摘要
社会拥挤是近年来营销领域的一个研究热点,它指的是由于单位面积人口密度大而导致个体感到受约束的体验状态。目前,该主题的研究较为零散,同时国内的相关研究成果还比较少见。本文通过对国内外营销领域相关文献的梳理,在界定社会拥挤概念的基础上,回顾了社会拥挤对消费行为的消极和积极影响效应,分析了社会拥挤效应的影响因素,并从消费者的情绪反应和认知加工两个层面梳理了社会拥挤对消费行为产生影响的理论机制,最后指出了未来可能的研究方向。
Social crowding becomes a new research topic in consumer behavior domain in recent years. It is defined as the experience state caused by the large population density per unit area. At present, the research on this topic is fragmental, and the domestic research in the lens of consumer behavior is relatively rare. Therefore, it is necessary to systematically sort out relevant research. This paper firstly introduces the concept of social crowding and distinguishes the terms of density, perceived density and physical proximity. It also demonstrates the multiple measurements and manipulations of social crowding to further clarify the definition of social crowding. Then it describes the research findings from the negative and positive sides in detail. Specifically, social crowding can induce negative emotion, lead to withdraw behavior, and influence the status inference. In Contrast, some research provides empirical evidence that social crowding increases the satisfaction of experience consumption,such as consumption in the restaurant and in the bar. In addition, social crowding facilitates compensatory consumption. For example, it leads consumers to become more attached to brands as an alternative way of maintaining their basic need for belongingness. Meanwhile, this paper discusses the moderator factors of social crowding, including the view of the characteristic of the crowding component per se and the relationship between the components. For the characteristic of the crowding component, culture, gender, personality and product attributions have an impact on perceiving crowding,and as a result leading to different behaviors. The relationships between the crowding components, such as the individuals in crowding are in-group or out-group, acquaintance or strangers, also affect consumer behavior, which can be explained by the social identity theory. Moreover, this paper analyzes the mechanism of social crowding on consumer behavior from the perspective of consumers’ emotional response and cognitive processing. Based on the dual-processing model, an automatic affective process is a domain in the crowding environment, which influences consumer behavior. In view of the cognitive processing of social crowding on consumer behavior, this paper mainly discusses the control theory to explain why consumers do compensatory consumption to recover their sense of control, and the regulation theory to explain why consumers tend to be conservative in the crowding environment. In the end, it demonstrates the future research outlook in order to advance the concerns and discussion of social crowding research in domestic academia. It is divided into the implication of social crowding on marketing and the future research directions. Marketing managements should make good use of the strengths and avoid the weaknesses of social crowding. For the future research, researchers can further explore the subset of social crowding, such as well-organized or disordered social crowding, long-term or short-term social crowding. What’s more, we should explore stronger explanations for some contradictory existing findings. Finally, further research can expand the crowding background to other domains, such as health care, tourism, charitable giving, sports events, and so on. In sum, this paper reviews the influence and mechanism of social crowding on consumer behavior and points out the possible directions for further research.
作者
沈曼琼
王海忠
胡桂梅
Shen Manqiong;Wang Haizhong;Hu Guimei(Sun Yat-sen Business School,Sun Yat-sen University,Guangzhou 510275,China)
出处
《外国经济与管理》
CSSCI
北大核心
2019年第3期85-97,110,共14页
Foreign Economics & Management
基金
国家自然科学基金重点项目(71832015)
国家自然科学基金面上项目(71572207)
关键词
社会拥挤
社会密度
消费行为
social crowding
social density
consumer behavior
