消费者仪式行为研究综述与展望

Consumer Ritual Behavior: A Literature Review and Prospects

消费者运用仪式行为或通过仪式体验获得精神上的满足已成为一种普遍现象。从消费者文化视角看,仪式因其对嵌入特定文化背景的消费行为的重要影响而引发研究者的广泛关注。目前国内消费者仪式行为研究尚为鲜见,国外消费者行为研究虽已出现与仪式主题相关的内容,但并未对这些内容进行系统的阐述。本文通过梳理国外已有的消费者仪式行为研究文献,对仪式的概念、仪式的嵌入情境、消费者运用仪式的动机、仪式对消费者行为的影响及其作用机制进行了归纳,并在此基础上分析了已有研究的局限性和未来研究方向。

Ritual behavior exists in numerous aspects of consuming activities.From the fixed procedure of＂Black Friday＂to the pleasant enjoying process of Oreo Cookie’s＂twist apart Oreo cookie,lick the cream center,dip chocolate cookie halves into a glass milk＂,consumer ritual behavior does exist in the reflection of many kinds of festivals and,at the same time,in the consuming process of our daily life widely.As an important way,ritual can help people in the modern society to achieve the goal of spiritual satisfaction,and thus be a good explanatory factor for many consuming phenomena embedded in specific culture and value.However,there are still very few papers that try to explain consuming phenomena in China from the perspective of consumer ritual behavior.In view of this,the current study make a literature review of the concept of ritual,embedded situations,motivations,and its influencing effect based on the existing pertinent literature in the domain of consumer behavior.We first conclude the important concept and representative theories referring ritual in the field of religion,sociology and psychology discipline,and then we make a definition about consumer ritual behavior,i.e.a series of behaviors and activities that are formal,procedural and have their own symbolic significance in the process of consumption.Then,we make a comparative analysis and a brief comment on the concept of ritual in domain of consumer behavior from the perspective of daily life,symbolic culture as well as the sacred experience.Secondly,we sum up the main circumstances in which consumer ritual behaviors have embedded.We show that ritual behavior exists not only in general daily consuming activities referring the usage of goods,interpersonal interaction and hedonistic experience,but also in the following situations：traditional festivals like Christmas,Thanksgiving Day and Spring Festival,significant transition in one’s life cycle like wedding,adulthood ceremony and school graduation,and last,aesthetic activities like appreciating opera and music concert.Thirdly,the motivations for consumer usage of ritual behavior can be classified into three categories：to acquire and consolidate a new identity through passage rites and micro-ritual in daily life,to attain and strength family or other forms of group identification and to maintain the sacred experience with ritual behavior.Fourthly,we explore the influencing effect of ritual on consumer behavior,and conclude that ritual can affect consumer behavior in three way：the first one is to stimulate consumer purchase behavior especially for the products rich in culture symbolism,the second one is to make individuals produce positive emotional experience in consuming activities,and the third one is to promote an enduring involvement behavior.At the end of this paper,we point out the directions in future research based on a review of existing literature.Although the research of consumer ritual behavior has already made a significant development,there still exist its own limitations and deficiencies.We argue that the findings of most existing research are based on offline shopping,face-to-face interactions in traditional consumption context in Western cultures.Their general applicability in other consumption contexts like online shopping and other cultural backgrounds still remains to be tested.As to the discussion on ritual effect,most of the existing literature draws attention to its positive aspects,but ritual can sometimes be a＂double-edged sword＂,that is to say,the other side,i.e.the negative aspect of ritual effect still remains to be explored in future study.What’s more,from the perspective of research method,most of the previous research adopts qualitative method like interviews,observations or ethnography,but lack quantitative research methods such as laboratory experiment and questionnaire survey to examine the relationship between ritual behavior and other key variables.In short,future study can start from the mechanism and function of ritual behavior in different culture and consumption contexts.Also,it can focus on the negative effect that ritual behavior might exist.Meanwhile,it is necessary to develop a scale,which can apply to the specific culture context for key variables measurement and mathematical model development,so that the quantitative research on consumer ritual behavior can be carried out.