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This paper aims to identify and classify consumers’ goals associated with the consumption of environmentally sustainable products. The applicability of such goals to the positioning of environmental products is also tested.

Study 1 used 62 laddering interviews to identify a hierarchical map of adoption related goals. Study 2 used a survey design (N = 152 students) to test the effects of construal-goal fit on evaluations of environmental product attributes of a hybrid car. Study 3 involved an online experiment (N = 125 consumer panellists) to test the effects of construal-goal fit on consumers’ willingness to pay a price premium (WTPP) for energy-efficient light bulbs.

A hierarchical goal map displays consumption goals attainable through environmentally sustainable products. Consumers with a chronic, high-level construal placed more importance on product attributes associated with abstract goals than those with chronic, low-level construal. This effect was stronger for males than for females. Additionally, construal-goal fit increased WTPP.

The results suggest that marketers consider construal-goal fit to communicate the value of environmentally sustainable products. The results, however, should be replicated in other product categories and across diverse cultural settings.

This paper identifies and classifies the goals related to consumption of environmentally sustainable products. Additionally, it tests the effects of construal-goal fit on evaluations of environmental products, providing insights for marketers seeking to improve their promotional efforts and for public policymakers as they institute demarketing campaigns.

Customer experience research predominantly anchors the customer journey on a specific offering, implying an inherently firm-centric perspective. Attending calls for a more customer-centric approach, this study aims to develop a goal-oriented view of customer journeys.

This study interprets the results of a phenomenological study of a transformative journey toward a sober life with the self-regulation model of behavior to advance understanding of customer journeys.

The consumer's journey toward a higher-order goal encompasses various customer journeys toward subordinate goals, through which consumers engage in iterative cognitive and behavioral processes to adjust or maintain their experienced situation vis-à-vis the goal. Experiences drive behavior toward the goal. It follows that negative experiences may contribute to goal attainment.

This study highlights the importance of looking at the consumers' higher-order goals to obtain a more holistic understanding of the customer journey.

Companies and organizations should extend their view beyond the immediate goals of their customers to identify relevant touchpoints and other customer journeys that affect the customer experience.

This study proposes conceptualization of the customer journey, comprising goal-oriented processes at different hierarchical levels, and it demonstrates how positive and negative customer experiences spur behaviors toward the higher-order consumer goal. This conceptualization enables a more customer-centric perspective on journeys.

When consumers fulfill consumption goals they make decisions on first, from which product category to buy, and second, which brand to purchase within the product category. In this article, the relative effects of product‐level typicality and brand‐level typicality on goal‐driven consumer choice are examined. Which level of typicality is more diagnostic of choice? Empirical results show that consumers are, in goal‐derived usage contexts, more likely to choose a less typical and less favored brand from a typical product category than a typical and more favored brand from a less typical product category. Consequently, brands that consumers perceive as inferior may be chosen over superior brands because of the link between product categories and usage contexts. Our results indicate that it may be fruitful for marketers to associate brands and product categories with usage contexts, and that they need to consider brand competitors from other product categories.

To provide a keener understanding of consumers’ decision-making processes and motivations regarding deliberate counterfeit consumption, this paper aims to integrate insights from several theoretical perspectives and the relevant literature. It proposes an overlooked yet important goal-directed interactionist perspective and identifies and tests a novel construct called consumers’ perceived counterfeit detection (PCD) in a proposed model.

This paper uses a comprehensive review of the literature to justify its proposed perspective, PCD construct and model, followed by in-depth interviews and survey data to test its proposed model and hypotheses.

Besides the theoretical insights derived from the proposed goal-directed interactionist perspective, empirical results demonstrate the important role that PCD plays in counterfeit consumption. In fact, PCD not only negatively and directly affects consumers’ intentions to deliberately purchase counterfeits but also weakens the positive effect consumers’ attitudes have on their purchase intentions.

This research makes several theoretical contributions. First and foremost, differing from other approaches (e.g. personal, economic and ethical), this research justifies an overlooked yet important goal-directed interactionist perspective and develops a refined and substantive framework including its proposed PCD construct. This framework provides opportunities to investigate behavior as an interpretative and dynamic process, vitalizing the domain of counterfeit-consumption behavior studies in particular and ethical behavior research in general. Second, at the construct level, the proposed hypothetical construct of PCD comprises the building blocks for knowledge advancement. Finally, rather than testing theories incrementally (such as the theory of planned behavior and the theory of reasoned action), this research fosters the development of new ideas regarding our proposed goal-directed interactionist perspective and PCD construct, which can be applied to other contexts and constructs that share the same or similar mechanisms and features.

According to the proposed goal-directed interactionist perspective, this research offers insights regarding why understanding consumers’ different goals (e.g. social-adjustive vs value-expressive; attainment vs maintenance) is important for marketers; how consumers’ goals interplay with their choices through their actions and consumption (e.g. compete vs substitute); and why, how and when their goals interact with their actions, choices and situations during their goal-setting, goal-striving and goal-realization stages that may lead to unethical behavior. At the construct level, the better marketers understand PCD, the more effectively they can use it. At the level of relationships and procedures, this research can offer important insights for businesses that look for “best practices” in the fight against deliberate counterfeit consumption.

First, by integrating insights from goal-directed behavior, self-regulatory theories and interactionist theory, this paper proposes its own goal-directed interactionist perspective. It then develops and tests a refined and substantive model of counterfeit decision-making in which PCD stands as a novel construct. The paper’s proposed perspective and model provide opportunities to investigate behavior as an interpretative and dynamic process, taking the domain of ethical behavior research (e.g. counterfeit-consumption behavior) from descriptive frameworks to testable theories.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how consumers’ affective goal pursuit influences the relationship between their affect and satisfaction in services. In particular, it examines when affect can directly influence satisfaction and when such an impact is mediated by perceived service quality.

This research explores consumers’ consumption goals in three different service contexts, i.e., a primarily pleasure-seeking hedonic service context, a primarily arousal-seeking hedonic service context and a utilitarian (non-affect-seeking) service context.

Results from two studies show that the primary affective consumption goal determines which specific affect can directly influence satisfaction. Other desirable non-primary affect influences satisfaction through the mediation of perceived service quality.

This research focuses on the service contexts in which consumers’ primary consumption goals vary. Further research may focus on the priority and strength of a consumer’s various consumption goals in different services and study how the priority and strength of different consumption goals determine how affect influences quality and satisfaction.

The study provides several insights for service providers and retailers to recognize that consumers’ primary consumption goals may vary in different service contexts, for different consumers, and even at different usage situations. Accordingly, marketers need to develop different strategies for consumer with different goal pursuit in services.

While the literature has documented that consumer affect influences consumer satisfaction in general, it is unclear how different consumption goals influence the impact of affect on satisfaction. This research contributes to the consumer goal literature by demonstrating the importance of primary consumption goals in the post-consumption evaluation of services.

Previous research indicates that the goals consumers have when shopping influence their attention to and processing of information they encounter. The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of consumers' pre‐purchase goals on their responses to price promotions.

In three experiments, the existence of consumer goals (i.e. with or without a pre‐purchase goal) were manipulated and promotion characteristics including message framing, promotion format, and promotion depth were systematically varied to examine how consumers respond to these price promotions.

Consumers with a pre‐purchase goal were found to be more attracted to the promotion than those without a goal. More importantly, pre‐purchase goals interact with promotion characteristics and produce differential effects on willingness to buy. Consumers with a pre‐purchase goal are more attracted to promotions emphasizing reduced losses while those without a goal responded more favorably toward promotions emphasizing gains. Moreover, consumers with and without a pre‐purchase goal respond differently to various discount levels.

Existing research on price promotions has not examined the influence of consumers' pre‐purchase goals. This paper brings a new dimension to price promotion research. Understanding these variations in pre‐purchase goals across consumers will help sellers design more effective promotion programs

Based on goal-directed behavior, this study explores the direct effects and the interaction between health and environmental concerns as the main drivers of organic food consumption. Consumer's economic problems are proposed as the main barrier for such behavior from a cost-benefit approach theoretically grounded on decision theory.

Data were collected using the 26,669 European 95.1 wave participants of the Eurobarometer survey. Logistic regression estimates are used to analyze the hypotheses postulated.

The results indicated the significant association of both health and environmental concerns with organic food consumption, as well as the existence of an interactive effect between both consumer goals. As a novel finding, health concern weakens the influence of environmental concern on organic food consumption. Consumer's economic problems harms the expansion of organic food consumption as well as other socio-demographic factors included as control variables.

For the first time, this research explores the interaction effect between health and environmental concerns as antecedents of organic food consumption. The study argues that these consumer goals present differential features in terms of individual importance, feasibility, abstractness and outcome demonstrability, resulting in a prevalence of health over environmental goals for some consumers. The research provides not only novel insights for understanding organic food consumption but also provides additional evidence for practitioners to develop sales strategies and policymakers to formulate policies to guide the promotion of this so desired example of sustainable consumption.

This research is conducted in the context of beauty salons in India, to investigate how enhanced perceived acceptance in interpersonal relationships through consuming beauty salon services can generate narcissistic brand love among consumers via the mediation of brand happiness. It also investigates the moderating impact of consumer's anxious interpersonal attachment style and cynicism on the relationship between perceived salon brand-interpersonal acceptance goal congruence and salon brand happiness.

To test the hypothesized relationships, a survey was conducted among 225 regular consumers of beauty salon brands. The data were analyzed using Hayes' (2017) process macro in SPSS.

The results suggest that perceived goal congruence between beauty salon brand-interpersonal acceptance positively influences brand happiness, which in turn predicts consumer's narcissistic brand love. Consumer's anxious interpersonal attachment style positively moderates the effect of brand-interpersonal acceptance goal congruence on brand happiness, while cynicism negatively moderates the path.

Value of the study lies in extending interpersonal acceptance and rejection (IPAR) theory to the domain of consumer–salon brand relationship, to posit that if salon brands satisfy consumers' interpersonal acceptance goals, there is a potential for such happy consumers to love the salon brand, albeit narcissistically.