Knowledgeable consumers are like “stalkers”: the effect of consumers’ previous knowledge on the amount of information sought in post-decision timespan

Resumo

Nowadays, consumers have more previous knowledge about products/services before making decisions. As they can easily access the internet, they often engage in showrooming or webrooming, which increase their knowledge. This might be a source of concerns because both, researchers and retailers, do not know all the effects of consumers’ previous knowledge on consumers’ behaviors. In this paper, we shed lights on one of these effects: the effect of consumers’ previous knowledge before making decisions on the amount of information sought in post-decision/purchase timespan. The information sought in this phase helps consumers to reaffirm their decisions, diminish back-out behaviors, and increase repurchase intentions. Previous literature argues that this sought occurs because of cognitive dissonance and feelings of regret or dissatisfaction (Shani & Zeelenberg, 2007). We present two studies (experimental and correlational studies) to show that this view is incomplete. Our findings suggest that consumers who have previous knowledge about a specific product will search great amounts of information about this product in post-decision/purchase phase. Besides, this main-effect is stronger (weaker) for consumers with high (low) maximizing tendencies. Finally, we show the main approaches used by consumers when they look up information in the last phase of their journey and an exploratory investigation which resulted in some insights about consumers’ main motivations to still search information during the post-purchase phase. Our research shows that consumers with considerable previous knowledge are like stalkers because they still search information about the purchased product: they browse online stores, talk to friends/relatives, read reviews.