An Empirical Test of a Theoretical Model of Surprise in Marketing

The purpose of this research was to construct and empirically test a theoretical
model of surprise and its impact on consumer affect and behavior. First the literature
on the emotion of surprise was reviewed with particular emphasis on
classification and process models of surprise. A theoretical model of surprise was
constructed. A new concept called motivated meaning integration (MMI) was proposed.
MMI takes place in a setting that includes the interaction of the appraisal process with
factors such as environmental uncertainty and consumers’ individual differences. These
interactions impact outcomes such as consumer affect and buying behavior.
Ten hypotheses were derived from the theoretical model and empirically tested
using several pretests and two main studies. The present research designed and evaluated
several surprise manipulations and MMI manipulation checks to effectively test the
proposed relationships. Participants were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk
(Mturk). Although many of the hypotheses were not supported, some important ones were.
The results provide some support that a consumer’s sense of personal control interacts
with MMI to impact a consumer’s likelihood of choosing unknown or mystery products (
e.g. products in a known category such as beauty products but the actual products are
selected by the company). Specifically, consumers who experienced a low sense of
personal control (compared to a high sense personal control) were more likely to
choose mystery products (vs. objectively similar known products) after they encountered
surprise with mystery (vs. with known) elements. The results also provided some
support that productivity orientation interacts with surprise appraisal to impact consumer
affect. Particularly, consumers with high productivity orientation (vs. low) were more
likely to experience higher positive affect after encountering surprise with mystery (vs.
with known) elements.
The primary implication for theory involves refining the conceptualization of
surprise appraisal, especially fast MMI, and adopting adequate measure for testing it.
The most relevant implication for marketing management is to offer products
with mystery elements because consumers are more likely to choose additional
mystery products. If this dissertation stimulates others to pursue research on surprise
theory in marketing, my efforts to continue developing scientific theory will be worth it.