From impulse buying.

Has there been such a situation, you walk into the dazzling shopping malls, thinking, I need a toothbrush. And in the checkout, you are satisfied to see the salesperson brush one after another item, gladly pass the card. Until you get home, or before you go to bed, you suddenly find that you just need a toothbrush. Next, perhaps you will beat your breast, read over and over again the impulse is the devil, and the pain of determination will never be so impulsive, until the next time this situation and then "spontaneous" occurrence. This "natural" process is an impulse purchase.

1. Impulse buying and irrational

For the definition of impulse buying, Beatty and Ferrell (1998) believe that impulsive buying is a sudden unplanned purchase behavior. Why do impulsive buying happen? Before we answer this question, let's look at a classic marketing case.

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Yes, according to our normal thinking, who will choose b? So at first glance, the existence of option B is inherently absurd. Therefore, we can speculate that even if the B option is removed, it will not affect the choice of other options. And the real situation is really the option to remove the B, the result is this:

A-order electronic version: 59 USD-68 people

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See this situation, you are not also in the heart Marvel, a useless option how can have such magic. However, the "one-order print version of the 125 dollar" option, is not useless, but a "bait", his own appearance is not to be chosen, but to add other options ("Print version of the electronic version of the package") is selected on the probability.

This is the "decoy effect": When people choose a two-point option, the addition of a third new option (bait) makes an old option look more appealing. Among them, the "bait" to help the option is often called "target" (here for the "print version of the electronic version of the package: 125 dollars"), while the other option is called "Competitors" (single electronic version of 59 U.S. dollars). In addition to the "decoy effect", there are many factors that affect our consumer decisions, such as herd effects, deadlines, gambler's fallacies, placebo effects, stereotypes, and so on. All these show that in the process of decision-making, because of human cognitive resources and access to information, "rational" judgment will be a lot of factors, make us make "irrational" decision or behavior, which is also an important reason for our impulsive purchase.

Before further analysis of impulsive buying behavior, let's take a look at the consumer's general shopping decision making process. Figure 1 is the "cyclic model" proposed by David ET (2009).

As shown in the picture, the consumption decision process is generally divided into 4 stages: primary, positive evaluation (or the process of studying the potential purchase option), the time of purchase (the consumer buys a brand), and the experience after purchase (consumer's experience of the product). It is not difficult to see that the model described in the "trigger mechanism" is actually touched the consumer purchase Desire "psychological contact", which plays the whole cycle of the engine, in the whole cycle plays a very important role. So next, we mainly to the impulse purchase process of "psychological contact" of the factors to do further discussion.

2. The influence factors of "psychological contact" in impulse purchase.

2.1 "Psychological contact" of impulse purchase--emotional reaction

The study of Rook (1987) confirms that in the process of consumers ' impulsive purchase, the author puts forward that "impulsive buying behavior does not conform to the traditional study of rational person and the assumption of maximizing the utility of purchase, is a result of the struggle between emotion and rationality, and more affected by emotional reaction." Jonah Lehrer also mentioned in the book how We decide that the ideal world is an economist utopia, and consumer decisions are often influenced by "emotional brain". According to the above, "emotional reaction" can be defined as the "psychological contact" in the process of impulse purchase. Zhang (2010) Research also supports this, in his study, through the Consumer-to-consumer model of consumer online impulsive purchase of empirical research, found that the consumer's "emotional response" is to affect consumers impulsive purchase intention, and then affect impulse purchase behavior.

2.2 Introduction to the theoretical model

As a preliminary exploration, we have followed the theoretical model structure of Zhang (2010), as shown in Fig. 2, "emotional response" directly affects "impulsive purchase intention" and further influences "actual impulse purchase". The emotional response ("Psychological touch") is four external stimuli (commodity prices, graphic displays, other people's reviews and transaction records) and the consumer's own characteristics (consumer impulsivity).

2.3 Research Examples

This research is mainly for the purpose of I to investigate the user's understanding of the value of the poly-value and the behavior of the good, and II explore the psychological factors and the influence factors of purchasing decision. A total of 5,375 valid samples were collected by using questionnaires and 7,371 questionnaires were screened according to cleaning rules. The following is a brief introduction to the results of the n=1717 consumer (nearly three-month-old users who have purchased goods at the cost of the purchase, the psychological model of impulsive buying and the n=258) impulse buying psychological model and the cost-effective service users (who have purchased life services for nearly three months.)

As shown in Figure 3 and Figure 4, whether it is a cost-effective consumer impulse purchase psychological model or a cost-effective life service users impulse purchase psychological model. The results found that (1) Consumers ' emotional response positively influenced consumers ' willingness to purchase; (2) Consumers ' impulsive purchase intention is positively affecting consumers ' impulsive buying behavior, which shows the applicability of model structure in this research, and (3) is also the most concerned about this research, The psychological contact (emotional response) is significantly influenced by the external stimuli and the impulsive nature of consumers. Further analysis found that: the psychological model of the impulsive purchase of the product users, the influence of the picture and text display on the psychological contact is greater; poly-value Life service user Impulse purchase psychological model, others evaluation of psychological contact is more significant.

In addition, the results also found that nearly three-fourths of the users of the cost-effective and life-service users were potential consumers of impulsive buying (to get a good view without any purpose, just a casual look), which showed that the poly-profit impulse purchase model has a broader potential market.

3. Summary

Simon (1916-2001) said that in real life as a manager or decision maker is between complete rationality and irrational "limited rationality" of "manager", we in the decision-making process, we will have their own thinking, but also by other factors interference. A preliminary exploration of the impulse buying psychology of the cost-effective consumers found: picture and text show the psychological contact of the impulsive purchase of the product is the most influential, followed by the user's own impulse characteristics and the price of the commodity; others evaluate the psychological contact of the impulsive purchase of the cost-effective life service, followed by the impulse characteristics and graphic display.

4. Discussion

4.1 The wrong and wrong of impulse purchase

Irrational must be bad? A very interesting study on the issue mentioned, when asked, "which American city has more residents: Santiago or San Antonio?" "When only 62% of the University of Chicago chose the right answer (Santiago), 100% of the German students made the right choice. And how do German students correctly make the judgment that Santiago has more residents? All German students have heard of Santiago, but most of them do not know San Antonio, so they can use the "re-recognition heuristic" to make the right inference. American students are familiar with these two cities, so they cannot use the heuristic, but use their judgment to synthesize all the information they know about the two cities. Comparatively speaking, the latter is a rational way of judging, but the effect is worse. It is not difficult to see that such a "re-recognition heuristic" application, seemingly not rational decision-making, but has a certain degree of ecological validity.

In the same way, does impulsive buying necessarily have problems? According to the previous experiments and the results of the study, it is found that emotional response is the key "trigger point" in the psychological process of impulse purchase. But it also has good ecological validity. Although in the impulse shopping, people lack of complete rational thinking, but this kind of emotional reaction, may also reflect the value of the commodity to a certain extent. Similar to "re-recognition heuristic", "emotional response" may be an ecologically rational heuristic that helps people make quick judgments without fully rational thinking, although it is not entirely accurate.

4.2 Deficiency of the model

The present model is only as a preliminary exploration, the research of Zhang (2010) is mainly to explore the model of consumers ' impulsive purchase online under the Consumer-to-consumer model, not specifically for the "group purchase" trait, this study will introduce this model to "poly-cost" for initial attempt, do not rule out that there are more other factors, There is still much work to be done to build a complete model. Here only hope to arouse you to think and discuss further. Welcome everyone to propose, Pat Bricks, in the discussion of common growth.

4.3 Research results application and future research direction

In the psychological model of impulsive purchase of the product, the "Picture and text display" has more influence on the psychological contact, then it implies that it is especially important to provide beautiful and detailed product pictures and text information in the Poly-cost goods group. In the same way, in the psychological model of impulse purchase, the most important influence is "others ' evaluation", which puts forward the expectation for the various dimensions of local life evaluation, such as the number of evaluations, the content of evaluation, etc. What kind of "graphic display" and "other evaluation" is enough to "touch" the user? This requires further research to continue to explore, but also hope to get everyone's suggestions and opinions.

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