Previous research on self-regulatory focus motivation was mainly conducted within the boundary of how consumers handle advertisement information such as advertisement message or brand extension, but still lack approaches to consumers' WOM (word of mou ...
Previous research on self-regulatory focus motivation was mainly conducted within the boundary of how consumers handle advertisement information such as advertisement message or brand extension, but still lack approaches to consumers' WOM (word of mouth) situations in the same context. Against such limitation, this study seeks to identify whether consumers' self-regulatory focus equally influence consumer response in WOM situations as well and thereby any differences in consumers' product attitudes.
To this end, in advertising situations, 2(self-regulatory focus: prevention focus motivation/promotion focus motivation) × 2(advertisement message: image ad message/attribute ad message) × 2(time pressure: 30 sec./30 min.) between-subjects factorial design was applied. Meanwhile, in WOM situations, 2(self regulatory focus: prevention focus motivation/promotion focus motivation) × 2(WOM information type: image cue information/attribute cue information) × 2(purchase time distance: 1 day/2 weeks) between-subjects factorial design was applied. Digital camera was selected as the test product in both advertising and WOM situations, and a hypothetical name was used instead of the original brand name via pre-survey in order to control consumers' prior knowledge and familiarity. Sample data were collected from undergraduate and graduate students. Analysis results in advertising situations showed interaction between self-regulatory focus motivation and advertisement message type, which led to a difference in consumer attitudes. That is, consumers with higher promotion focus motivation showed stronger preferential attitude towards image ads, while consumers with higher prevention focus motivation exhibited more preferential attitude towards attribute ads. Moreover, self-regulatory focus and time pressure interacted significantly to affect consumer attitudes. To clarify here, consumers with promotion motivation preferred the product more under higher time pressure, but consumers with prevention motivation preferred the product more under lower time pressure. In WOM situations, information presentation type and purchase time distance interacted to show significant variance in consumer attitudes. In this particular setting, product attitude is not formed only with information cue as consumers' self-regulatory focus evidently plays an important role. In other words, promotion-oriented consumers displayed stronger preferential attitude by image rather than attribute cue information, while prevention-oriented consumers exhibited stronger preferential attitude by attribute cue information. Moving on, self-regulatory focus influenced consumer attitude differently according to purchase time distance. Particularly, consumers with more promotion focus motivation displayed strong preference in consumer attitude as purchase time distanced, but consumers with more prevention focus motivation showed comparatively higher scores in consumer attitude as purchase time neared. This indicates that consumer preferences distinctively vary according to purchase time distance, and thus it is elucidated that consumers' self-regulatory focus leads to forming different product attitudes in advertising and WOM situations. Based on such findings, companies that wish to form preferential consumer attitude towards their products need to include self-regulatory focus as a key segmentation market factor in their marketing strategies. Additionally, should future studies on consumers' self-regulatory focus cover various personal characteristics as variables, more sufficient empirical results will be presented.