The Effect Of Brand Strength, Review Valence And Regulatory Focus On Online Purchasing Decision-making

Online shopping has a huge customer base, and the growth rate of users continued to rise, it has become a popular shopping pattern. Compared with offline shopping, online shopping decision-making has its uniqueness: information asymmetry between consumers and sellers, spatial separation of both trading parties, who are not familiar with each other, consumers can not directly touch and feel the product,which increased the difficulty of judging the quality of products.This special online shopping decision-making environment encourages consuers to comprehensively utilize various external cues of products to improve product quality perception to make purchase decisions. Researchers have already respectively done some research on the brand strength and review valence. However, the mechanism of joint impact of these two important and unique clues on consumers’ online purchasing decisions has not yet been studied. Regulatory focus as an important intrinsic qualitity, the difference in thinking mode and the risk appetite between the different regulatory focus consumers leads to consumers’ behavioral and psychological differences in the use of brand strength and review valence to make purchasing decisions. However, researchers have not done research about the relationship between the three variables previously. Meanwhile, the effect of brain mechanisms from brand strength and review valence on consumers’ online purchasing decisions is worthy of attention.This research adopts two studies,study 1 designed a simulated online shopping site "treasure hunt net", employed 2×2×2 mixed design, selected 78 subjects to explore how brand strength(strong brand / weak brand)、review valence(positive review / negative review)and regulatory focus(promotion focus/prevention focus)affect consumers’ online purchasing decisions through behavioral experiment. The results show that:(1)Strong brands, positive reviews, promotion focus could significantly increase the online purchase rate.(2)With respect to the strong brand, negative reviews has greater impact on the weak brand’ online purchase rate, brand strength can increase the impact of review valence on the purchase rate.(3)With respect to the strong brand, prevention focus has greater impact on the weak brand’ purchase rate, brand strength can increase the impact of regulatory focus on the purchase rate.(4)Regulatory focus can moderates brand strength and review valence’ online purchase rate, for promotion focused subjects group,brand strength can moderates the relationship between review valence’ online purchase rate, for prevention focused subjects group,no such moderating effect exists. To further explore the neural mechanisms of the impact of online purchasing decisions from brand strength and review valence, study 2 employed 2×2 within-subject design, selected 16 subjects to explore the neural effects of different brand strength((strong brand / weak brand)to different review valence(positive review / negative review) through ERP experiment method. The results show that:(1)In the early stage of cognitive process,strong brands attract more attention resource, and as a result evoked greater average amplitude of P2 component in Frontal and Frontal Central areas, evoked greater average amplitude of N1 component in Occipital area than weak brand.(2)When consumers need to consider the brand strength and review valence for their online purchasing decisions, consumers face the decision risk reflected in event-related potential: under the conditions of strong brand, negative reviews evoked greater average amplitude of N2 component than positive reviews, under the conditions of weak brand, the positive reviews evoked greater average amplitude of N2 component than negative reviews.