2 Promotion and Prevention in Consumer Decision Making 1 The State of the Art and Theoretical Propositions

Our understanding of consumer decision making has historically been dominated by information-processing theory and, more recently, by behavioral decision research. These two perspectives have undeniably offered important insights about the cognitive processes underlying consumers’ decisions. However, there is more to consumer decision making than computer-like mental processes, judgment heuristics, and preference construction. Clearly missing from these perspectives is the motivational dimension of consumer decision making. Consumers’ decisions—which brand to purchase, where to go on vacation, or how to decorate the house—do not take place in a motivational vacuum. These decisions take place in the context of goals that consumers are pursuing, needs that they seek to fulfill, and drives that color their thoughts. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how regulatory focus theory (Higgins 1997, 1998, 2002)—a theory of motivation and self-regulation that has been rapidly gaining prominence in consumer research (e.g., Aaker and Lee 2001; Briley and Wyer 2002; Pham and Avnet 2004; Zhou and Pham 2004)—can be drawn upon to explain a variety of consumer decision making phenomena. We briefly review the major tenets of the theory, which proposes a fundamental distinction between two modes of self-