自我建构、冲突解决风格与口碑两极分化产品偏好

Consumer Self-construal,Conflict Resolution Styles and Preference for Polarizing Products

口碑尤其是网络评论对消费者的购物行为产生越来越重要的影响,而现有研究较少关注口碑出现两极分化对消费者购买决策的影响。本研究从口碑两极分化隐含的冲突性、争议性这一视角出发,将个体的冲突解决风格与产品偏好两个看似不相关的概念联系起来,推断自我建构对口碑两极分化产品偏好具有显著影响,其中冲突解决风格起中介作用。通过四项实验,结果发现:独立型自我建构个体比依存型自我建构个体更偏好口碑两极分化产品,冲突解决风格在自我建构对口碑两极分化产品偏好的影响中起中介作用。该中介作用受到产品使用情境的调节。公开情境下,独立型自我建构个体比依存型自我建构个体更偏好口碑两极分化产品;私人情境下,不同自我建构个体对口碑两极分化产品的偏好无显著差异。本研究增进了对口碑两极分化现象影响效应的认知,丰富了自我建构对消费者行为影响机制的研究。

With the advent of the era of personalized consumption,it is more and more common for personalized products to suffer from word-of-mouth polarization.Current research pays less attention to the impact of word-of-mouth polarization on consumer purchase decisions.In addition,there are few systematic theoretical results on the influence mechanism of review dispersion on consumer decision-making and the few relevant studies mainly explore from the perspective of product quality uncertainty brought by inconsistent word-of-mouth.Focusing on the conflicting and controversial features implied by word-of-mouth polarization,this paper introduces the concept of“conflict resolution style”in the field of organizational behavior into the research framework of consumer behavior,and connects the seemingly-unrelated concepts of conflict resolution style and product preference.The research tries to verify that consumer self-construal will affect consumer preference for polarizing products due to their different conflict resolution styles.Four experiments were designed for this study.We measured consumers’chronic self-construal and initiated consumers’situational self-construal using different manipulative methods.The empirical test of theoretical hypotheses is conducted by means of variance analysis,simple effect analysis and bootstrapping method.The results show that consumers with independent self-construal show greater preference for polarizing products than consumers with interdependent self-construal.The reason is that,independent self-construal consumers tend to adopt a confronting conflict resolution style,while interdependent self-construal consumers tend to adopt an avoiding conflict resolution style.The result will be different in the private consumption situation.As interdependent self-construal consumers no longer need to consider others’evaluation in the context of private consumption,there is no significant difference in the preference for polarizing products between independent self-construal and interdependent self-construal consumers.The contributions are as follows:First,previous studies mainly focus on the negative impact of word-of-mouth dispersion on consumer behavior caused by the uncertainty of product quality,while this paper focuses on the controversial and conflicting characteristics implied by word-of-mouth polarization and reveals that word-of-mouth polarization will also produce a normative effect,which provides a new perspective for exploring the influence mechanism of word-of-mouth dispersion on consumer behavior.Second,this paper incorporates the two concepts of conflict resolution style and product preference into a research framework,which expands the boundary of research on both concepts.Third,this paper incorporates the mediation mechanism of conflict resolution style into the framework,which enriches the research on the influence mechanism of self-construal on consumer behavior.The findings also provide great referential significance for enterprises to develop marketing strategies for polarizing products.