An excuse for more ice cream

Purchase motivation can shift if we’re shopping for pleasure

A little shopping spree can be fun: idling through aisle after aisle of goodies, zeroing in on the pick worthy of your hard-earned cash. Unless you’re shopping because you have to—a serviceable stapler or functional filing cabinet. In that case, you want to quit browsing and get it done. A new Questrom study on choice and purchase motivation finds that when customers are spurred by pleasure, they want plenty of options, but that those hunting for a utilitarian object want a narrower assortment.

“For ice cream? The more flavors the better,” says Sarah C. Whitley (PhD’18), who coauthored the study, published in the April 2018 Journal of Consumer Research. But no one wants to be confronted with 35 types of trash bag.

Whitley, along with Remi Trudel, an associate professor of marketing, and Didem Kurt, an assistant professor of marketing, conducted a series of experiments to figure out shoppers’ thought processes. They asked participants to consider similar purchases with different motivations: buying a documentary for fun or for a class assignment, choosing a paint color for a work car or for a personal one. Then, they asked subjects how many options they wanted to see before making a decision. The researchers concluded that people want more choices when buying for pleasure, in part because they want to make sure their decision reflects their individuality.

“For product categories where people feel that they have unique preferences, it may be worth it to have more variety,” says Whitley, an assistant professor of marketing at Oklahoma State University. “It may be fine to reduce the number of offered products where this is not the case.”