Self-Regulation of Consumers

The countless reasons people have or give for doing the things they do can be divided into two groups: To make something good happen, or to prevent something bad from happening. This is the basic idea behind regulatory focus theory. This distinction has far-reaching implications. For example, the joy of successfully achieving something we have long hoped for feels very different from the relief of successfully avoiding something we have feared.
The same applies to us as consumers. We buy things out of hope, but also out of fear or guilt. For example, when you buy health insurance, an alarm system, or vitamin pills, you buy them to get rid of your worries, not to look forward to the great time you will have with them. This is also reflected in advertising. Advertisements may promise you things like attractiveness and happiness, but they may also subtly threaten you and then offer you the product as a way around that threat. There are products that can only be advertised in a certain way. The ones mentioned above can hardly be advertised by mere promises, because they are not bought out of hope. On the other hand, a sports car, a fiction book, or a jar of mustard, for example, are not bought in order to get rid of some worry, but in expectation of something nice. This is also the way they are advertised.

In this area of research, we look at how exactly consumers are influenced by their ideas of how things should be and how they should not be. We study what kind of outcomes, positive or negative, people focus on. We then examine how this affects emotions, memory, attention, attitudes, and ultimately behavior. The methods we use are mainly those of contemporary social cognition research: The studies are strictly empirical and mostly experimental. We employ questionnaires, linguistic analysis, and response time measures to assess the attitudes and emotions our subjects experience during standardized procedures and situations.  In addition to Regulatory Focus Theory, which is a central model for our research, our research often touches on other topics in personality, development, cognition, and affectivity. Our ultimate goal is to deepen the understanding of how consumers make decisions.

Read more about our research findings in this area:

Florack, A., Friese, M. & Scarabis, M. (2010). Regulatory focus and reliance on implicit preferences in consumption contexts. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 20(2), 193–204. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2010.02.001

Florack, A. & Hartmann, J. (2007). Regulatory focus and investment decisions in small groups. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43(4), 626–632. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2006.05.005

Florack, A., Keller, J., & Palcu, J. (2013). Regulatory focus in economic contexts. Journal of Economic Psychology, 38, 127–137. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2013.06.001

Florack, A., Ineichen, S., & Bieri, R (2009). The impact of regulatory focus on two-sided advertising. Social Cognition, 27(1), 37–56. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2009.27.1.37

Friese, M., Engeler, M., & Florack, A. (2015). Self-perceived successful weight regulators are less affected by self-regulatory depletion in the domain of eating behavior. Eating Behavior, 16, 5–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eatbeh.2014.10.011

Söllner, M., Dürnberger, M., Keller, J., & Florack, A. (2022). The impact of age stereotypes on well-being: Strategies of selection, optimization, and compensation as mediator and regulatory focus as moderator: Findings from a cross-sectional and a longitudinal study. Journal of Happiness Studies, 23, 635–665. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-021-00417-x