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25-03-2021 | Research Article

More or Less? Consumer Goal Orientation and Product Choice

Authors: Haipeng (Allan) Chen, Woojin Choi, Yan (Lucy) Liu, Haoying Sun, Fu Liu

Published in: Customer Needs and Solutions | Issue 1-2/2021

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Abstract

We study the impact of consumers’ goal orientation on their preference between high-quality and low-priced products. Consistent with our theorizing, we find that US (Korean) consumers, who are more promotion (prevention) oriented, prefer high-quality (vs. low-priced) products because they assign more weight to quality in their choice. In addition, we identify a boundary condition of the effect by showing that it is mitigated for products for which safety is a salient feature. We also rule out price/quality perceptions, regret, and price-quality association as rival explanations of our results. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and managerial implications of the current research.

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We aimed for 80 participants in each country, but many more were recruited in South Korea due to a clerical error. The resultant imbalance in the study design may reduce the statistical power of detecting the proposed effect, thus providing a conservative test of our predictions.

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Title: More or Less? Consumer Goal Orientation and Product Choice
Authors: Haipeng (Allan) Chen
Woojin Choi
Yan (Lucy) Liu
Haoying Sun
Fu Liu
Publication date: 25-03-2021
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Customer Needs and Solutions / Issue 1-2/2021
Print ISSN: 2196-291X
Electronic ISSN: 2196-2928
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40547-021-00114-z

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Other articles of this Issue 1-2/2021

Herding Among Retail Shoppers: the Case of Television Shopping Network

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Adaptive Multidimensional Scaling: Brand Positioning Based on Decision Sets and Dissimilarity Judgments

Correction to: Customer Needs and Solutions, Vol 7, Issue 3–4