The Effect Of Consumer Goal On Product Preferencee: An Experimental Study From The Perspective Of Construal Level Theory

This research origins from the real consumption context. It is quite common in today's market place that consumers tend to collect information about a particular product category before their real purchase behavior. So consumers'decision process can be divided into two stage, namely information collecting or browsing and real purchase behavior or buying, and consumers might form their preferences in both of the stages. Then, are these preferences identical or different? Prior research has shown that consumers'preferences formed in these two stages are quite different. A consumer may prefer Product A in the data collecting stage, while she may prefer Product B instead of A in her real purchase stage. Then, the question is what happened? Why the preferences of the same consumer reversed? Related research is rare.This paper intends to explain this phenomenon from the Theory of Consumer Goal. According to the theory of consumer goal, consumer will salient two kinds of goals during her contacting, collecting, and processing of the information. These two goals are named as Browsing and Buying. It is believed that when consumers are collecting data for future use, the goal of browsing will salient. While when consumer are making the real purchase, the goal of buying will salient. Based on these conclusions, this paper hypothesis that the reason why consumers show different preferences in different stages is that different consumer goal is salient in a particular stage. The Construal Level Theory was also cited in this paper to explain what happened when consumers have different goals. In particular, I concluded that when the goal of browsing is salient, namely the consumers are in the information collecting stage, the perceived distance between present and the time purchase behavior happens is relatively long. In contrast, when the goal of browsing is salient, namely the consumers are in real purchase behavior, the perceived distance between present and the time of purchase behavior happens is relatively short. According to Construal Level Theory, when the perceived distance is long consumers prefer the product that performs better in the primary attributes, and when the perceived distance is short, consumers prefer the product that performs better in the secondary attributes. Then it can explain why consumers form totally different preferences in the two stages. It is the perceived distance that works.Another question this paper intend to answer is how the perceived distance works, resulting in different preferences. We explored this under mechanism by adopting consumers' learning of attribute information and the effect of Need for Cognitive Closure. More specifically, consumers prefer the product that performs better at the primary (vs. secondary) attributes because they can learn these attributes information much better when the goal of browsing (buying) is salient. Furthermore, this relationship exists only when consumers' Need for Cognitive Closure is relatively low rather than high. This is the case because, when consumers' Need for Cognitive Closure is high, then tend to resist the new information came from the second stage and persist their preferences formed in the first stage, and they only focus on the secondary attributes that are much easier to process.To test the framework and hypotheses, this study has conducted multiple experiments. Among those experiments, experiment 1 is an exploring study which intended to test whether consumers will show different preferences in different stages or goals. Experiment 2 is a lab experiment, which test the influence of consumer goals and the mediation of consumer learning through manipulation of consumer goals and attribute information. Experiment 3 testified the moderation effect of Need for Cognitive Closure, and by using a different product category, enhancing the robust of this research. In conclusion, the empirical study shows supports to the hypothesis.The work of this paper contributes to the related research area and has implications for managerial practice. From the theoretical aspect, this study extended the research of consumer goal, adopted theories like Construal Level and Need for Cognitive Closure into a new domain. From the practical aspect, this study can be helpful in guiding the management of retail corporate, the behavior of sellers, and the self regulation of consumers.