Chapter 10: Post-Decision Processes

Post-Decision Dissonance and Regret

Consumers are not always confident with their purchase decisions and may feel uncertain about whether they made the correct choice or regret it later. Post-decision dissonance is a feeling of discomfort about whether or not the correct decision was made, and post-decision regret is the negative feeling that one should have made another purchase than one actually did. Now when we think of Nike, it may be easy to assume all consumers are happy with their purchases since they are a highly regarded brand with amazing athletic gear. Wrong. Consumers still have their moments of dissonance and regret, post-purchase. With Nike, they are able to save these consumers by providing a 30-day wear test, as stated on their website, and also provide the consumer with access to the Nike Plus rewards program, which offers access to Nike experts for equipment recommendations and personalized exercise regimens. 

Learning from Consumer Experience

There are four factors that affect consumers' learning from experience: motivation, prior knowledge, the ambiguity of the information environment/lack of opportunity, and processing biases. 

In terms of motivation, consumers are motivated to process information, generate hypotheses, and then seek out information to test them. From a marketers standpoint, they may post video snippets of product and service demonstrations. For Nike, they demonstrate this in their video advertisements which show athletes working out and competing in their gear, which is a great way to show the product in use. 

A consumers' prior knowledge affects the extent to which they learn from experience, for example, consumers who have well-defined beliefs and expectations are less likely to form new hypotheses. In this case, consumers' prior knowledge was high. If their prior knowledge was low, then consumers lack the skills to develop hypotheses to guide their learning process. 

When a situation does not allow the opportunity to learn from experience and a consumer can not come up with a hypothesis, then there is ambiguity of information. Ambiguity of information is when there is not enough information from the consumption experience to confirm or disprove one's hypotheses. Since consumers cannot easily disprove information by experiencing the product again, they perceive the product as being consistent with their prior expectations.

And last, processing biases. Overconfidence and confirmation bias are major threats to the learning process, especially when evidence is ambiguous. These biases make consumers avoid negative and diagnostic information, which can have a strong impact on consumer learning.