Research On Consumers' Information Searching Behavior From Network Perspective Based On Risk And Fashion

With the deepening of the globalization,informationization and intellectualization,the flow of the international capital and goods speeded.The business model,competition and cooperation model take profound changes.Consumer becomes an important source of enterprises sustainable competitive advantages.Increasingly developing of traffic and communication technology accelerates people's movement and information dissemination,which promotes the fusion of consumption concept and cinsumption patterns.Consumption presents a globalization trend.In such background,consumers' behavior presents globalization characteristics.Consumer decision making is no longer an individual behavior in a closed system,but a complex activity in the open environment.The popularity of the internet and the development of network technology expand consumer's information accessing channels and organization pattern,which also brings information overloading.How to find valuable information becomes the first issue of consumer decision.Compared to accept company's pushing information passively,consumer is more willing to take the initiative to information search.For consumers,the information comes from other consumers' real consumption experiences without profits incentive is more reliable and trustworthy.For example,when decision,consumer may consult,discuss,observe and imitate their fellows or worship groups,or take internet searching.Other consumers' play more important role on consumer's decision making,information comes from other consumers occupies a big proportion in consumer information searching.As a decision making process of the information integration of various sources,consumer information searching presents correlation and network effect,which become the new trends of consumer information searching behavior.For enterprises,this correlation and network effect have given rise to a new business model and competition pattern,which affect enterprises' marketing strategy making and strategic choice.Enterprises are increasingly aware that their communication with consumers about their brand,products,and services are often disrupted by consumer's interaction.Compared with traditional B-to-C communication,consumer pays more attention to the cognitive insights and the consumption patterns of their fellows.The exchange information between consumers affects their attitude and behavior;they make decisions seldom only based on their own judgment,but in the social background affected by other consumers.As consumer becomes more active,how to use consumer's interaction becomes the core of company's marketing strategy making.In the wave of globalization,with awaken of consumer's sovereignty consciousness,consumer pursues personality and differentiation.As the way of self construction and self growth,symbol property receives more attention.Fashion reflects consumer's tastes,identity and social status.The Pursuit of fashion becomes the order of the day.Fashion is a special phenomenon of consumption,its significance comes from consumer groups,its information disseminates in the complex system of consumers' interaction.Fashion trends change quickly,fashion goods update frequently,which increase the uncertainty of consumers' decision-making.Facing fashion goods,consumer is inclined to search information from their fellows,risk and fashion present obvious correlation and network effect.The correlation and network effect of consumers' information searching challenge the classical analysis paradigm.Focusing on 'correlation',paying attention to 'structural effect',the network analysis method becomes an effective tool.In this background,the paper puts forward the consumer information searching research from network perspective,puts consumers into the complex networks,and pays attention to correlation and network structure of consumers' information searching behavior under specific context,so as to provide help for theory development and the enterprise marketing practice.Throughout the literatures,although the consumer information searching behavior and the 'network' with the decision-making behavior have yielded fruitful results,few have the combination.For consumer information searching behavior,more researches mainly stand in the angle of the enterprise,starting from the individual and focusing on indi-vidual variables(such as knowledge,cognition,experience,education level,etc.)and situational variables(such as time pressure,economic pressure,information available,product attributes,etc.),rarely stand on the consumer,from the angle of networks which put consumer into its own social resources,focusing on the networks effect on information searching.For network and consumer decision-making,more researches pay attention to post-consumption(such as opinion leader,social contagion,brand loyalty),ignored the pre-consumption behavior(such as information searching).On the research methods,relating literatures mainly use quantitative analysis,focusing on the measurement of structure and the appraisal of networks' influence.Especially on the modeling,most literatures mainly put the network which can affect consumers' decision making as a kind of social network or complex technology network,using 'friend network','online community network','internet' as replacement,ignoring the networks' particularity.So those methods can't reflect the structure characteristic and the influence of the real networks.Based on the existing decision-making network model,from the consumer decision process,this paper abstracts the correlation and network effect of consumer decision-making into the Consumer Complex Decision-making Network to extract structure indexes for consumer information searching behavior research.The basic idea is:first,defining the Consumer Complex Decision-making Network and consumer information searching behavior.Second,clarify the relationship between these two concepts.Third,based on Consumer Complex Decision-making Network,this paper extractes structure indicator to reflect the correlation and network effect of consumers' information searing behavior and built the Consumer Complex Decision-making Network Model.Fourth,using descriptive indicator to describe the information searching behavior's network effect,this paper designs and develops the scale.Fifth,abstracting the influence of network effect on information searching behavior into the variables' causal relationship,by selecting risk and fashion to set the specific decision situation,this paper designs three studies to examine the correlation and causal relationship between two variables.The main content of this paper includes:(1)Introduction.Introduce research background,main research problems,research methods and the overall framework of this paper.(2)Review.Clarify existing literatures' research contents and methods,points the problems and the gap.(3)Model and Scale.From networks perspective,this paper puts forward the concept of Consumer Complex Decision-making Network,analysis the mechanism of network and information searching behavior.On modeling,'the Consumer Complex Decision-making Network' may have the structure characteristic of social network and technology network,so these networks can take as the basis of modeling.Relying on related literatures and researching findings,by choosing structures indicators,this paper constructs the Consumer Information Searching Conceptual Model based on Consumer Complex Decision-making Network,designs and develops the scale.(4)Model Application-Based on risk and fashion.For verifying the conceptual model,this paper chooses risk and fashion as the specific context to empirical study.By clarifying the logical relationship between risk,fashion,network and consumer information searching,it puts forward the empirical framework and proposes the hypotheses.(5)Empirical Research.Using questionnaire to data collecting,using statistical analysis tools and regression model to data analysis and hypothesis verify,this paper testes the conceptual model and the effectiveness of the empirical research model through three studies gradually.Through three studies,under different product categories and in different income groups,the relationship between risk,fashion,network and consumer information searching has verified respectively.This method realizes the combination of network analysis idea and statistical analysis model.(6)Conclusion and Prospective.Summarizing the main conclusions,pointing the limitation and drawback,this paper discusses the future research direction.Based on empirical analysis,this paper got the following conclusions:First,consumer information searching behavior is relevant and has network effect.In the process of information searching,the Consumer Complex Decision-making Network has some special characteristics.By building the Consumer Information Searching Conceptual Model and empirical research,the conclusions showed that in searching information of risk and fashion goods,consumer's information behavior is relevant and has network effect.Accordingly,the Consumer Complex Decision-making Network has some special characteristic,such as cohesive group,structure hole,tie-strength,etc.Those structures have different effect on different product and in different income level consumers.Second,consumer information searching behavior is embedded in Consumer Complex Decision-making Network,and affected by risk,fashion,and network.In the concrete:(1)Consumer's perception of risk and fashion which come from their cognition and psychological state are a kind of subjective feeling.Different people have different product's risk and fashion judgment.These lead to the differences in consumers' decision-making behavior,especially in the information-searching and the dependence on network resources.Through empirical study,it proved that as consumer's risk and fashion sensitivity degree increasing,the tendency of consumer information searching enhanced.(2)Consumer Complex Decision-making Network is the important variable influences consumers' information-searching.Network position influences consumers' ability of accessing to information resource,and the depth of searching tendency.For example,the information searching tendency of people who has large network resources and intimate relationships is significantly higher than people who has small network resources.Positing in the network structure-hole will give people more access to non-redundant and innovative information.(3)As the moderator,consumer complex decision-making.network moderated the relationship between risk,fashion and consumer information searching behavior.For example,network scale and network density intensify the positive relationship between fashion sensitivity and information searching,but tie-strength plays a negative role in this process.That is when facing fashion products,sensitive consumer will do deep searching if he/she has large and intimacy network resources.For insensitive consumers,discussion of fashion product often-happens between strong ties,but for high sensitive consumers,discussion often between weak ties.Third,in searching information,the relevant and network effect has different features in different product category and in different income groups.This paper found that the relationship between risk,fashion,network,and consumer information searching behavior are affected by product category and income level.As the raise of risk and fashion,the greater of the network effect,the external information tendency.During this process,network's influence in different product category and income levels has discrepancy.This also confirms the embeddedness and complexity of the consumer complex decision-making network.With the support of contents and conclusions,main innovation points are:First,this paper researches consumer information searching behavior from network perspective.It transfers the focus from individual into the relevance and network structures.It makes up for the existing researches focusing too much to the individual and the network's perspective research only focus on post-consumption behaviors,which can grasp the new trends of consumer information searching effectively and do more in-depth analysis of the nature of consumer information searching behavior.At the same time,this paper uses structure variables to describe the relevance and network effect,changing the influence of network effect into causal relationship.This method realized the combination of the network analysis idea and classical statistical analysis model,also providing a new paradigm of network perspective's consumer behavior research.Second,this paper built Consumer Complex Decision-making Network Model to describe the relevance and network effect of consumer information searching behavior.Through the abstracting of relevance and network effect into structure variables,this paper choose structure indicators building the Consumer Information Searching Conceptual Model based on Consumer Complex Decision-making Network,which makes up the limitation of existing researches only focus on one or a few indicator,lacking whole index.Third,this paper develops the scale to describe the network effect of consumer information searching behavior.Facing the drawback of quantitative method of network building,this paper uses descriptive indicators and develops the scale to describe the network effect.The results show that this scale has better reliability and validity in different product category and different income level groups.So it makes up the limitation of existing researches pay more attention to quantitative analyzes,lacking the qualitative scale.On the other hand,this scale provides new method and tool for the network perspectives' consumer behavior research.Fifth,Choosing risk and fashion as the key indicators to classify the context.Different from previous sociology and psychology's perspective,the paper focuses on fashion consumption behavior and elaborates risk and fashion from network perspective.That is risk and fashion present network effect.Risk and fashion embed consumer into complex network.