Research Article
Consumer Affective and Cognitive Pleasure
Published: January 2011 · Vol. 40, No. 2 · pp. 255-295
Full Text
Abstract
This study distinguishes in-store consumer emotions into affective pleasure and cognitive pleasure, thereby suggesting the possibility of integrating the emotion-behavior model and the cognition-emotion-behavior model. Prior studies related to in-store consumer emotions have presented findings that consumers experience various emotions through in-store stimuli when visiting stores containing diverse stimuli, and that such emotions influence consumer behavior. That is, the relationship between in-store emotions and consumer behavior has been discussed based on the Stimulus (S)-Organism (O)-Response (R) theory. Consequently, prior studies focused only on the relationships among stimulus-emotion-behavior or on identifying the components of each concept, with insufficient discussion of the fundamental formation mechanisms underlying them. However, in-store stimuli can be distinguished into evaluative stimuli that trigger appraisal and non-evaluative stimuli that do not trigger appraisal, and emotions can likewise be distinguished into emotions experienced through non-evaluative stimuli and emotions experienced through the appraisal of evaluative stimuli. While non-evaluative stimuli (music) follow a stimulus-emotion-behavior process, evaluative stimuli follow a stimulus-stimulus appraisal (cognition)-emotion-behavior process. That is, when a single customer visits a store, both processes can manifest and can also influence each other's processes. This demonstrates the possibility of integrating the emotion-behavior model and the cognition-emotion-behavior model. This study distinguishes the emotion in the stimulus-emotion-behavior framework as affective pleasure and the emotion in the stimulus-cognition-emotion-behavior framework as cognitive pleasure, and seeks to examine the causes of these emotions and the mechanisms of behavior formation (purchase intention, stay intention) induced by such emotions, thereby verifying that these two models do not exist independently but can both manifest in-store and be integrated. The research results showed that in-store consumer emotions are distinguished into cognitive pleasure and affective pleasure: cognitive pleasure is experienced through the evaluation of in-store stimuli (products), while affective pleasure is experienced through environmental sensory stimuli (music). However, environmental sensory stimuli were found not to affect product evaluation, indicating that environmental sensory stimuli alone cannot improve product evaluation. Ultimately, to improve product evaluation, it was found necessary to induce affective pleasure through the presentation of environmental sensory stimuli that consider the customer base. Stay intention was found to be more influenced by affective pleasure than by cognitive pleasure, while purchase intention was found to be more influenced by cognitive pleasure than by affective pleasure. This suggests that because purchase intention is a higher-involvement behavior than stay intention, it is more influenced by cognitive pleasure experienced through product evaluation than by affective pleasure formed merely through sensory elements. These findings demonstrate the dynamic relationship between consumer cognition and emotion, and show that the emotion-behavior model and the cognition-emotion-behavior model are not independent models but can be linked organically to each other. This study provides a new perspective on in-store consumer emotions through the possibility of integrating the debated models in consumer behavior, and establishes a foundation for more concretely discussing the mechanisms underlying the elicitation of positive consumer behavior.
