광고 및 구전상황에서 자아규제초점이 소비자태도에 미치는 영향

Abstract

The present study attempted to investigate the effects of self-regulatory focus on consumers' attitude in relation with the types of advertisement and the product, time pressure, and purchasing time distance factors. Research on self-regulatory focus has been conducted mostly in the areas of advertisement framing and brand extension. And prior advertisement framing research related to self-regulatory focus has been carried out on very limited types of advertisement, namely, positive advertisement, negative advertisement, benefit advertisement, and property advertisement as major types of advertisement. In addition, studies of consumer information process related to self-regulatory focus also have been conducted only on a limited number of factors, such as common/differential factor, prior knowledge, advertisement context, and congruence/incongruence. However, in forming the consumers' attitude, other conditions of advertisement should be considered, such as image or attribute advertisement, unlike the prior research where only limited advertisement types have been explored. Moreover, the studies of information processing suggest other factors that are closely related to the motivation factors of consumers' information processing in product evaluation, such as product types, time pressure, and purchasing time distance. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the interactional effects of information type of advertisement and other various situational factors, which have not been examined in previous self-regulatory focus studies. In addition, research on consumers' self-regulatory focus has been mostly conducted in the advertisement context, but not in consumers' word-of-mouth (WOM) context which is similar to the advertisement context. The present study attempted to examine the effect of self-regulatory focus motivation not only in the advertisement context but also in the WOM context. The study consists of three phases to investigate the various roles of self-regulatory focus: Study 1 and Study 2 concerns an advertisement context, and Study 3 concerns a WOM context. Study 1 adopted the between-subjects factorial design based on the previous studies, creating 8 advertisement contexts from 2(self-regulatory focus: promotion/prevention focus)x2(advertisement message framing: positive/negative advertisement messages)x2(product type: hedonic/utilitarian product) design. Study 2 employed different advertisement information types, i.e., image advertisement message and attribute advertisement message, and looked into the interaction effects of time pressure and self-regulatory focus. In the study a 2(self-regulatory focus: promotion/prevention focus)×2(advertisement message framing: image/attribute advertisement messages)×2(time pressure: 30 seconds/30 minutes) design was used for between-subjects factorial analysis, creating 8 different cells. Study 3 can be differentiated from previous research in that it extends the previous advertisement context to the WOM context in examining the effect of self-regulatory focus. Study 3 tested the role of self-regulatory focus in consumers' product purchase in its relation with WOM information types and time pressure factor. Between-subject factorial design of 2(self-regulatory focus: promotion/prevent-tion focus)×2(WOM information types : conceptual/experiential cue information)×2(purchasing time distance :1 day/2 weeks) was employed, creating 8 WOM experimental cells. As for the instrument of each study, Study 1 used MP3 and electronic dictionaries, Study 2 used digital cameras, and Study 3 used sneakers as experience products. Pseudo brand names were used for all the products in order to control the subjects' prior knowledge of particular brands. The experiments in Studies 1, 2, and 3 were conducted independently, and the participants were seniors and graduate students in education: a total of 202 students in Study 1, 184 students in Study 2, and 198 students in Study 3. The collected data were analyzed using ANOVA to test the hypotheses after relevant manipulation checks. The findings of the study are as follows. Study 1 showed a significant interaction effect of advertisement message types (positive/negative), product types (hedonic/utilitarian), and self-regulatory on consumers' attitude. Specifically, consumers with promotion motivation showed greater preference toward positively framed advertisement message while those with prevention motivation formed higher positive attitude toward negatively framed advertisement message. Also, consumers with promotion motivation showed higher positive attitude toward a hedonic product whereas those with prevention motivation showed higher preference toward a utilitarian product. Study 2 revealed different consumer attitudes affected by interaction between self-regulatory focus motivation and the advertisement message types (image/ attribute advertisement). The results showed that the more promotion motivation a consumer had, the higher preference he/she showed toward image advertisement, while the more prevention motivation a consumer had, the higher preference he/she showed toward attribute advertisement. In addition, the consumers' attitudes were shown to be different by being affected by interaction between self-regulatory focus and time pressure. Specifically, those with promotion focus motivation showed higherpositive attitudes with higher time pressure, whereas those with prevention focus motivation showed more positive attitude with less time pressure. Study 3 in the WOM context revealed a significant interaction effect of WOM cue information types (conceptual cue/experiential cue), purchasing time distance, and self-regulatory focus on the consumers' attitude. The results showed that particularly in WOM context, not only is product attitude formed by cue information, but consumers' self-regulatory focus also plays a significant role. In the study, those with promotion focus motivation showed higher preference toward experiential cue information than conceptual cue information, whereas those with prevention focus motivation showed higher positive attitude toward conceptual cue information. Furthermore, the effect of self-regulatory focus on attitude was shown to be different depending on the purchasing time distance. Those with promotion focus motivation showed higher positive attitude with longer purchasing time distance, while those with prevention focus motivation revealed higher positive attitude with shorter purchasing time distance, indicating the purchasing time distance affects consumer's attitude and preference. The three phases of the study imply that self-regulatory focus plays a significant role in forming consumers' positive attitude toward a product. The findings of the study suggest that companies consider self-regulatory focus as an important segmentation factor in establishing marketing strategies for having their consumers form positive attitude toward their products. The present study also suggest that the future studies of consumers' self-regulatory focus explore various individual trait variables so that they can provide the field with more rich empirical findings.