Keep up or Give up Halfway? A Literature Review and Prospects of Consumer Perceived Goal Progress

Abstract

With the development of mobile internet and big data, various health APPs and smart wearable products are becoming more popular during recent years. Consumers are more likely to monitor their learning, exercise, health and other goals by smart technology for perceiving the progress of their goals. Consumers can be triggered by different perceived goal progress to further adjust their consumption behaviors. Therefore, our research explores how perceived goal progress influences consumer reactions, which can provide important managerial implications for enterprises.Perceived goal progress refers to the perception of the goal progress that consumers struggle to approach the goal for reducing the distance with their ideal state. Previous research has put forward the conception and the manipulation methods of perceived goal progress. However, few studies have unified the conception of perceived goal progress and summarized its manipulation methods. Besides, researchers have explored perceived goal progress from different perspectives and found that it can affect consumers’ attitudes, motivations and behaviors, but these effects have not been systematically and completely reviewed. Moreover, the relationships among consumer attitudes, motivations and behaviors caused by perceived goal progress have little been deeply studied. Finally, the related theories about perceived goal progress have only been mentioned in the hypothesis development sections, but not been systematically summarized.This article systematically reviews some domestic and foreign literatures about perceived goal progress to integrate them. Firstly, it clarifies the conception of perceived goal progress and summarizes four types of its manipulation methods. In addition, the understanding of perceived goal progress is deepened from the construction perspectives of level and framework. Secondly, it makes clear the effects of perceived goal progress on consumer reactions from three aspects: consumer attitude（consumer perception, consumer loyalty, consumer evaluation and satisfaction）, consumer motivation（single-goal situations, multi-goal situations）, and consumer behavior（consumer choice, consumer purchase intention / behavior）. Consequently, it develops the research framework about how perceived goal progress influences consumer reactions. Finally, it introduces some theories about perceived goal progress and uses them to explain the principles that perceived goal progress triggers consumer reactions. Furthermore, it discusses four important theories of perceived goal progress from three aspects: the conflicts between theories, the causes of motivations, the similarities and differences of objects.Our study makes several contributions to the literature: First of all, it focuses on the research of perceived goal progress in the field of consumer reactions, and clarifies the concept and manipulation of perceived goal progress. Second, from the perspective of consumer attitude, motivation and behavior, it integrates the relatively scattered literature with different research perspectives, summarizes and refines the research trends of perceived goal progress in the field of consumption, and puts forward the future research direction, so as to promote scholars’ in-depth discussion on this topic. Third, by exploring the impact mechanism of perceived goal progress on consumer reactions, it can help enterprises to realize the importance of perceived goal progress, and make it more effective for enterprises to design and manage goal progress.