Abstract

Past research generally finds that if consumers share word of mouth about past purchases with others, the valence of the information tends to be congruent with actual perceptions. Thus, a negative purchase experience should elicit negative (vs. positive) word of mouth. We examine how a goal of attaining the best possible outcome, or maximizing, may alter this tendency. Drawing on prior work demonstrating that consumers may view their own personal failures more favorably through relative comparisons with others faring similarly or worse, we show that maximizing increases consumers’ propensity to share favorable word of mouth about unsatisfactory purchases, in an effort to encourage others to make the same poor choices, as they seek to enhance the perceived relative standing of and post-purchase feelings toward their own unsatisfying outcomes. We further show that consumers particularly exhibit this behavior when sharing with psychologically close (vs. distant) others, as comparisons with close others are especially relevant to relative standing. Finally, we consider the downstream consequences of such behavior, finding that when consumers successfully persuade close others to make the same bad decisions, they feel better about their own outcomes, but are also burdened with feelings of guilt that erode their overall wellbeing.

中文翻译：

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当不关心共享时：寻求最佳对共享不满意购买的良好口碑的影响

摘要

过去的研究通常发现，如果消费者与他人分享关于过去购买的口口相传，则信息的价值往往与实际的看法相吻合。因此，负面的购买经历应该引起负面的（相对于正面的）口碑。我们研究了达到最佳结果或最大化的目标如何改变这种趋势。根据先前的研究表明，消费者可以通过与表现类似或更差的其他人进行相对比较来更好地看待自己的个人失败，我们表明，最大化地增加了消费者分享关于购买不满意的良好口碑的倾向，以鼓励其他人做出同样的错误选择，因为他们试图提高人们对自己不满意的结果的感知相对购买力和购买后的感觉。我们进一步表明，与心理上相近的人（相对于远处的）分享时，消费者尤其表现出这种行为，因为与亲密的人进行比较与相对地位尤其相关。最后，我们考虑了这种行为的下游后果，发现当消费者成功说服亲密的他人做出相同的错误决定时，他们对自己的结果会感觉更好，但同时也会背负着内their感，这会损害他们的整体幸福感。