There is more to planned purchases than knowing what you want: Dynamic planning and learning in a repeated multi-store price search task

As consumers, our lives are full of planning. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of consumer planning, how planning performance improves with experience, and the possible interventions that may help people form better shopping strategies have important implications for marketers, policy makers, and consumers. Despite the importance of this topic, there is a scarcity of research on consumer planning in marketing. Most research has focused on planned vs. unplanned purchases and defines planned purchases strictly as those items that were fully specified before entering the store (e.g., on a shopping list). These studies have not examined the psychology of planning itself and ignored the fact that an unplanned purchase made in the store can be the result of a well developed plan that intentionally stopped short of full specification. In the current research, planning is defined as coming up with a scheme or procedures for the accomplishment of an objective before the commencement of the task. We focus on repeated multi-store price search behavior because it provides an ideal framework to study planning from the perspective of human information-processing. We show in four simulated shopping experiments that consumers often fail to plan optimally and do not appreciate the value of early learning. Fortunately, after obtaining relevant experience consumers are able to increase their awareness to track and keep important information in working memory for the successful plan execution. As a result, they transferred their planning to shopping in a different situation or product category successfully. Finally, having consumers explicitly verbalize their plan has mixed effects on their performance depending on what stage of this repeated shopping process consumers are asked to focus on. On the one hand, explicit planning for immediate shopping trips at a deep level helps people perform better by making them focus on strategy-oriented metacognitive processes. On the other hand, having people plan for their final shopping habits was not helpful and inhibits their initial learning. Implications of our results as well as future research directions are discussed at the end