Karen A. Machleit

Describing and Measuring Emotional Response to Shopping Experience

Abstract Research has shown that shopping environments can evoke emotional responses in consumers and that such emotions, in turn, influence shopping behaviors and outcomes. This article broadens our understanding of emotions within the shopping context in two ways. First, it provides a descriptive account of emotions consumers feel across a variety of shopping environments. Second, it empirically compares the three emotion measures most frequently used in marketing to determine which best captures the various emotions shoppers experience. The results indicate that the broad range of emotions felt in the shopping context vary considerably across different retail environments. They also show that the Izard (Izard, C. E.: Human Emotions, Plenum, New York. 1977) and Plutchik (Plutchik, R.: Emotion: A Psychoevolutionary Synthesis, Harper and Row, New York. 1980) measures outperform the Mehrabian and Russell (Mehrabian, A., and Russell, J. A.: An Approach to Environmental Psychology, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 1974) measure by offering a richer assessment of emotional responses to the shopping experience.

Emotional Feelings and Attitude toward the Advertisement: The Roles of Brand Familarity and Repetition

Abstract The effects of emotional feelings during advertisement exposure and the effects of attitude toward the advertisement (Aad) are considered in an experiment which used both familiar and unfamiliar brands. The findings illustrate that brand familiarity moderates the relationships between Aad and brand attitude after advertisement exposure. In addition, the research provides evidence that the direct-affect-transfer hypothesis may be an adequate explanation for the effects of emotional feelings and Aad on brand attitude in some situations.

Human Versus Spatial Dimensions of Crowding Perceptions in Retail Environments: A Note on Their Measurement and Effect on Shopper Satisfaction

Perceived retail crowding was originally conceptualized as having two dimensions, but subsequent empirical work in marketing has treated the construct unidimensionally. This paper reports a series of lab and field studies that examine the dimensionality of the construct and its relationship to store satisfaction. Two alternative crowding measures are tested. Results suggest that perceived retail crowding has distinct human and spatial dimensions that affect satisfaction differently.

Emotional response and shopping satisfaction: Moderating effects of shopper attributions

Abstract Two studies are presented which demonstrate that the effect of emotions on shopping satisfaction is moderated by the attributions that shoppers make for their feelings. Study 1, a field study, includes two samples of shoppers (student and non-student) who responded to a questionnaire after an actual shopping episode. Results indicate that emotions have stronger effects on shopping satisfaction when the feelings are attributed to the store rather than being internally attributed. A subsequent laboratory experiment (Study 2) replicates the finding and also demonstrates that attribution locus (internal vs. external) and outcome (purchase success vs. failure) produce specific types of emotional responses. The effects of attribution locus and purchase outcome on shopping satisfaction are mediated by these emotions. Implications for retailers and future research avenues are discussed.

Effects of Individual and Product‐specific Variables on Utilising Country of Origin as a Product Quality Cue

This article advances the country of origin research stream by addressing some of the theoretical and methodological issues given as limitations in past studies. A conceptual model based on the cue paradigm was developed to investigate the relative impact of country of origin as a quality indicator in a causal framework. Results indicate that the country of origin cue is indeed a significant indicator of product quality; however, its relative effect varies by product category as well as by certain individual and product variables.

Psychometric assessment of a reduced version of INDSALES

Abstract INDSALES is the most comprehensive scale available to measure the job satisfaction of industrial sales representatives (reps); however, the scale has not found widespread use in the literature. This limited use could be due to the lenght of the scale. With the use of a split sample of 295 sales reps, qualitative techniques were combined with the LISREL procedure to reduce INDSALES to a balanced 28-item scale. The reliabilities of the reduced scale dimensions continued to exceed .75. Cross-validation using LISREL produced goodness of fit indices in excess of .80. Finally, nomological validity was successfully confirmed through comparison with variablr relationships established in the existing sales literature.

A place for emotion in attitude models

Abstract Finding ways and means to incorporate emotional experience into consumer and market research has been an ongoing challenge. We frame this challenge in the context of the information that is and is not normally collected in multiattribute attitude models. Our data show that retrospective reports about emotional experiences can be useful predictors of attitude when compared to traditional measures of cognitive structure, and that prior experience with a behavior can play a major role in moderating these relationships. The appeal of multiattribute attitude models has always been their value for predicting and diagnosing motives and preferences. Integrating emotive information into these models appears to be a way to build on this appeal.

Online Consumer Psychology : Understanding and Influencing Consumer Behavior in the Virtual World

In recent years, few questions have been of greater interest to consumer researchers, as well as to marketers of consumer products, than the viability of the internet as a platform for commercial transactions. At the heart of this debate is the issue of whether or not the internet provides anything that is substantially new or different from traditional business-to-consumer (B2C) channels. We believe that, indeed, the internet does provide some unique opportunities to marketers in their quest to better understand and ultimately influence their target customers. In particular, retailers on the internet have an unprecedented opportunity to personalize the shopping experience and control the shopping environment. In this chapter we will examine three specific psychological mechanisms that can play a central role in influencing the interaction between shoppers and recommendation agents in electronic marketplaces. PERSONALIZATION AND THE OPPORTUNITY TO INFLUENCE Thanks to Moore’s Law, marketers now have the ability to remember and respond to the tastes and preferences of many individual consumers. Advances in technology, and techniques for database marketing, have created the opportunity for retailers to resurrect business practices over one hundred years old. At that time, the local shop owner was able to develop individual relationships with each of his customers, providing them with personalized service and product recommendations. Don Peppers and Martha Rogers (1997) explain it this way: We are facing a paradigm shift of epic proportions – from the industrial era to the Information Age. As a result, we are witnessing a meltdown of the massmarketing paradigm that has governed business competition throughout the twentieth century. The new paradigm is one to one (1:1) – mandated by cheaper and faster data management, interactive media, and increasing capabilities forfor a grant to initiate this research and Theresa Cai and Harshavardhan Gangadharbatla for their invaluable help during the data collection. Consumers learn about products from the experience of interacting with people, objects and the environment. However, an experience is more than simply the passive reception of external sensations or subjective mental interpretations of a situation. Rather, an experience is the result of an ongoing transaction that gains in quality, intensity, meaning, and value integrating both psychological and emotional conditions (Mathur, 1971). These conditions are ultimately accomplished via the generation of thoughts and/or sensations brought together creating the experience (Hirshman, 1984). A product purchase is in many ways not the purchase of a physical good itself but of an experience that the product affords (Pine II and Gilmore, 1998). Thus, the role of consumer learning about a product prior to the purchase is mainly to assess what consumption experience the product can offer and how well it can meet the expectations of the anticipated experience (Hoch and Deighton, 1989). Research has documented that consumers learn about products through indirect experience, such as advertising, and via direct experience, such as product trial it has been speculated that the type of medium may limit the effect of advertising and a more powerful medium for communicating the details and experiences of a product, such as the Internet, could have a stronger impact on consumer learning (Moore and Lutz, 2000). Three-dimensional (3-D), multiuser , online environments constitute a new revolution of interactivity by creating compelling virtual experiences (Waller, 1997). McLuhan and McLuhan(1988) suggest that within any medium there is a connection between the human mind, the technology, and the environment that serves to immerse users. It is the interactive nature of the Internet that immerses consumers and offers the greatest potential to marketers because of the ability to offer user-controlled product interactive experiences (Schlosser and Kanfer, 2001). Since most products are 3-D objects that are experienced with the senses, the use of dynamic 3-D visualization in ecommerce is increasing as companies seek to give users a virtual experience of the product. The implications are that a 3-D virtual product experience is a simulation of a real or physical product experience and can be construed to be located between direct experience and indirect experience within the spectrum of consumer learning. To fully understand the impact of a virtual experience and the use of 3-D product …

The Differential Effects of within-Brand and between-Brand Processing on the Recall and Recognition of Television Commercials

Abstract This study considers the usefulness of a basic distinction between two types of evaluative processing in explaining memory for advertising. The results of empirical tests suggest that between-brand processing leads to increased performance on recall tasks, while within-brand processing appears to facilitate successful performance of brand name recognition tasks. Analysis of the effects of the processing tasks on brand name recall and recognition, dissociations across these tasks, and recognition errors suggests that this distinction in processing types can help us to better understand memory for advertising phenomena. The implications of the findings for future advertising research into the effects of processing differences and the relationship between retrieval tasks are discussed.

Do Australian and American consumers differ in their perceived shopping experiences

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present findings from an experiment designed to test the impact of crowding perceptions (both human and spatial), emotions (positive and negative) and shopping values (utilitarian and hedonic) on shopper satisfaction. Culture is explored as a moderating variable with the expectation that it systematically affects perceptions and values, which, in turn, influence the shoppers experience with the store.Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected via a 2×2×2 full factorial between subjects design with two variables, one manipulated and one measured. The two manipulated variables were spatial density (high versus low) and human density (high versus low). The measured variable was country of origin, where subjects were coded as either American or Australian.Findings – Culture moderates the effects of perceived spatial crowding as well as both hedonic and utilitarian shopping values on shopper satisfaction. Specifically, the adverse effect of perceived spatial cr...