A Study On The Effects Of Consumer Confusion On Customer Satisfaction:the Mediating Effect Of Shopping Value

With the rapid development of market economy and technology improvement in China, the market competition is becoming increasing fierce, the life circle of products is getting shorter and shorter, and product imitation strategy prevails. The all of it makes customers have to face too many choices, frequent launch of new products, similar products, all kinds of complicated technology and ambiguity information, which undoubtedly make some customers experience confusion in their shopping process. How to deal with consumer confusion to reduce or avoid customer dissatisfaction has been getting western scholars’ attention. But the phenomenon of consumer confusion obviously has not caused enough attention to the scholars in China and the related study is just getting started. In face of current market environment, it’s urgent to conduct study on consumer confusion. More importantly, a study on the relationship between consumer confusion and customer satisfaction is of great practical value.Based on previous studies, consumer confusion can be abstracted to three dimensions:similarity confusion, overload confusion and ambiguity confusion, and the article introduces shopping value as mediating variable which can be attributed to two dimensions:utilitarian shopping value and hedonic shopping value. Moreover, this study explores the relationship among consumer confusion, shopping value and customer satisfaction. With the help of SPSS 19.0 and AMOS 17.0, this article analyzes the survey data collected which was based on customers’smartphone buying behavior, and comes to the following conclusions:(1)About the impact of the three dimensions of consumer confusion on the two elements of shopping value:overload confusion and ambiguity confusion have a significant negative impact on utilitarian shopping value, and all the three dimensions of consumer confusion have a significant negative impact on hedonic shopping value.(2)The three dimensions of consumer confusion all have a significant negative impact on customer satisfaction.(3)Both utilitarian shopping value and hedonic shopping value have a significant positive impact on customer satisfaction(4)Both utilitarian shopping value and hedonic shopping value have a mediating effect on the influence of consumer confusion on customer satisfactionFinally, based on the empirical analysis, this paper gives enterprises and retailers some marketing suggestions in the hope that enterprises and retailers would take appropriate marketing strategies for different types of consumer confusion to improve customer shopping value and satisfaction.