A Review of Research Context of Consumer Confusion and Future Prospects

Abstract

Consumer confusion refers to uncertain and anxious state of mind in specific consumption environment, which mainly stems from some fuzzy factors, such as similarity production, overload information and ambiguous information, and can lead to judgment mistakes and suboptimal selection by consumers in information processing. Recently, the internet carrying a large amount of information has become the main channel of consumer information search, resulting in increasingly serious consumer confusion problem. Furthermore, confused consumers will show a series of psychological or behavior, which are not beneficial to enterprises, such as abandonment or postponement of purchase, the reduction in trust and satisfaction, negative word of mouth. Therefore, consumer confusion area has attracted more and more attention from foreign scholars in recent years. Through a literature review, this paper firstly elaborates the conceptual connotation and structural dimensions of consumer confusion, and then summarizes antecedents & consequences of consumer confusion. And then on the basis of existing empirical conclusions, it constructs an integrated model of consumer confusion, and finally raises directions in future consumer confusion research, to attract attention to consumer confusion research from domestic scholars and provide some certain marketing enlightenment for enterprise practioners.