The relationships among consumers' values, attitudes, intentions and behaviormoderating effects and nonlinear dynamics

Resumen

The main objective of this thesis is to examine the relationships among consumers values, attitudes and behavioral indicators (purchasing intentions, willingness-to-pay and loyalty) and the moderators and nonlinear influences of these relationships, within the food market. The thesis integrates recent perspectives on: i) the moderator role of information on consumer evaluations; ii) the role of satisfaction strength in the translation of satisfaction to intentions and behavior; iii) the role of habit strength and automaticity in consumer loyalty formation and iv) nonlinearities in satisfaction outcome functions. The present research is built upon different streams of research and combines insights from marketing and consumer behavior literature and social and cognitive psychology literature. The empirical foundation for the research consists of three surveys on the consumption of fish in Spain (n=1000), Denmark (n=1110) and Belgium (n=852) and three field experiments exploring consumer behavior with regard to three new seafood products in Spain (n=349; n=239; n=357). The data analysis relies heavily on the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) methodology. SEM allows for the incorporation of latent structures into the theoretically-based probabilistic models. SEM has been used to examine moderator effects involving both categorical variables and continuous variables. The research suggests that: - Researchers should be more aware of how an intervention affects the process leading to consumer purchasing intentions, and not only how an intervention affects consumers average evaluations. Identifying how the information predisposes individual values and attitudes (cognitions and feelings) towards behavioral intentions or behavior leads to a more nuanced understanding and a better evaluation of strategic intervention effects. - Understanding the mechanism by which the strength-related attributes of satisfaction confer resistance to intentions or actual behavior allows practitioners and policy-makers to develop adaptive persuasive messages that strengthen the confidence, increase the object relevance and/or dispel consumers thoughts and feelings of ambivalence. - Strong habits are associated with attenuated relations between intentions and behavior. The higher the habit strength, the greater the probability that consumers will free up cognitive resources and incline the balance from controlled intention-based responses to routine-based or less-controlled responses. Understanding consumers habits is important to managers for persuasion campaigns, and also to public policy concerning interventions (e.g. concerning healthy food consumption). - Practitioners should be conscious of the potential appearance of nonlinearities and the type of nonlinearity (e.g. increasing vs. decreasing returns) when predicting satisfaction outcome functions. Considering how different levels of satisfaction impact loyalty intentions and willingness-to-pay, is a key step in estimating their influence on future sales and profits. The linear nature of these relationships might sometimes mislead managers responsible for launching new products.