CONSUMERS BEHAVIOR

Consumers Behavior

Consumers Behavior

Introduction

Research on emotions within marketing has evolved through three stages: the categories approach, the dimensions approach and the cognitive appraisals approach. The categories approach groups emotions around exemplars and considers their different effects on consumption related behaviour. However, this method cannot explain why emotion groups have different behavioural effects. The dimensions approach uses the affective dimensions of valence and level of arousal to distinguish between emotions and the effects they have on consumer behaviour. While this approach offers some explanatory power, it lacks the ability to account for differences between behaviours driven by emotions of similar valence and arousal levels, such as anger and fear. More recently the cognitive appraisals approach has used emotions' underlying motivational and evaluative roots to explain their influences on consumption related behaviours.

This approach supposes that underlying evaluations of a situation (e.g. its desirability, certainty, etc.) combine to elicit specific emotions. Left unchecked the elicited emotions affect consumer behaviour. This approach may be used to explain how an extensive range of emotions, including those with similar valence and arousal levels, are elicited and how they lead to different behavioural responses.

The cognitive appraisals approach has been called “an especially relevant approach for understanding the emotional responses of consumers in the marketplace” (Johnson and Stewart, 2005, p. 3). Like others (Bagozzi et al., 1999) we propose that a cognitive appraisals approach offers a more complete explanation of consumers' behavioural responses to emotions than has emerged from either of the two preceding approaches. However, before we can advance our knowledge by applying cognitive appraisals to the study of consumer behaviour, marketers must reach a consensus about what characteristics of an event or situation are appraised that evoke emotions.

Several variations of cognitive appraisal theory have been advanced. These theories espouse as few as four up to as many as nine relevant cognitive appraisals as being necessary to distinguish between emotional responses to stimulus events. Consensus has not yet emerged on a single encompassing cognitive appraisal theory in terms of terminology, number of relevant concepts and concomitant construct measurements, and theoretical linkages between constructs. These issues must be addressed before a comprehensive theory of cognitive appraisals as they affect consumption situations can emerge.

Literature review: The motivations for consumers who engage in behaviour which could be termed dubious, criminal, deceptive or fraudulent.

The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, we provide an extant review of cognitive appraisal theories of emotions, which makes transparent the looseness in terminology and differences in theoretical perspectives that currently exist. The purpose of this exercise is to distil a wide range of ideas down to their essential components. Second, based on this review we advance a unifying “theory” of consumption appraisals and explore their relevance to marketers. Theory is intentionally left in quotes because we acknowledge that construct measurements are still in flux.

We are not so presumptuous to believe our theory is the panacea; rather it is our intention that the proposed theory will act as a catalyst for debate and rigorous ...