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This article aims to focus on product-featuring advertising targeted to stock investors – that is, ads that provide investors with impressions about the company’s products, over and above financial information. The purpose is to explicate and test the psychological mechanisms by which such ads may exert influence on investors.

An experiment is conducted with a representative sample of real investors, to test the effect and explore the underlying mechanisms. Two additional laboratory experiments reveal moderating factors of this effect.

The results show that highlighting the company’s product features in an investor ad increases investors’ interest in investing in the company’s stock, by enhancing investors’ subjective evaluations of the company’s products. This effect emerges independent of factors related to preexisting brand perceptions (e.g. brand recognizability and likeability) and is mediated by dual causal channels: by increasing expectations about the company’s financial returns and by increasing affective attachment with the company’s products.

The findings identify and confirm different mechanisms of the effect of investor ads, but the relative magnitude of the effects is not generalizable.

The results provide corporate marketing, corporate communications and investor relations professionals insights into how investors may be attracted by product-featuring advertisements.

The study is the first to explicate the different channels of influence through which product-featuring ads may affect investors’ willingness to invest in companies.

This study aims to examine the interplay between focal and background goals in consumer financial decision-making and identify conditions that lead individuals to trade-off financial returns for background goals.

The current research reviews the relevant literature on consumer financial decision-making and goal systems theory to develop a set of hypotheses that is tested using three experiments.

The experiments show that individuals who have been subtly primed with self-expressive background goals, or experienced progress toward the focal goal of financial returns, accept lower financial returns for the opportunity to invest in stocks that allow for increased self-expression. Further, while subtly primed background goals exert a non-normative influence on investment decisions, explicit cues about an investment’s background goal-instrumentality create a backlash effect, and decrease individuals’ willingness to trade-off financial returns.

Future research could confirm the robustness of the findings of the present research by using different priming tasks and alternative ways of making the background goal explicit to individuals.

To achieve greater attraction among individual investors, it helps to frame a financial product or stock in communications materials in a way that sends subtle signals with which investors can identify. Such signals could include stressing the product/company’s home country (addressing individuals’ patriotism) or a particular product domain (addressing individual investors’ desire for interesting/exciting current/future products).

While previous research suggests that investment choices may be influenced by self-expressive motivations, to date, it remains unclear whether and when individual investors are actually willing to trade-off the focal goal of maximizing financial returns for the opportunity to satisfy alternative background goals.

The purpose of this study is to test the impact of time and price sensitivity on consumer satisfaction and purchase intention on online-to-offline (O2O) takeout platforms and explore the moderating effect of purchase preference on time sensitivity and satisfaction, as well as price sensitivity and satisfaction, in order to guide market pricing.

A structural equation model (SEM) of customer purchase intention was constructed, and the relationships between the variables (time sensitivity, price sensitivity, satisfaction and purchase intention) were examined. The completed questionnaires of 349 respondents were collected from the Questionnaire Star platform in China. The research model and hypotheses were then tested. Analytic hierarchy procedure was used to determine the moderating effect of purchase preference. Finally, the study proposes a pricing strategy for customer-active selective services.

Satisfaction positively influences purchase intention, and price sensitivity significantly increases satisfaction and further increases purchase intention; however, time sensitivity negatively affects satisfaction. Specifically, purchase preference has strongly moderated the relationship between time, price sensitivity and satisfaction. In addition, the findings show that when purchase preference is high, the effect of price sensitivity on satisfaction is stronger, suggesting the importance of purchase preference in strengthening purchase intentions. The research work recommends a pricing strategy involving value-added pricing primarily for time-sensitive customers, which can help build a high-end brand image and reduce price competition. Reduced pricing is mainly for price-sensitive customers, which is conducive to stimulating consumption within a specific time. This pricing strategy is important for adjusting market sensitivity and flexibility.

This research provides new ideas for related disciplines and guidance for the differentiated pricing and promotion of takeout platforms, as well as a theoretical basis for the diversified development of takeout platforms, improvement of personalized service quality and enhancement of customer stickiness. This study fills gaps in the existing literature on the moderating effect of purchase preference on time sensitivity and satisfaction and price sensitivity and satisfaction.