Exploring Dual Consumer Motivations: The Moderating Role of Hedonic Shopping Values in a Utilitarian Service Setting

Abstract

Previous research often divided motivation along the lines of it being either cognitive or affective driven, related to the benefits and values people derive from their consumption. However, people’s perceptions shift and change upon situational factors, and the strict dichotomy of catering to the needs of either a utilitarian or hedonic consumer may not provide a complete understanding of consumers’ purchase behaviour. The paper challenges the binary understanding utilitarian and hedonic consumption and explores how hedonic values can have an effect on consumers’ perceptions of the overall utility of a service.Younger generations in particular value constant variety and want to buy more than just a simple product, even in traditional utilitarian service settings, like a supermarket. To support supermarket chains this research investigates whether young consumer’s need for elements eliciting affective responses may have an effect of their overall evaluation of a functional service context. Based on the trend of intense European consolidation, the paper aims to build a European consumer profile of young consumes to provide transferable insights for cross-country optimisation. In order to conduct the following research, a quantitative research was conducted through the distribution of a survey. The answers of the respondents were used to analyse how utilitarian values in a supermarket setting affect the purchase intention of shoppers, and if the hedonic factors entertainment, exploration, value shopping and idea shopping have a moderating effect on this relationship. A total of 193 respondents, after cleaning, filled out the survey and were subject to our analysis. The results of the study were derived from analysing the data with a two-step SEM approach. The analysis concluded that two out of the five hypotheses could be supported, while for the remaining three there was insufficient evidence to support them. There are several reasons as to why this is the case, one of them being the relatively small sample size. Even though the results were rather weak, they still provide interesting insights and information that they can serve as a good starting point for further analyses.