1、Consumer personality and other factors in situational brand choice variation原文：INTRODUCTION Past research and empirical evidence indicate that individual behaviour varies across situations. More specifically, research into consumer behaviour has shown how individuals prefer different brands for diff
2、erent consumption occasions.This variation in consumer choice has been reported for branded products such as clothing, snack foods,4 mineral water, soups and sodas, candy, fragrancesand wine. Although a significant amount of research has examined drivers of situational variation, past studies almost
3、 exclusively focused on product attributes and failed to establish links to brand equity dimensions in terms of the benefits desired by individuals in brands. Closing this knowledge gap is important because for many product categories consumers buy brands rather than products. Accordingly, brand man
4、agers need to know how to design and deliver brand messages that are either robust across a number of consumption occasions or are specifically tailored to a distinctive situation, where they outperform more general brand designs. Long-term objectives of this research thus aim at a better understand
5、ing of the consumer situationbrand interactions in consumer choice. More immediate objectives focus on the examination of how consumer personality and other factors influence desired brand benefits and choice when different consumption situations are salient. The central hypothesis is that consumer
6、characteristics interact with situational characteristics in affecting the benefits that consumers desire in brands, and consequently their choice.BRAND BENEFITS AND CHOICE In the past, marketing researchers have focused on the relationship between consumers and the product class to predict brand ch
7、oice. In particular, the product attributes desired by consumers attracted researchers interest, but researchers generally did not distinguish between the effect caused by the brand name and the effect originating in the product in terms of attribute level combinations. More recently, scholars have
8、advanced the idea that the product as well as the brand name is capable of contributing several types of benefits to the consumer. The theoretical and empirical literature on consumer-perceived or desired brand benefits suggests classifying those benefits according to a number of basic dimensions. M
9、ultiple- item scales for assessing individual perceptions and desired brand benefits have been developed with six distinct dimensions emerging, termed quality/performance, price/value for money, social, emotional, environmental and health benefits. Recent applications of these scales to branded cons
10、umer goods have demonstrated that the basic dimensions are suitable for assessing brand images,16 brand positioning, and for predicting consumer preferences18 and No study could be found, however, applying the model to predict consumer choice, a variable of stronger interest for marketing managers t
11、han antecedent but unobservable perceptions, intentions or attitudes. Figure 1 shows the model utilised in this study.SITUATIONAL DRIVERS According to Hornik, neither individual differences （consumer personality） nor situational factors are assumed to be of exclusive importance in predicting situati
12、onal variation in consumer behaviour. Instead, it is the person within a situational interaction that is expected to contribute most of the variance. The notion that consumer states, particularly their situational disposition, influence consumer behaviour is widely accepted. Consumer situational dis
13、positions are posited as significant mediators between situational stimuli and behavioural outcomes with personality traits and affective states being their antecedents. For various product categories, marketing researchers have demonstrated the effects of consumer dispositions such as individual in
14、clination to take a risk, to seek variety and curiosity on acquisition behaviours including brand switching. For example, Mitchell and Greatorex have stressed the importance of risktaking and variety-seeking to consumer choice of wine brands. Dominating the current literature on consumer exploratory
15、 tendencies is Rajus conceptualisation of three situational dispositions. Risk-taking describes exploratory behaviour expressed through choices of innovative and unfamiliar alternatives that are perceived as risky. Variety-seeking is expressed through an individuals switching within familiar alterna
16、tives, including brand switching, and an aversion to habitual behaviour. Curiosity-motivated behaviour involves exploratory information-seeking, interpersonal communication and shopping. Consumer-perceived risk in wine buying situations has been related to functional （quality） and social brand benef
17、its.Scholars have also shown consumer information-seeking （curiosity-motivated behaviour） to be related to what benefits consumers desire in wine. Examining several other branded consumer goods including soups, sodas, beer and mineral water, Van Trijp reported that in addition to individual differen
18、ces in intrinsic desire for variety, expression of varietyseeking behaviour was also influenced by brand-related factors. High-involvement decisions usually entail a considerable degree of perceived risk in making a sub-optimal decision, a situation that hampers variety-seeking behaviour. On the oth
19、er hand, for brand choices that are totally unimportant to the consumer, habit-based repetitive choice behaviour is by far the most efficient heuristic, and consequently variety-seeking is not likely to occur. Van Trijp et al. suggest that true variety-seeking is rooted in the need for change in an
20、attempt to resolve the boredom associated with a brand. Different from that is variety-seeking triggered by external factors such as impression-management concerns. Indeed, researchers have found that consumers incorporate more variety intheir brand choices when their behaviour is subject to public
21、scrutiny because they expect others to evaluate their decision more favourably if they choose variety.VARIATION IN DESIRED BRAND BENEFITS AND CHOICE An ample body of studies indicates that the awareness that others will observe ones decision induces impression-management concerns that lead individua
22、ls to alter their consumption choices. Experimental evidence has confirmed that reference groups influence both individual brand and product choices. The benefits desired by consumers in a brand have been found to play a role in this choice because they add to the self-expressive and symbolic value
23、of the brand for the buyer, and thus to that buyers impression management efforts. Batra and Homer further demonstrated that such beliefs have a greater impact on intentions and actual behaviour （behaviour that others can observe, such as choice） than on brand attitudes （which are private and unobse
24、rvable）. In situations where reference groups are salient, purchase and consumption are thus at least partly motivated by a need for public self-presentation and impression management. Some brand benefits specifically pertain to socially visible aspects of a brand, eg how classy, trendy or fashionab
25、le it is widely perceived to be or how cheap, valuefor-money it is. Accordingly, the desire to obtain or avoid these benefits ought to be greater in consumption occasions in which a reference group is salient, ie where impression management needs are higher. Past research has indeed shown that socia
26、l brand benefits of clothing are more important in situations in which the outcome is visible to others. Similarly, the social and valuefor-money benefits consumers seek insnack brands have been found to affect choice. Just as different reference groups can make different self-conceptions more salie
27、nt for an individual,38 the absence of these groups could also influence the salience of brand benefits. In a situation where the brand is being chosen privately for self-consumption, greater salience of more self-centred benefits such as emotional or health benefits might lead to differential effec
28、ts on brand choice.CONSUMER PERSONALITY AND BRAND CHOICE VARIATION Beyond the substantial body of research indicating that the influence of others （interpersonal influence） affects individual behaviour, researchers have argued that these reference group effects will be stronger for certain more infl
29、uenceable individuals, characterised by an individual difference construct sometimes called the susceptibility to interpersonal influence. Consumer susceptibility to interpersonal influence has been conceptualised as a general personality trait that varies across individuals and is related to other
30、individual traits and characteristics. In his 1968 review, McGuire concluded that a persons relative influenceability in one situation tends to have a significant positive relationship to his or her influenceability in a range of other social situations.Social psychologists distinguish between infor
31、mational influence, in which the group provides information about the issue in question, and normative influence, the motivation to mesh with the groups standards and norms.Bearden et al. reported the development of a twodimensional scale to measure such interpersonal influenceability, including a n
32、ormative and an informational dimension. The authors defined the construct as: the need to identify with or enhance ones image in the opinion of significant Others through the acquisition and use of products and brands, the willingness to conform to the expectations of others regarding purchase deci
33、sions, and/or the tendency to learn about products and services by observing others or seeking information from others. A considerable number of articles from psychological and consumer research have investigated the tendency of individuals to conform to group norms or to modify their judgment based u
