A Shaken Self on Shopping Consumer Threats and Compensatory Consumption

Sammanfattning: In a series of experiments, with a total sample of over 2,400 participants, this thesis investigates how various threats that customers may encounter influence the customers’ subsequent purchase and choice behaviors. Furthermore, this thesis examines whether individuals’ predicted behaviors in certain consumer contexts are congruent with customers’ actual behaviors in these very contexts.Paper I takes an evolutionary approach and investigates whether a status threat to male customers, induced by exposure to physically dominant men, results in compensatory consumption of products that signal status through price or size.Paper II takes a reactance-based approach and examines whether customers whose freedom to touch has been threatened compensate by touching, and ultimately purchasing, a larger number of products.Paper III investigates whether threats to customers’ self-control in one domain influence choice behavior and consumption preferences in another unrelated domain. More specifically, the paper examines whether exposure to attractive opposite-sex faces (and hence a subtle activation of sexual desire and its associated pleasure-seeking mindset) makes individuals more motivated to choose and consume unhealthy-but-rewarding foods.     The main findings of this work can be summarized as follows: Consumer threats result in compensatory consumption, not only in the specific domain under threat, but also in unrelated or only symbolically similar domains. Such compensatory responses are in direct contrast to consumer lay beliefs and even the predictions made by marketing professors and other scholars, which suggests that people are generally unaware of the impact that certain threats have on their behavior. These results should be as interesting for customers who want to make informed choices and resist various influence attempts as for marketers, advertisers, and retail managers who want to influence customers.