The Influence of Consumers' Thinking Styles on Their Responses to Marketing Offers: The Moderating Role of Relationship Quality and the Types of Marketing Offers

The Influence of Consumers' Thinking Styles on Their Responses to Marketing Offers: The Moderating Role of Relationship Quality and the Types of Marketing Offers

This research proposes that consumers' thinking styles influences the evaluations of marketing offers because consumers with holistic thinking styles are better able to pay attention to relational-contextual information associated with the offers while consumers with analytic thinking styles tend to ignore it. In addition, this research predicts that consumers' relationship will moderate the effect of consumers' thinking styles on the evaluations of marketing offers. The results from a lab experiment support the existence of these differences due to consumers' thinking styles. Moreover, the findings indicate that among those with low relationship quality with firms, holistic thinkers tend to evaluate their marketing offers more favorably than analytic thinkers. However, among those with high relationship quality, there was no significant difference between holistic and analytic thinkers' evaluations.