Incorporating attitudes into a new framework for impulse buying behavior

Abstract

Given that consumers often make spontaneous purchases without conscious deliberation, it is not surprising that researchers have been investigating impulse buying for over 65 years. The current approach is to explore the antecedents of impulse buying behavior, and although this approach has been extremely fruitful, it is short of being complete in that it does not answer many important theoretical issues. We believe these theoretical issues can be resolved by considering the insights of attitude models that explicate the contributions of implicit and explicit attitudes to consumer behavior. Consequently, we propose a new framework for impulse buying that takes attitudes into consideration. Based on this framework, I ran four experiments testing the role of affect in impulse buying behavior. Experiment 1 examined the role of positive affect, with Experiment 1A.