How Mindset Affects Online Planned and Unplanned Purchasing – An Extended Abstract

As a shopping platform, the Internet was initially predominantly viewed as a uniquely convenience based shopping channel that allowed shoppers to exert self control and regulate shopping decisions (Girard et al. 2002; Li et al. 1999). But it is becoming increasingly clear that online purchasing also extends to being experiential and provides for a mixture of utilitarian and experiential shopping motives, allowing consumers to engage into planned as well as unplanned shopping activities (Partobeeah et al. 2009). The present paper primarily draws from the Rubicon model of action phases (Gollwitzer 1990) to assess an important marketing implication for online shopping – that the extent to which consumers engage into planned versus unplanned behaviour depends on the mindset that consumers are in at the time they access a website.