Title: The impact of social Support on consumer behavior

Speaker: Lili Wang, Post-doc, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University

Time: 1:30-3:00pm, Dec. 9, 2011

Location: Room 216, New Building of GSM, Peking University

Abstract:

Since the mid-1970s, research focus on the role of social support as a coping resource in daily life has increased. There are more than 7 millions research books on social support. However, majority of these researches were conducted by scholars from medicine school and psychology department. Few studies were conducted in marketing field to check whether social support influence consumer behavior.

On the one hand, traditional research on social support found that social support played as coping resources to help individuals to adjust their health related behavior when they were under stressful situations. In the marketing field, a lot of research argued that loss of control to a large extent should be attributed to limited resources. So we were thinking whether social support as a kind of resources could enhance individuals’ self control. Firstly, we focused on a special case of self-control-risk-taking. We found that social support indeed influenced individuals’ risk-taking behavior. Then we extended our research to a broader self-control problem-self-regulation depletion effect. We tried to figure out whether social support could buffer/undo self-regulation depletion effects. Bunches of studies would show the moderators, mediators of the impact of social support on risk-taking and interesting findings for the unbelievable function of social support on self-regulation would be displayed.

On the other hand, another streams research on social support argued that social support not only was a coping resources, but also could increase individuals’ self-esteem, self-worth. In 2011, Schachar, Erdem, Cutright and Fitzsimons found that individuals were less likely to choose branded products when religion was salient than it was not. They theorized that brands and religiosity may serve as substitutes for one another because both allow individuals to express their feeling of self worth. So we were interested in whether social support would influence individuals brand choice just same as religiosity. Multiple studies would showed that social support indeed influenced individuals’ brand choice and process underlying of this impact would be explored.

Taken together, in today’s talk, I will talk three topics: 1) social support and risk-taking; 2) social support and self-regulation; and 3) social support and brand reliance. Future research directions will be discussed during talk. Any commons and suggestion would be warmly welcomed.

Welcome to attend!