Exploring the affective factors encouraging engagement with blind boxes consumption

Abstract

The emergence of blind boxes has promoted the development of China's toy industry. The trend of blind boxes led by POP MART has made other toy brands follow the direction of releasing art toys in the form of blind boxes, and even other industries have followed the blind box surprise marketing method. This study conducted semi-structured interviews with blind box players and industry experts to investigate affective factors influencing consumers' purchasing blind boxes. The study found that consumers tend to make emotion-oriented decisions in the blind box decision-making process, mainly affected by affective motivation and emotion. Emotional influence can also be divided into integral emotion and incidental emotion. In addition, this study also found that the affective factors of first-time purchase and repeated purchase were different. There is a connection between Affective motivation and Integral/Incidental Emotion, which influences each other and promotes the consumer's purchase decision-making process. This research fills in the gaps in the classification and interaction of purchase motivation and emotional factors of surprise products in the decision-making process. It proposes a theoretical model for future research. At the same time, the consumer sentiment factors derived from the study are also beneficial to marketers to seek insight into consumers' psychological needs and conducive to the innovative application of blind box marketing in other industries.