Healthy food exposition attendees’ purchasing strategies: a mental budgeting perspective

Abstract

Purpose Grounded in the theory of mental budgeting, this paper aims to investigate how the regret and perfectionism of exposition attendees influences their purchasing strategy. Design/methodology/approach This research collected on-site data at a well-established specialty food exposition in China. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were applied to test the proposed model. Findings The findings confirm the effect of psychological mechanism (regret and perfectionism) on exposition attendees’ purchasing strategy as one that boosts/impairs their confidence in purchasing healthy food at the exposition. Specifically, regret and perfectionism show differential contributions to purchasing strategy dimensions. Variety seeking has a positive effect, whereas price consciousness has a negative effect, on purchase confidence. Practical implications Event organizers and exhibitors should understand attendees’ consumption-related psychological mechanism and devise effective management and marketing strategies for optimal consumption experiences at expositions. They can create an informative and worry-free experience that facilitates a pleasant thought process to reduce uncertainty in attendees’ on-site decision-making. Originality/value The current research pioneered a unique model conceptualizing the important, yet underexplored, phenomenon of purchasing mechanism in the exposition setting. Addressing the emerging interest in food expositions, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first for examining purchasing mechanism from the perspective of mental budgeting, providing insightful knowledge about how the psychological mechanism affects exposition attendees’ pre-purchase evaluation and confidence toward purchasing healthy food at expositions.

Fashion involvement, opinion-seeking and product variety as stimulators for fashion e-commerce: an investigated model based on S-O-R model

“…Such results confirming consumers buying behavior is affected by their assessment of product quality and supported by the variety of product offered by the retailers. Different product choices offered by online retails in this case are widening consumer's ability to evaluate the product value and make a confident purchase decision, especially in Asian markets as proved for Chinese (Fu et al, 2021), Indian (Asokan-Ajitha and Rejikumar, 2020) and Malaysian markets through the current study. Psychological factors in this casefashion involvement and opinion-seekingcould be seen as directional factors that influence consumers interest toward a fashion trend, product shape or material design.…”

“…(2017) found that consumers had highlighted product quality as highest impact characteristic they seek in brick-and-mortars stores, followed by availability of wide range of product variety as a second ranked characteristic. Aside from Western markets, a study on purchase confidence of healthy food in the Chinese market, perfectionist consumers were found to be more confident in their purchase choices if richer product variety and quality are available, more than being conscious with prices (Fu et al. , 2021).…”

“…, 2017). Within this context, variety ranges support consumers’ decision-making process and reduce their risk taking, while the relationship between product variety and sales is influenced by product characteristics (Fu et al. , 2021; Santos et al.…”

Variety-Seeking Behavior in Consumption: A Literature Review and Future Research Directions

“… Li and Sun (2021) investigated 364 participants in the United States and found that consumers with a growth (vs. fixed) mindset are more likely to engage in variety seeking. As a purchasing strategy, variety-seeking also could be positively influenced by self-oriented perfectionism ( Fu et al, 2021 ; N = 312).…”

“…For example, Hung et al (2011) measured variety-seeking from Kahn et al (1986) , which used five-point Likert scales (1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree). In the research of Fu et al (2021) , variety seeking was measured by three items from Grünhagen et al (2012) , with a five-point probability scale ranging from 1 (not probable) to 5 (very probable). A sample item is “I am willing to see different food products and brands.” In the research of Zhao et al (2021b) , variety seeking was measured with the five-item Variety Seeking Scale ( Helm and Landschulze, 2009 ).…”