【公开学术报告】Promoting Consumption Experiences through Positive Incidental Affect

Topic: Promoting Consumption Experiences through Positive Incidental Affect

Date & Time: 9:30-11:00am, Thur. 1^st, November 2018

Venue: Room 2101, Tongji Building A

Language: English

Speaker：Dr. Aiqing LING (INSEAD Europe Campus)

ABSTRACT

Much research in consumer psychology has investigated how affective reactions unrelated to a decision at hand (i.e., incidental affect) influence consumers’ pre-consumption preferences. The underlying mechanism has been theorized as a “misattribution” process. My research advances the understanding of how incidental affect could be “misattributed” by unpacking it into valence and arousal – two orthogonal dimensions that conceptualize affective states – and considering their joint influences on consumers’ consumption experiences across different sensory domains (i.e., with wines, images and music). Based on recent findings in decision neuroscience on how affect alters the neural computation of subjective values, I propose an arousal transport hypothesis suggesting that the valence of incidental affect mediates the shifts of reported consumption experiences, whereas the arousal acts as a vehicle that transports the valence to execute such impact. In this talk, I will be presenting a set of four multi-method studies combining functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), skin conductance recording, facial affective recording, and traditional behavioral approaches in the lab and in a natural experiment setting to demonstrate this novel hypothesis. My research provides an interdisciplinary approach to extend the existing affect misattribution theory, highlighting the indispensability of arousal to carry over affective influences on consumer behavior. My research is also particularly important for marketing since a better understanding of how a strategy and in what circumstance incidental affect could be induced more effectively is pivotal for managers to improve customer experience, as well as key performance indicators of consumers’ post-consumption behavior such as reviews, likes and tweets along the customer journey.