Download Predicting Consumer Decision Making Process: The interplay

Predicting Consumer Decision Making Process: The interplay between
emotions and attention during the purchase of cause-related products
1. Introduction
What motivates consumers to purchase cause-related products? Increasing interest in the
determinants of this behavior is somehow evidenced by reports suggesting that 80% of
consumers would be willing to change their preference for a socially responsible brand (“Cone,”
2010). Cause related marketing is a business strategy and a powerful tool to help companies to
meet their marketing goals by associating a brand with a social cause as a purchase incentive
(Strahilevitz & Myers, 1998; Barone, Miyazahi, & Taylor, 2000). Major companies have raised
their efforts on cause-related marketing in order to increase their sales while maintaining a
positive perception of the brand (Barone, Norman, & Miyazaki, 2007). Non-profit organizations
like UNICEF have successfully generated more than US$5.2 million just by partnering with
companies like IKEA during their “Soft Toy Campaign”, aimed at supporting children worldwide
(“UNICEF,” 2012).
During the purchase decision process, consumers are bombarded with a confusing mixture of
stimuli in a cluttered environment. Those visual cues influence their ability to choose the final
product (Pieters, Warlop, & Wedel, 2002). Cause-related products are one more product trying to
draw consumers’ attention in order to gain a place in the consideration set. As such, it is of
utmost importance to study how and when the presence of cause-related products is able to break
the cluttered environment. Furthermore, studies suggest that individuals tend to donate to
charitable causes driven by their emotional state (Strahilevitz & Myers, 1998). Thus, emotions
play a key role in the purchase experience that must be thoroughly studied.
This research presents a conceptual explanation of what goes on during the decision making
process when consumers are confronted with product-charity bundles, namely by studying how
emotional arousal and attention mediate the consumer choice of cause-related products.
2. Literature Review and Research Model
It is generally accepted that one of the main drivers of cause-related marketing effectiveness
is the product type (frivolous vs. practical) (Strahilevitz, 1999; Strahilevitz & Myers, 1998;
Winterich & Barone, 2011). Consumers have different motives when they buy a product during a
shopping trip. They may be looking for a product that can meet their functional needs (utilitarianpractical) or one that can help them increase their levels of multisensory and emotive aspects of
the purchase experience (hedonic-frivolous) (Dhar & Wertenbroch, 2000; Hirschman &
Holbrook, 1982). People are more likely to choose a donation-based promotion when they are
buying frivolous products (Strahilevitz & Myers, 1998). The reward one obtains from
contributing to a cause acts as a kind of utility that is gained during the purchase. That increases
the likelihood of an individual to buy a cause-related product (Strahilevitz & Myers, 1998).
Nevertheless, the type of product is not the only factor affecting the purchase of productcharity bundles. The effects of the perceived motivation of the retailer to the cause and retailercause fit are also particularly important. Barone et al (2007) found that when consumers perceive
that the company is not motivated to support the cause, retailer-cause fit does not affect intention
to buy. However, if they realize that motivation is high, the likelihood of buying the product
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increases with the fit between the cause and the retailer (Barone et al., 2007). They manipulated
retailer-cause fit by associating a retailer of pharmaceutical products with fitness programs (low
fit) or breast cancer causes (high fit). This result is in line with previous studies by Pracejus and
Olsen (2004) where they examined that brand/cause fit amplifies the impact of cause-related
marketing on choice behavior.
The point of purchase is a highly complex environment for decisions to take place. There are
many products and brands competing for attention and trying to consider them all is a cognitive
task that our brain cannot handle (Pieters et al., 2002). This poses another question that so far has
not been answered in the extant cause-related marketing literature. How does the product-charity
bundle captures the consumers’ attention so that it can break the cluttered environment?
Visual attention is a crucial element in our ability to make decisions and a scarce resource in
the cluttered shopping environment (Pieters & Wedel, 2004). It helps us to selectively focus on
what is most important and “filter out irrelevant information” (Ungerleider, 2000). Theories of
attention have long recognized the inability of people to handle the overload of information that
is captured through the eyes (Desimone & Duncan, 1995). The brain has to eliminate unwanted
stimuli to cope with the complexity of the surrounding environment. Biased competition models
(Buehlmann & Deco, 2008) are able to explain how products struggle to capture and retain the
attention of the consumers.
Visual attention is a mediator of brand choice (Pieters & Warlop, 1999). People are more
likely to buy the products they observe longer. The bias in visual attention salience increases the
information acquisition and thereby its chances of being selected. Chandon et al (2009) found
evidences that “brands influence both attention and evaluation given attention” and also provided
evidence that the number of fixations is positively related to brand consideration, so one should
expect that the greater the number of fixations on a particular brand, the better the chance of these
brands be to chosen (Chandon, Hutchinson, Young, & Bradlow, 2009).
Despite the importance of cognitive information processing in visual attention, recent studies
in emotional attention confirm that cognition is not the only factor influencing attention
(Vuilleumier & Huang, 2009). Not all stimuli have the same amount of associated emotions and
those feelings may influence our perception of what is relevant or not during the purchase
experience. Research shows that emotional arousal captures attention very early during visual
search (Calvo & Lang, 2004). This suggests that the number of fixations may depend on the
arousal that their visual cues produce, and that this arousal can act as a kind of additional weight,
which breaks the existing thresholds in non-compensatory strategies (Roberts & Lilien, 1993).
This bias might improve the likelihood that the product is chosen. During this struggle to
highlight the most salient cue among the competing products, cause-related marketing is also a
fearless fighter. If cause-related products are unable to capture the attention of the consumer, it is
likely that they won’t have a chance to enter the consideration set.
Barone et al (2007) showed evidences that the charity stimulus presented in the donationbased promotion attract attention due to the novelty of the association, especially for non-familiar
brands. Following the moderating role of the product type that influences the choice of donations
(promotions) (Strahilevitz, 1999), this research theorizes that visual attention should act as a
mediator between these constructs, favoring the frivolous (utilitarian) product that fits the
consumers’ identity salience (Reed, Lutz, Sawyer, & Schlenker, 2004). Specifically, this effect
should be salient in a high interbrand homogeneity environment where consumers don’t have to
weight other trade-offs in order to come up with the better choice (Barone, Miyazaki, & Taylor,
2000). Therefore,
H1: Cause-related products attract more attention during frivolous (practical) purchases if
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the causes are in line with the consumers’ identity salience and all products share interbrand homogeneity conditions.
Empirical studies confirm that the association of a company with a cause will yield positive
emotional responses in consumers (Bagozzi & Moore, 1994; Lafferty & Goldsmith, 2005). More
specifically, consumers who buy frivolous products are more likely to choose one that has an
associated charity incentive (Winterich & Barone, 2011). Giving to charity acts as some sort of
“warm glow” that balances the desire to feel pleasure with the purchase (Strahilevitz, 1999;
Winterich & Barone, 2011). Thus, consumers that buy hedonic purchases associated with a cause
should feel higher levels of moral satisfaction than with utilitarian products. Given the above
behavior, consumers should feel more emotional engaged during hedonic purchases and those
feelings can be measured by their higher levels of emotional arousal towards those stimuli.
Hence,
H2: Consumer will increase their levels of satisfaction during hedonic (utilitarian)
purchases associated with causes leading to higher levels of emotional arousal.
Another important factor that was previously mentioned in the literature review is that
brand/cause and retailer/cause fit enhances the likelihood that consumers choose a donationbased promotion (Barone et al., 2007; Pracejus & Olsen, 2004). Consumers are more willing to
buy a product-charity bundle when the cause is perceived as having a strong connection to the
type of product being sold by the brand or the retailer. In a related research, Barone et al (2007)
found pharmaceutical products to fit better with breast cancer causes than with general fitness
programs.
In the present context it is argued that consumers should exhibit higher levels of emotional
arousal when they are confronted with high product/cause fit stimuli than with low fit
associations. Thus,
H3: Consumers will have higher levels of emotional arousal when observing products with
high (low) product/cause fit condition.
Information of high emotional content disrupts attentional processing (Yiend, 2010).
Therefore one cannot ignore the interaction effects among attention and emotional arousal. This
effect suggests that cause-related products with higher levels of emotional arousal introduce bias
in attention. While benefiting of further attention, these products are more likely to enter the
consideration set and, therefore, to be chosen. This is in line with the empirical evidence of
(Nielsen, Shapiro, & Mason, 2010) who observed that consumers were more prone to change
their attention to ads with highly emotional cues. As such, it is expected that emotional
processing should heighten the power of hedonic products with high levels of product/cause fit
and increase the attentional bias towards product/charity bundles. Hence,
H4: High emotional arousal towards cause-related products increases the duration of
attention, in high product/cause fit condition.
One final question is whether there is a relationship between attention and emotional arousal
as independent measures and choice as a dependent measure. As previously hypothesized, causerelated products should attract more attention, but does that extra attentional bias increase the
opportunity of those products to be chosen? The present study draws from the studies performed
by Pieters and Warlop (1999) where they find visual attention measures, as expressed by longer
fixation durations, intra/inter-brand saccades to have a significant positive effect on brand choice
in general. Therefore,
H5: Visual attention is positively related to the choice of cause-related products, compared
to products having no donation-based promotion.
Similarly, it should be expected that as emotions increase the salience of cause-related
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products they also should have a positive effect on the choice itself. The affective-cognitive
model of consumer decision making suggests a dual-process mechanism during the choice of a
set of alternatives (Shiv & Fedorikhin, 1999). A first automatic process where lower-order
affective reactions are present, and a second process where the cognitive resources are used to
establish a more detailed comparison of the alternatives (Shiv & Fedorikhin, 1999). However,
their results suggest that consumers are more influenced by their affective reactions when they
have lower cognitive resources. During a real shopping experience, the availability of resources is
constrained because consumers are exposed to a plethora of alternative products and external
factors (Shiv & Fedorikhin, 1999). Furthermore, these affective influences should be heightened
by the satisfaction of the consumers in engaging in the purchase of a guilt-free hedonic product
when bought together with a donation-based promotion (Strahilevitz, 1999; Winterich & Barone,
2011). Thus,
H6: Emotional arousal is positively related to the choice of hedonic (utilitarian) causerelated products, compared to products having no donation-based promotion.
Figure 1 resumes the conceptual model along with the formulated hypotheses.
Fig.1 – Proposed Conceptual Model
3. Research Directions
The present study extends the theoretical contributions hitherto proposed by formulating
hypotheses that suggests that attention and emotions mediate the relationship between causerelated marketing and consumer choice. However, further research is necessary to empirically
test the conceptual model using an experimental design to manipulate the several factors that
influence the purchase of cause-related products.
Following the work of Strahilevitz and Myers (1998) on donations to charities as purchase
incentives, a preliminary data collection was conducted to select which causes have high/low fit
with the frivolous (chocolate truffles) and practical (detergents) products. A set of 10 social
causes well known by the target population (liking rate above M=4.5/7) was used to test their fit
with each of the frivolous or practical products of the study. Using Pracejus and Olsen (2004)
seven point likert scale, 102 undergraduate and graduate students from a major university (37%
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Male, 63% Female) were asked if they considered the product to have very low fit (1) or very
high fit (7) with the cause. In each category, one of four different brands was paired with the 10
social causes. As expected, results confirm that when participants rated the frivolous (utilitarian)
products against each social cause there were significant differences in terms of perceived fit. A
Kruskal-Wallis non-parametric test on the fit between chocolate truffles and social causes
revealed that, one of the charities is perceived as having a different fit than at least one of the
others (chi-squared = 56.66, df = 9, p-value < 0.01). After a post multiple-comparison test,
“Greenpeace” (Fit=1/7) and a National non-profit organization “Operação Nariz Vermelho”
(Fit=5/7) were selected as the two social causes with the biggest differences in terms of perceived
fit. These significant differences were confirmed using the Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon test
between these two causes (W = 2822.5, p-value < 0.01).
As for utilitarian products, Kruskal-Wallis test showed no significant differences between any
of the social causes (chi-squared = 14.74, df = 9, p-value > 0.05).
Previous research revealed some of the most important determinants of cause-related
marketing effectiveness. Nonetheless, the measurement of consumer preferences has been made
exclusively by means of questionnaires and self-reports which assume that consumers rationalize
their intentions and make their choices in a thoughtful way. Yet, in order to eliminate some
alternatives from the choice task consumers opt to use simplified heuristics and noncompensatory strategies, which are not possible to uncover using self-reports (Bettman & Park,
1980; Payne, Bettman, & Johnson, 1993; Roberts & Lilien, 1993).
In order to understand the processes that occur between the consideration of the several
alternatives and the final choice, future research should use a measure of attention such as eyetracking. Eye-tracking technology has been successfully applied as a tracing method to
understand and explain the visual scan path towards purchase. Tracking the eye movements has
proved to be a reliable method to capture attentional processes (Blair, Watson, Walshe, & Maj,
2009). These techniques can record the location of the fovea when the eyes fixate a given object,
as well as the time the consumer spends on each stimulus.
Furthermore, future research may explore the use of skin conductance response as a
concurrent measure to reflect changes in emotional arousal. Skin Conductance Response (SCR)
is one form of electrodermal activity (EDA) of the human body (Dawson, Schell, & Filion,
2007). EDA is an indicator of an emotional mechanism which is present in everyday decisions
and it’s an extensively used measure of emotional arousal (Boucsein, 1992). It can be measured
by placing two electrodes on sensitive parts of the skin (usually in the phalanges of the finger)
and applying a constant voltage. When confronted with highly emotional stimuli the body
produces an electrolyte solution through the eccrine sweet glands (Dawson et al., 2007).
4. Conclusion
Cause-related marketing is a good strategy to enhance the profit of the seller and the ability of
the social causes to make a difference. Both can benefit from the managerial implications of these
contributions. Not only can they understand what drives consumers’ attention during the purchase
of cause-related products, but also what makes them more emotionally aroused. When
empirically tested, the results of these hypotheses can help marketers and charities to fine tune
their campaigns in order to promote the choice of charity-product bundles.
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