This section conceptualises the relationships between the need to evaluate, choice goals and consumers’ need for touch in a retail environment. Specifically, the relationship between approach goal orientation and consumers’ need for affective touch in a retail environment is conceptualised, followed by the conceptualisation of relationships between need to evaluate, anticipated process regret and consumers’ need for cognitive touch in a retail environment. Finally, the conceptualisation for consumers’ need for affective touch preceding their need for cognitive touch in a retail environment is provided.
While need for touch is the physical display in search of haptic information, approach goal orientation is the preceding motivating state that leads consumers to the retail store. Motivation literature has long established that approach goal orientation tends to focus on the positive rather than the negative aspects. Individuals who have approach goal orientation, regardless of their objective ability, have a propensity to focus on attaining competence and achieving better task performance (Bandura 1989). The reasoning behind this is that individuals with approach goal orientation perceive the achievement setting as a challenge. This in turn tends to generate excitement, encouraging an orientation towards the presence of success- relevant and mastery-relevant information. Approach-oriented motivation includes states like achievement motivation, self-actualisation, hope, joy, interest, expectation and desire (Reeve 2009). Such consumers, in the context of a retail setting, are enquiring, inherently motivated and sensation seeking, with goals and plans while
choosing among the various alternatives available. This research thus posits that consumers’ approach goal orientation in a retail environment translates into the affective need for touch, which is touching for fun, enjoyment and to enjoy the process of shopping. In other words, affective touch is hedonically oriented and, therefore, consumers with approach goal orientation will engage in the affective need for touch, resulting in the next hypothesis:
H9: Consumers’ approach goal orientation towards shopping is positively related to their need for affective touch
In their daily lives individuals encounter a multitude of objects and choices. Fazio (2000) notes that this multitude of objects and choices require individuals to make many decisions. Shopping is one environment where consumers are presented with many choices. There is a constant bombardment of information which forces consumers to make many decisions. Almost every shopping event involves consumers making a continuous cycle of choices, based on their interpretations and evaluation of the objects. The work of Holbrook (2006) sheds light on the link between the need to evaluate and information gathering. Individuals with a high need to evaluate were found to gather all the information available and then form evaluations based on this information. Vieira (2009) observes that consumers with a high need to evaluate do not rely on outside influences, like advertisements. Instead, these consumers form evaluations based on their own judgments. These studies indicate that individuals with a high need to evaluate employ a cognitive process in order to make an informed decision. Moreover, this research noted earlier that perfectionists have a high need to evaluate products before making a purchase
decision. In the retail context, this research posits that these consumers employ the need for touch in order to make the best purchase decision. This need for touch is not for fun, excitement, enjoyment as manifested in affective need for touch, but rather is cognitive in nature:
H10: Consumers’ need to evaluate is positively related to their need for cognitive touch
Anticipated regret has been shown to be one of the main motivating forces driving the selection of products (Bell 1982). In consumer research though, it is post purchase regret that has received more attention (Reynolds, Folse and Jones 2006). It was argued earlier that consumers may experience regret on the process they employ to arrive at a purchase decision. Once consumers anticipate process regret, they consider the alternatives in a more systematic and careful manner before making a purchase decision.
There is evidence in the literature that when consumers anticipate regret, they work harder to reduce chances of post purchase regret (Zeelenberg 1999). The mind-set in this situation, where regret is anticipated, this research posits, is more towards the cognitive than the affective aspect. That regret is more cognitive in nature is well supported in previous scholarship (Matarazzo and Abbamonte 2008). Noting that regret is cognitive in nature, Zeelenberg, van Dijk and Manstead (1998) define regret “as a negative, cognitively determined emotion that we experience when realising or imagining that our present situation would have been better, had we acted differently”. Zeelenberg and Pieters (2007) provide a very direct relation between the
emotion of regret and cognition. They observe that regret produces a higher order of cognitive process. Extending these findings to the kind of touch consumers employ in a retail environment when they anticipate regret, this research posits that when consumers anticipate regret, they employ a more cognitive form of touch to evaluate products:
H11: Consumers’ anticipated process regret is positively related to their need for cognitive touch
Consumer goals may change during a single shopping trip and are not highly specific the entire time. This change may be from a more generic to a more precise goal. An example given by Lee and Ariely (2006) is a thirsty consumer going out with an initial goal of quenching thirst, but which could translate into a more precise goal of drinking a certain kind of milk shake. The theoretical basis for this transition from an abstract to a precise goal includes the ‘mind-set theory’, ‘construal level theory’ and the ‘two-stage consumer shopping goal theory’. Gollwitzer’s (1990) ‘mind-set theory’ from goal orientation literature provides evidence for people’s goals changing from uncertain to certain as the decision-making time approaches closer. According to Gollwitzer (1990), individuals in the first phase exhibit a deliberative mind-set, while in the second phase they have well established goals and their mind- set makes a transition to an implementation mode. Two similar process models of motivation have also been proposed in the 199s (Kruglanksi and Webster 1996; Carver and Scheier 1998). The ‘construal level theory’ postulated by Trope and Liberman (2003) also provides insight into the two-stage process employed by individuals before making a decision or doing a task. In their work, respondents
normally construed the activity of locking a door as ‘securing the house’ if it was at a distant future, but as ‘putting a key in the lock’ if the activity was to take place the following day. More recently, Lee and Ariely (2006) have proposed a ‘two-stage shopping goal theory’, in which they show how goal concreteness increases during the process of shopping. According to this two-stage model, at the start of a shopping process consumers have ill-defined goals. However, as time goes into the shopping process, consumers’ goals become more concrete. In other words, consumer goals become clearer and distinct only as the target of a purchase decision draws closer. Drawing a parallel to consumers’ need for touch in a retail context, this research argues that even consumers who primarily shop for fun, novelty, excitement and sensation seeking, and display an affective form of touching products, may, closer to making a purchase decision, employ a more cognitive form of touching them. Further, the studies of Peck and Childers (2003b) show a high correlation between the constructs of affective and cognitive touch in a retail environment. Therefore, this research posits that even for consumers who rely mostly on affective touch for purchase decisions, their final product selection is influenced by an element of cognitive touch:
H12: Consumers’ need for affective touch is positively related to their need for cognitive touch
3.6 Consequences of Consumers’ Need for Affective and Cognitive Touch in a