Focusing on others before you shop: exposure to Facebook promotes conventional product configurations

Christian Hildebrand () and Tobias Schlager ()
Additional contact information
Christian Hildebrand: University of Geneva
Tobias Schlager: University of Lausanne

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 2019, vol. 47, issue 2, No 7, 307 pages

Abstract: Abstract Consumers’ use of social media websites can serve fundamentally different motives, from merely sharing entertaining content, filling up spare time, to observing what friends are doing on social media. The current work examines the downstream consequences of such social media use on consumers’ subsequent product choices. Specifically, this work explores how exposure to Facebook compared to other major social media websites such as Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn enhances consumers’ focus on others and the consequences of such temporary shifts in focus on consumers’ subsequent preference for specific options. A large-scale field study and a series of experiments provide evidence that exposure to Facebook prior to a product configuration task enhances consumers’ tendency to upgrade conventional as opposed to unconventional options, and we show that this effect is driven by a greater focus on others followed by a fear of negative evaluation from their peers. We show that this effect can be reversed if consumers believe that only a minority prefers a conventional target option. These findings provide novel insight into the role of pre-shopping factors in consumers’ path-to-purchase, context effects that can trigger more conventional choices, and the conceptualization of consumer journeys as a sequence of events—rather than isolated ones—which can alter consumer preference in subsequent product configuration tasks.

Keywords: Consumer journey; Path-to-purchase; Facebook; Social media; Field study; Product customization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11747-018-0599-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:joamsc:v:47:y:2019:i:2:d:10.1007_s11747-018-0599-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... gement/journal/11747

DOI: 10.1007/s11747-018-0599-0

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science is currently edited by John Hulland, Anne Hoekman and Mark Houston

More articles in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().