The Emotion of Interest and its Relevance to Consumer Psychology and Behaviour

Consumers are known to show a paradoxical tendency to favour both familiar and novel marketing stimuli such as products and advertisements. However, an explanation for this paradox has yet to be proposed. This provides immense challenges for marketing practices that conventionally strive to build fa...

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Main Authors: Sung, Billy, Phau, Ian, Vanman, E., Hartley, N.
Format: Journal Article
Published: Elsevier 2016
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/14878
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author Sung, Billy
Phau, Ian
Vanman, E.
Hartley, N.
author_facet Sung, Billy
Phau, Ian
Vanman, E.
Hartley, N.
author_sort Sung, Billy
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description Consumers are known to show a paradoxical tendency to favour both familiar and novel marketing stimuli such as products and advertisements. However, an explanation for this paradox has yet to be proposed. This provides immense challenges for marketing practices that conventionally strive to build familiarity (e.g. building awareness, recognition, recall, and customer relationships). Using the emotion differentiation framework, this theoretical paper shows that this paradox is a result of two distinct emotions – liking and interest. Specifically, consumers like familiarity but are interested in novelty. This paper offers six empirical propositions to: (1) differentiate interest from liking; (2) show that liking motivates consumers to favour familiarity whereas interest motivates consumers to prefer novelty; (3) demonstrate that interest accounts for previously explained boundary conditions of the familiarity–liking effect; and (4) provide insights to explain previous conflicting findings in the field of innovation, advertising, and consumer psychology research.
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spelling curtin-20.500.11937-148782020-07-24T06:53:11Z The Emotion of Interest and its Relevance to Consumer Psychology and Behaviour Sung, Billy Phau, Ian Vanman, E. Hartley, N. Consumers are known to show a paradoxical tendency to favour both familiar and novel marketing stimuli such as products and advertisements. However, an explanation for this paradox has yet to be proposed. This provides immense challenges for marketing practices that conventionally strive to build familiarity (e.g. building awareness, recognition, recall, and customer relationships). Using the emotion differentiation framework, this theoretical paper shows that this paradox is a result of two distinct emotions – liking and interest. Specifically, consumers like familiarity but are interested in novelty. This paper offers six empirical propositions to: (1) differentiate interest from liking; (2) show that liking motivates consumers to favour familiarity whereas interest motivates consumers to prefer novelty; (3) demonstrate that interest accounts for previously explained boundary conditions of the familiarity–liking effect; and (4) provide insights to explain previous conflicting findings in the field of innovation, advertising, and consumer psychology research. 2016 Journal Article http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/14878 10.1016/j.ausmj.2016.11.005 Elsevier restricted
spellingShingle Sung, Billy
Phau, Ian
Vanman, E.
Hartley, N.
The Emotion of Interest and its Relevance to Consumer Psychology and Behaviour
title The Emotion of Interest and its Relevance to Consumer Psychology and Behaviour
title_full The Emotion of Interest and its Relevance to Consumer Psychology and Behaviour
title_fullStr The Emotion of Interest and its Relevance to Consumer Psychology and Behaviour
title_full_unstemmed The Emotion of Interest and its Relevance to Consumer Psychology and Behaviour
title_short The Emotion of Interest and its Relevance to Consumer Psychology and Behaviour
title_sort emotion of interest and its relevance to consumer psychology and behaviour
url http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/14878