental accounting and enhancing the price search tendency.Self-efficacy reinforces the inhibitory effect of higher price search tendency on impulsive purchase.Study 1 with three experimental results of shows that consumer goal conflict positively affects the security requirements of mental accounting.The higher the security requirements of mental accounting improve the price search trend of goal conflict of consumers.The stronger the price search trend suppresses the impulsive purchase.High self-efficacy further promotes the inhibitory effects of consumer goal conflict on impulsive purchase as compared to low self-efficacy.Consumer goal conflict activates the psychological perception of resource scarcity,and the security of mental accounting is threatened.To balance the crisis,consumers make practical plans and adjust individual behavior to the environment,with higher information searching tendency.Activation psychology triggers individual self-impedance and the consumer takes action to delay riding short-term preferences,with impulsive purchase inhibited.Business managers and marketers can improve the marketing performance of impulsive purchase by reducing security requirements of mental accounting of goal conflict consumers,as well as reducing price search tendency and self-efficacy.Thirdly,the suppression of impulsive purchase by consumer goal conflict can also be achieved by reducing the need for closure and improving the level of construal level.The results of study 2 show that consumer goal conflict negatively affects the need for closure,and positively affect construal level,and the need for closure positively affects impulsive purchase and construal level negatively affects impulsive purchase.Goal conflict reduces the rapid closing demands of consumer impulsive purchase,and postpones the "freezing"and "seizing" of impulsive purchase.Resource shortages and dilemma force the consumers to think dialectically and gradually adapt to ambiguous thinking patterns,tending to consider long-term orientated interests.Consumers with goal conflict will reduce the demand for structure and order and slow down the process of individual information processing.They will give more weight to the rational consuming psychology activated by goal conflict,with conclusive solutions not easily achieved.Thus,consumers suppress the dominant response to impulsive purchase.Goal conflict triggers a deep sense of urgency of resource shortage knowledge and association of resource exhaustion,which upgrades the existing specific goals for a more overall long-term orienting benefit.Consumers present more holistic,core,abstract,decontextualized and psychological representations associating with main goals.They pay more attention to extract key features,and think overall thoroughly.Their rational cognition drives the valence improvement.The results of the remote perspective on long-term and short-term benefit trade-offs inhibit the short-term temptation of impulsive purchase.Fourthly,the study verifies that consumers with goal conflicts make less impulsive purchase by improving their normative negative assessment,improving their self-control ability,pushing the boundaries of phenomena through personality traits,cultural differences,and augment reality(AR).The results of study 3 show that consumer goal conflict activates crisis psychology,and resource scarcity pressures trigger a rapid normative negative assessment of impulsive purchase to reduce the reasonable expectations of impulsive purchase.Compared with the primary spontaneous impulse,consumers tend to be more rational and socialized.Deliberation and rational assessment by goal conflict is more incompatible with spontaneity and immediacy of impulsive purchase.Consumers initiate and implement self-control system.Control system-impulse system dual system mode works.The control system is activated and the impulsive system is suppressed,which in turn suppresses impulsive purchase.The moderating effects of studies 3 and 4 show that the conflicting goal consumers with similar individual characteristics and cultural differences have the same behavioral preferences,which shows that consumer behaviors with personality traits,and cultural differences of different types and intensity can be operated to a certain extent,and it enriches and expands the existing research conclusions.The empirical results of Study 5 show that,unlike many other scholars’ prediction,AR promotes the inhibitory impact of consumer goal conflict on impulsive purchase.That is,it does not promote but reduce the impulsive purchase of goal conflicting consumers.When applying AR technology,attention should be paid to preventing and avoiding consumer goal conflict.That is,business managers and marketers should improve the marketing performance of impulsive purchase by reducing the perception of consumer uncertainty from goal goal conflicting consumers as well as by improving decision-making comfort.The study has three aspects of academic innovation.Firstly,the study connects the research network of goal conflict and impulsive purchase,integrating the consumer goal conflict into the research theory of impulsive purchase,explaining the impact of goal conflict on impulsive purchase.The study proposes that consumer goal conflict may be an important reason for affecting impulsive purchase,which may become one of the first studies to incorporate goal conflict into the literature of impulsive purchase.The study improves the theoretical gap for enterprise managers and marketers from the perspective of goal conflict.Secondly,this study builds a theoretical model based on consumer decision theory,plan behavior theory,entropy increment law and system evolution theory.Based on the perspective of relationships between goal conflict and impulsive purchase,this study integrates the relevant classical theories of natural science and social science.with the universal classical natural science law guiding the marketing micro-research,the study support theory is strengthened,making a beneficial supplement to the theory of impulsive purchase.Thirdly,the study explores the intrinsic impact mechanisms of consumer goal conflict on impulsive purchase from multiple perspectives.Combined with a large number of literature studies and classical variables that have an important impact on impulsive purchase,the study systematically explains the internal psychological mechanism of consumer goal conflict on impulsive purchase,which provides a multi-angle reference for the academic research on the mechanism,and has a positive promotion effect on the existing research on impulsive purchase.