Time-Varying Effects of Chronic Hedonic Goals on Impulsive Behavior
Published 11/1/2006
Author: Suresh Ramanathan and Geeta Menon
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Executive Summary
Much of what people buy is often unplanned or even impulsive. Marketers have long been interested in understanding what drives people to act impulsively in the hopes of finding the right triggers. Conversely, public policy makers are concerned about the increasing incidence of overindulgence that manifests in different forms, such as unrestrained eating, binge drinking, rising credit card debts, and pursuit of risky behaviors. Such acts of indulgence have usually been attributed to personality traits, that is, whether a person is impulsive or not. However, personality measures only help categorize a person as impulsive or prudent (not impulsive) without explaining how such people might act in different situations and what might underlie these behaviors. More important, these measures merely indicate whether a person might indulge or not but not how much.
The purpose of this article is to provide a framework based on goal theory (1) to explain how marketing stimuli can trigger desires and lead to impulsive actions among both impulsive and otherwise prudent people; (2) to show how these desires come into conflict with goals to be frugal or stay healthy and thus cause intense ambivalence over time; and (3) to examine how impulsive and prudent people resolve this ambivalence differently, leading to overindulgence on the part of impulsive people and a backfire effect among prudent people.
This research contributes to the theory on impulsive behavior by demonstrating the dynamics of hedonic or pleasure-seeking goals and the creation of desires for products related to these goals. Thus, unlike previous work that may predict only whether a person may choose a cake over a salad, the current research suggests that some people might actually end up helping themselves to more of the cake if they wait a while before indulging themselves. Notably, the research also finds that even so-called prudent people can be influenced temporarily. However, one act of indulgence among such people could lead to a significant rebound effect such that they try to shield their self-control goals from further violation, thus causing them to shut down any more impulses. This could potentially lead to a reduced basket size.
Given that retailers often try to influence in-store behavior by using ambient scents, in-store coupons, or other stimuli, this research underscores the importance of using time as a strategic tool for influencing behavior. If marketers could identify impulsive people on the basis of prior purchase patterns, they may find significant value in the use of targeted cues aimed at such people before they enter the store rather than handing them out in the store. However, prudent people are better targeted after they finish their shopping so that there is no backfire effect of any act of indulgence on their shopping behavior.
Biography
Suresh Ramanathan is Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He received his PhD in Marketing from the Stern School of Business at New York University in 2002. He has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Before obtaining his PhD, he worked with Brooke Bond Lipton India Ltd. (a subsidiary of Unilever), JWT, Lintas, MTV, and McCann-Erickson. His research interests revolve around the study of temporal dynamics of goal-driven and affect-laden judgments and behavior and the interface between conscious and nonconscious processes in such phenomena. He is also interested in the study of risky behavior and issues pertaining to loss of self-control. He was the recipient of the SCP-Sheth Foundation award for the best dissertation proposal in 2001. His work has been published in Journal of Consumer Research. He teaches consumer behavior and advanced marketing strategy at the graduate level at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
Geeta Menon is Professor of Marketing and Harold MacDowell Faculty Research Fellow in the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University. She is also the Chair of the Marketing Department. She got her PhD in Business Administration (with a minor in social psychology) at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign in 1991. Her research interests include the study of consumer memory and information processing in the contexts of survey methodology, advertising of health information, and risk perception. Her work has been published in leading marketing journals, such as Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Marketing Research. She is on the editorial review boards of Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of Public Policy & Marketing. She also serves on the policy board of Journal of Consumer Research. She was the cochair of the 2004 annual conference of the Association for Consumer Research and was recently elected to serve on the Board of Directors of the Association of Consumer Research in the role of treasurer starting January 2006. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in marketing research at Stern and, more recently, has focused her teaching efforts on the full-time MBA core course in marketing. She also teaches a required behavioral doctoral seminar in marketing; she enjoys mentoring doctoral students and has placed her most recent students at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. She has won the Citibank Award for excellence in teaching.
J Marketing Research, Volume 43, Number 4, November 2006
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