Feeling Versus Reasoning. The Significant Interaction Between Salespeople's Influence Tactics and Customers' Shopping Goals

Conference Proceedings

Feeling Versus Reasoning. The Significant Interaction Between Salespeople’s Influence Tactics and Customers’ Shopping Goals

Year

2018

Authors

Abstract

An important question to retailers is which sales tactics should be used with customers under various shopping conditions, for example, different purchasing goals. Despite this interest, the literature remains largely silent in providing theoretical guidance on this issue (McFarland et al. 2006; Evans et al. 2012). To begin to address this research gap, we develop a theoretical framework on the interaction between sales influence tactics, the mechanism utilized by salespeople to persuade customers (Brown 1990; Spiro and Perreault 1979), and customer shopping goal specificity (e.g., “just looking around” or shopping for something specific). We use construal level theory (CLT) in guiding our framework. Using CLT, we link the level of abstractness or concreteness of thoughts due to different shopping goal specificity levels. Based on this, we predict that emotional influence tactics work best when customers have a non-specific goal and rational influence tactics work best with specific goals.

KIM, Y. et MCFARLAND, R. (2018). Feeling Versus Reasoning. The Significant Interaction Between Salespeople’s Influence Tactics and Customers’ Shopping Goals. Dans: 2018 AMA Summer Academic Conference Proceedings. Big Ideas and New Methods in Marketing. American Marketing Association (AMA).