Motivated perceptions of salespersons' actions and messages: The role of consumers' self-regulatory goals and prior knowledge

Consumers use salespeople to obtain product recommendations, learn about product features, or even negotiate on prices. Marketers can use these interactions to favorably influence consumers' judgments of products/prices (e.g. Hoch & Deighton, 1989). However, consumers may also make unintended interpretations of salesperson's behaviors, as when they use persuasion knowledge to discount sellers' assertions as persuasive intent (Friestad & Wright, 1994). The ambiguity in common purchase contexts makes either interpretation plausible.; To investigate what types of interpretations consumers are likely to make, we conceptualize consumer decision-making as motivated perception—consumers construct meaning in accordance with their underlying motivations/goals and prior knowledge. Specifically, we contrast the effects of self-regulatory goals of “achievement” versus “avoidance” on interpretations of salespersons' behavior, and test their subsequent effects on price/product evaluations and purchase intention. We predict that achievement goals, relative to avoidance goals, result in more favorable interpretations of identical salesperson behaviors. Additionally, we predict that goals moderate consumers' use of prior positively- and negatively-valenced knowledge during judgment. We also test whether knowledge accessibility or diagnosticity mediates the effect of goals and prior knowledge on interpretations. Finally, we test whether these effects are sustained in downstream evaluations of seller's price offers/product recommendations, and consumers' purchase intentions.; We tested these predictions in the context of consumer evaluations of negotiated price offers (experiment 1) and product recommendations (experiment 2). The results from two studies showed that achievement goals, compared to avoidance goals, led to more favorable interpretations of the same salesperson behaviors. These data also suggest that compatibility between goal-type and knowledge-valence is an important determinant of whether or not a specific knowledge construct is used in judgment. These effects were also sustained in downstream evaluations of price offers/product recommendations and purchase intentions. In addition, the data provide partial support for knowledge diagnosticity as a mediator of the effect of goals and prior knowledge on interpretations of salespersons' actions and messages.