Research On The Influence Of Upward Comparison On Consumers’ Preference For Self-Improvement Products

As China’s economy shifts from high-speed development to high-quality development,people increasingly pay attention to self-improvement in all aspects.Judging from the current consumption trend of Chinese nationals and the development history of developed countries,self-improvement products have a broad market space in China.Chinese culture has always advocated exemplary education,advocated "Seeing another better than oneself,one tries to equal him" and attached great importance to self-improvement.Compared with western culture,individuals in eastern culture tend to find themselves through the relative position in the environment,and are more likely to be affected by the relative state of self in social comparison.In the field of consumption,merchants often promote the sales of self-improvement products by activating the upward social comparison process of consumers.However,this strategy of deliberately creating upward social comparison differences by presenting excellent benchmarks does not always work.In recent years,scholars have increasingly focused on the impact of upward social comparison on consumer behavior,including status consumption,conspicuous consumption,overeating and so on.However,these compensatory consumption cannot fundamentally improve the threatened characteristics of consumers.In contrast,self-improvement products can help consumers fundamentally improve their self-deficit and obtain substantial long-term benefits,but few studies have explored the impact of upward social comparison on self-improvement products.Therefore,this paper explores the influence mechanism of upward social comparison on preference for self-improvement products from an empirical perspective.We propose that upward social comparison will enhance consumers’ preference for self-improvement products,and this positive effect is mediated by self-identity threat and moderated by consumers’ implicit personality and self-construal tendency.In this paper,four experiments are carried out to verify the proposed hypothesis.Experiment 1 proved that upward social comparison positively affected consumers’ preference for self-improvement products.Experiment 2 demonstrated that self-identity threat mediated the enhancement effect of upward social comparison on preference for self-improvement products,and excluded the possibility of emotion and perceived threat of control as alternative mediators.The results of Experiment 3 showed that consumers’ implicit personality moderated the effect of upward social comparison on their preference for self-improvement products.Compared with entity theorists,incremental theorists showed stronger preference for self-improvement products after facing upward social comparison.The results of Experiment 4 showed that consumers’self-construal played a moderating role in the effect of upward social comparison on their preference for self-improvement products.Compared with independent self-construal,people with interdependent self-construal showed stronger preference for self-improvement products after facing upward social comparison.Different from previous studies that explored the impact of upward social comparison on compensatory consumption behavior from the perspective of emotion-focused coping,this paper explored the impact of upward social comparison on adaptive consumption of self-improvement products from the perspective of problem-focused coping.Theoretically,this study takes the preference of self-improvement products as the consumption consequences of upward social comparison,which enriches the research perspective of upward social comparison and related researches on self-improvement consumption.At the same time,this paper introduces implicit personality and self-construal as moderating variables,expanding the application of these two variables in the field of consumption.In practice,this study provides reasonable and feasible suggestions for enterprises to better use the upward social comparison marketing strategy.On the one hand,enterprises can achieve precision marketing through positioning incremental theorists and interdependent self-construal by market segmentation and big data analysis.On the other hand,enterprises can activate the tendency of incremental theorists and interdependent self-construal of consumers through reasonable incentives,and expand the potential customer group.In addition,this paper is also conducive to guide consumers to deal with the problem with more substantial and effective consumption choices,and obtain substantial long-term benefits.