The Influence Of Ritual Types On Consumer Product Preference

Nowadays,through the advocacy of films,TV series,various books,and online copywritings,ritual has become a popular vocabulary.More and more consumers begin to decorate daily life with rituals.Enterprises are also introducing rituals into practice for new marketing opportunities.However,current studies of ritual are limited,they exist mostly in psychology fields,marketing scholars did little exploration on it.Enterprises call for the development of related research.Based on this background,this article explores the impacts of different ritual types on consumers' subsequent product selection preferences,specifically,how individual rituals and group rituals would affect consumers' preference for minority-endorsed product and majority-endorsed product.This article intends to provide inspiration for marketing practices and complement current research in the academic.This paper mainly discusses how different ritual types affect consumers' preference for minority-endorsed product and majority-endorsed product through four experiments:(1)Experiment 1 explores the main effect of this article.Different types have different impacts on consumer preferences for minority-endorsed product and majority-endorsed product.Compared with group ritual,consumers who perform individual ritual more prefer minority-endorsed product.At the same time,this strengthening effect is not just a comparison between group and individual ritual.Compared with non-ritual scenarios,individual ritual and group ritual respectively polarize consumers' preferences for minority-endorsed products and majority-endorsed products.(2)While verifying the main effect,experiment 2 further verified the intermediary effect of private self-awareness,that is,individual ritual promote consumer's private self-awareness and enhance their preference for minority-endorsed product,while group rituals weaken the individual's private self-awareness,which in turn promotes consumer conformity preferences.(3)Experiment 3 explores the moderating factor of this effect-the narcissistic tendency of consumers.Specifically,when consumers have a low degree of narcissism,peoplegoing through personal rituals has a stronger preference for minority-endorsed product than group rituals;when consumers have a high degree of narcissism,whether going through a individual ritual or a group ritual has no significant effect on their product preferences.(4)Experiment 4 discusses the moderating effect of the second moderator variable,the imaginary audience,and proves that only in the case of low imaginary audience,the differences in product preferences of consumers after individual and group ritual are significant.After completing the work of laboratory data collection and online collection,this article analyzed the data by T-test,ANOVA,regression analysis and other methods in SPSS 21.0,and the experimental results support the three major assumeptions proposed in this article.All in all,this paper theoretically discusses the behavioral aftereffect of rituals,and verifies the mediation mechanism of private self-awareness.It enriches the research results of rituals,especially in the field of marketing,and further expands the research on the antecedents of consumer conformity tendency and unique search based on the preference of majority-endorsed product and minority-endorsed product.At the same time,this paper also provides some management enlightenment for enterprises,that is,marketing of different product types needs to be guided by different ritual types.