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

Abstract

Variety-seeking is a popular choice strategy in consumers’ daily lives, and many factors influence it. This study conducted a narrative and structured literature review based on three popular online academic databases to understand how researchers used influencing factors, adopted theoretical perspectives and underlying mechanisms, and developed measure methods in their studies. This paper consolidated and analyzed 61 articles on variety-seeking behaviors in consumer research, including empirical studies spanning from 2000 to 2021. This paper primarily focused on articles published at top tiers in the marketing literature. From these articles, a collection of internal and external factors, theoretical perspectives, underlying mechanisms, and measure methods adopted was summarized and tabulated for easy reference and comprehension. A research framework was developed to illustrate the relationships between influence factors and variety-seeking proposed by previous researchers. The literature review may not be exhaustive because variety-seeking behaviors could involve various research topics; however, the proposed research framework and suggested directions may be representative references for future research. This study is a more comprehensive literature review of variety-seeking behaviors in consumption research after 2000, and it contributes to a better understanding of the causes and effects of variety-seeking behaviors in consumption.

Making choices of food and non‐food products: a comparison between virtual stores and online shopping

“…Even though choosing food in the process of food preparation may be considered as a depleting task on people's psychological resources (Osdoba et al ., 2015), in the present study, participants were tasked with making consecutive choices from a limited set of options. Despite the limited number of choices, this method of continuous selection may satisfy the participants' pursuit of variety (McAlister & Pessemier, 1982; Zhang, 2022). Therefore, these findings, once again, demonstrate the possible influence of hedonic foods on people's emotions (Macht & Dettmer, 2006; Yang et al ., 2023).…”

Bystander preference for naloxone products: a field experiment

“…Notably, “Narcaned” has become a verb in the US-English lexicon to refer to the act of reversing an overdose. In contrast to product familiarity, novelty preference is also a relevant driver of consumer decision making [ 19 ]. As a related but distinct factor from product familiarity and novelty preference, the market release date of each product was stated in the study training video.…”

The effects of background music tempo on consumer variety-seeking behavior: the mediating role of arousal

“…Numerous researchers have explored the factors that influence consumer diversity seeking ( Zhang, 2022 ). These factors mainly focus on individual and social factors, such as gender ( Faraji-Rad et al, 2013 ), power state ( Jiang et al, 2014 ; Wang and Jin, 2022 ), emotion states ( Roehm and Roehm, 2005 ; Chuang et al, 2008 ), physiological states ( Huang et al, 2019 ) and social environment ( Ariely and Levav, 2000 ; Ratner and Kahn, 2002 ; Etkin, 2016 ).…”