The Effect Of Signal Focus On Postpurchase Regret Under The Explict Framing And DisclaimerFraming

Consumer regret can result in unfavorable outcomes to marketers. To prevent regret, a lot of retailers promise to give back the money without any additional terms to consumers who discover product failure after purchase. The author shows that a return of product without any additional terms, whose effect on felt regret depends on how consumers view these promises. If consumers mainly view those promises as protective tools, that is to say they adopt a protection focus, the regret after return of the product is minimal. If consumers primarily view such promises as sources of information about the retailers’quality of products’status, that is to say they adopt an information focus, the regret persist even after return of product without any additional terms.The author shows that regret persists with these consumers because finding a product failure results in a perception of trust violation. However, the author finds that using a disclaimer that states that the retailer does not claim to offer the flawless products can help avoid this negative outcome for consumers with information focus. Additionally, this study shows that regulatory focus serves as the motivational basis for how consumers view return of products promises. By showing that outcome reversal does not necessarily obviate regret, this study contributes to the literature on outcome reversibility and regret.Based on the pervious study on the subjects of regret, signal and regulatory focus, the author summarized amount of paper about these literature and conclude the main hypothesis. Then the author conducted three experiment studies to test the interaction between regulatory focus, signal focus, regret after purchase, perception of trust violation and signal framing.This paper also comprised several limitations, including sample collection method and sample amount, region limitation and scale design. Hope the researcher can overcome these limitations and deepen this subject in the future.