A Complete Consumer Journey: Tracking Motivation in the Marketplace

Traditional models of shopper motivation assume that a consumer arrives at a store with a particular goal in mind and shops according to that goal. As a result, the majority of studies on in-store decision making have treated shopper motivation as a stable trip-level variable measured either before or after a shopping trip (Kaltcheva and Weitz 2006). In contrast, consumer behavior studies demonstrate that examining motivation and choice through a series of actions and across multiple time points helps to uncover the inherent dynamics of such behavior (Dhar et al. 2007; Khan and Dhar 2006). Studying in-store behavior in a continuous manner from the beginning to the end, therefore, is imperative to understanding consumer motivation in the marketplace. In this research, we capture one facet of consumer motivation in the marketplace—the amount of time shoppers spend between product choices within a shopping trip. We refer to this measure as inter-choice time. A field study and two online shopping experiments contribute to the measurement and understanding of consumer motivation in the marketplace. First, we advance prior literature on shopper motivation by measuring consumers’ in-store behavior in a continuous manner. Second, we add to growing research that uses shopper-tracking technology by drawing attention to an antecedent of in-store behavior—pre-trip planning—and capturing its divergent impact on consumers’ motivation over the course of their shopping trips. Third, our findings add to the dialogue that consumer motivation can follow a linear trend (Kivetz, Urminsky, and Zheng 2006) or a curvilinear trend (Bonezzi, Brendl, and De Angelis 2011). We show that pre-trip planning determines whether a curvilinear motivational pattern emerges as a consumer progresses from one product choice to another in the store.