Abstract
Parenting motivation, the inspiration and drive to take care of one's children, is a powerful instinct for facilitating human reproduction. In a set of hypotheses, the authors address how, why, and among whom parenting motivation affects a pervasive decision-making tendency, namely, variety seeking. Six studies, including a large-scale panel data study and five online and lab studies, show that, when shopping, parenting motivation spurs feelings of time crunch that result in less variety seeking among consumers. The effect is diminished when time-saving parenting support exists (which reduces feelings of time crunch in parenting), when consumers are led to believe that they have sufficient time available for shopping, and when they do not have much loyalty to any brand offered in the choice set and thus cannot save time by simply choosing the top-of-mind product option. The current research thus contributes to the growing literature on how parenting motivation affects consumer decision making. In addition, it augments the literature on variety seeking by identifying an important factor that can influence it.
Many companies treat parent consumers as an important market segment, given the considerable number of consumers in parental roles and the centrality of parenthood in their lives. U.S. parents had approximately 3.79 million babies in 2018 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2020), and in 2019, nearly 40% of U.S. households had children under 18 years (Statista 2019). Across countries and cultures, parents spend on average up to 150 minutes every day with their children, in addition to time spent on other parenting-related activities (Sani and Treas 2016). Parents are targeted buyers of a wide array of parenting-related products, ranging from diapers to education services, as well as other mundane products (Durante et al. 2015; Jung and Mittal 2021; Liu, Dallas, and Fitzsimons 2019; Mukhopadhyay and Yeung 2010). Thus, marketing cues appealing to parents and portraying parenting activities are common in the marketplace. The demanding nature of parenting leads many parents to experience feelings of time crunch, or the perception of time shortage or time deficit (Szollos 2009), which is often reflected in the ads that target them. For example, Fiat 500L commercials feature a father and mother making jokes about their busy lives, filled with parenting chores, and the Coca-Cola Life commercial “Parenting” shows parents engaging in typical childcare activities with the drink at their side. Interestingly, ads and commercials targeting parents can also trigger thoughts about parenting even among consumers who are not parents (Li, Haws, and Griskevicius 2019). Given the immense size of the parent marketing segment and the ubiquity of parenting-related marketing cues, it is crucial to understand how parenthood, or even just the thought of it, may influence consumer behavior.
The parental role or thoughts about it can lead to parenting motivation—a set of affective and cognitive mechanisms aimed at taking care of the young (Buckels et al. 2015; Griskevicius and Kenrick 2013; Kenrick et al. 2010). Entering into a parental role has been shown to result in profound psychological change (Buckels et al. 2015; Eibach and Mock 2011), and only recently has marketing research begun to explore the implications of this significant life-role transition on consumption behavior (Li, Haws, and Griskevicius 2019; Li and Yan 2021; Shin and Mattila 2021; Su, Monga, and Jiang 2021). Extending this line of research, the current work shows a novel effect of parenting motivation: it makes people feel time-crunched and subsequently decreases variety-seeking behavior within a given product category, which refers to consumers’ tendency to diversify their consumption choices (Haws and Redden 2013; Haws et al. 2017; Huang and Wyer 2015; McAlister 1982; McAlister and Pessemier 1982; Mead, Hardesty, and Scott 2019; Menon and Kahn 1995; Ratner, Kahn, and Kahneman 1999; Zhu and Ratner 2015).
The current research contributes to the literature on variety seeking by identifying a novel factor that can influence it. Consumers’ tendency to include variety in their choices can be affected by various factors, such as an inherent need for stimulation (Steenkamp and Baumgartner 1992), activation of cognitive concepts related to variety (Maimaran and Wheeler 2008; Shen and Wyer 2010), and the shopping environment (Levav and Zhu 2009; Ratner and Kahn 2002). However, little research has studied whether the social roles of consumers can also affect variety seeking (for exceptions, see Etkin [2016] and McAlister and Pessemier [1982], which investigate variety-seeking behavior for romantic partners or family members). The present research adds to this body of literature by showing that a socially defined role, namely that of a parent, and thoughts about it can affect variety-seeking behavior.
Our findings provide novel and seemingly nonintuitive knowledge to marketing practitioners. We hired Qualtrics Research Services to conduct a pilot study and collected responses from 51 North American consumer marketing managers (Mage = 44.51 years, 35 male), all of whom indicated that they think parents are an important consumer group and acknowledged variety seeking as an essential factor to consider in designing a marketing mix for this consumer group. These marketing practitioners intuited that parents would be likely to seek variety in their product choices (i.e., “Do you think parents will be more or less variety seeking in their product choices, compared with those who are not parents?”; 1 = “much less variety seeking,” and 7 = “much more variety seeking”; M = 5.59, SD = 1.55; difference from scale midpoint of 4: t(50) = 7.31, p < .001, Cohen's d = 1.02). By contrast, we predict and show that parenting motivation decreases variety seeking. Furthermore, we observed similar effects even for nonparent consumers who were merely prompted to think about parenting. Such findings thus apply to the effective management of consumers’ variety seeking when a company's product category or marketing communication is likely to evoke thoughts about parenting.
This article is organized as follows. We first review the literature and develop our predictions about parenting motivation decreasing variety-seeking behavior due to feelings of time crunch. We report the results of six studies conducted to test our hypotheses, including a panel data study that examines the impact of parenthood on consumers’ actual choice of variety, and five online and lab experiments that involve both hypothetical and real choices. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings.
Theoretical Background
Parenting Motivation and Time Crunch
Parenthood is a significant life milestone that influences people's behaviors in profound ways. The impacts of becoming a parent often stem from the parental-care motivational system, a set of affective and cognitive mechanisms associated with caretaking of the young (Buckels et al. 2015; Griskevicius and Kenrick 2013; Kenrick et al. 2010). For example, mothers typically focus more on fulfilling children's immediate needs, whereas fathers typically focus more on acquiring resources to meet children's future needs; therefore, parenting motivation leads women to become more present-focused and men more future-focused in intertemporal decisions (Li, Haws, and Griskevicius 2019). The parental-care motivational system has been referred to as “the most powerful instinct” (McDougall 1908, p. 68) that has evolved for parental care of offspring to facilitate reproduction (Buckels et al. 2015), and it predisposes people to think in a parental role. Notably, research indicates that parenting motivation can potentially be activated in all human adults, regardless of their parental status (Gilead and Liberman 2014). For example, parenting motivation can be induced even among nonparents with stimuli evoking cognitions and actions related to parenting and caregiving, including kindchenschema, or infantile physical features (Li, Haws, and Griskevicius 2019); infant voice messages (Shin and Mattila 2021); and parenting activity–related product images (Li and Gong 2018). Prior research indicates that parenting motivation can have important implications for people's caregiving and interpersonal relationships (Shin and Mattila 2021), risk attitudes (Kerry and Murray 2019), future versus present focus (Li, Haws, and Griskevicius 2019), and money-saving motives (Canova, Rattazzi, and Webley 2005), which further influence behavior in various domains, such as social perceptions (Eibach and Mock 2011), moral judgments (Buckels et al. 2015), financial planning (Lee, Hanna, and Siregar 1997), and even political attitudes (Kerry and Murray 2018) (see Table 1 for a literature summary of the measurements, psychological mechanisms, and consequences of parenting motivation). However, few extant studies explore the influence of parenting motivation on consumer behavior (for an exception, see Li, Haws, and Griskevicius 2019); to fill this research gap, our study identifies feelings of time crunch as an underlying psychological mechanism activated by parenting motivation that has implications for a significant consumer decision-making tendency—that is, variety seeking.
Parenting Motivation: Summary of Empirical Findings.
Among all the challenges that parenthood brings, one of the most prominent is increased time demands. Parents need to spend time on activities such as nurturing their young children, reading and talking to them, taking them to school, and preparing their meals, each of which requires a considerable time investment. Longitudinal studies show that the time parents in industrialized countries spend on childcare has increased steadily over the last few decades (Gauthier, Smeeding, and Furstenberg 2004), with “intensive parenting”—defined as intensive time investment in hands-on childcare—being the norm since the 1990s (Miller 2018). In fact, parenting is such a time-consuming task that after people transition to parenthood, time becomes a precious commodity that is difficult to balance between parenting and other important activities. Sayer (2018), for instance, shows that people have less time for non-parenting-related activities after becoming parents.
Parents readily perceive the time demanded by the parental role. People who are parents tend to perceive greater feelings of time crunch in life than those who are not parents (Reeves and Szafran 1996; Zuzanek 1998). This increased perception of time crunch is particularly salient during the first several years of parenthood, as new parents engage in various activities (e.g., feeding, bathing, coaxing to sleep, comforting, playing) that are extremely time consuming (Ruppanner, Perales, and Baxter 2019). In addition, although people accumulate parenting experience with their first child, they face increased time pressure when they have a second child (Ruppanner, Perales, and Baxter 2019). Time-crunched parenting is common across various cultures and countries (Sani and Treas 2016), and the mass media routinely uses the expressions “time crunch,” “time squeeze,” and “time famine” to characterize people's feelings about parenting, especially young children (Bunting 2000; Daly 2000).
Given such a strong association between parenthood and time crunch, we thus predict that parenting motivation can trigger feelings of time crunch, with subsequent implications for consumers’ variety-seeking behavior. We elaborate the rationale for this prediction next.
Time Crunch and Variety-Seeking Behavior
Variety-seeking behavior can be driven by various motivations induced by situational factors. For example, individuals who crave sensation may seek variety because it triggers psychological stimulation (Steenkamp and Baumgartner 1992), and consumers in a crowded or spatially confining environment make more varied choices to regain a sense of freedom (Levav and Zhu 2009). Consumers are also more likely to include variety in their choices in public (vs. private) consumption contexts because they are motivated to appear adventurous and open-minded (Ratner and Kahn 2002).
Building on a stream of research that examines how consumers’ time may affect their shopping behavior, we conjecture that enhanced feelings of time crunch caused by parenting motivation have spillover effects on variety seeking. Consumers with ample time to shop in a store are more likely to browse, explore alternatives, and purchase a greater variety of products (Mohan, Sivakumaran, and Sharma 2012); similarly, those who tend to spend prolonged time contemplating product choices include more variety in their choices (Beatty and Ferrell 1998; Jeong, Christensen, and Drolet 2016). Conversely, when consumers are under time pressure, they tend to pick the most salient options in their memory (Iyer 1989) and minimize time spent learning about additional options (Xu and Kim 2008), which may result in less variety in their choices. Indeed, with time constraints, people are only able to screen options in a large assortment with regard to a limited number of attributes, leading to fewer alternatives in their final choice set (Weenig and Maarleveld 2002). Relatedly, time crunch helps people better remember information about options acquired earlier (Kruglanski and Freund 1983) and in turn enhances their preference for the status quo and a reluctance to vary among other options (Eidelman and Crandall 2009; Woodside and Uncles 2005). Consistent with these findings, other researchers have observed that time pressure predisposes decision makers to stick with familiar options rather than exploring new ones (Litt et al. 2011). These results suggest that time crunch can decrease variety seeking.
The Current Research
We hypothesize that people experience greater feelings of time crunch when parenting motivation is activated, by either their actual identity as parents or merely having thoughts about parenting (Bleidorn et al. 2013; Oechsle and Zoll 1991). As time crunch has been shown to dampen the tendency to choose variety (Erdem 1996; Fishbach, Ratner, and Zhang 2011; Kivetz, Urminsky, and Zheng 2006; Menon and Kahn 1995), we predict that parenting motivation will decrease variety-seeking behavior. Stated formally,
We further propose possible qualifications regarding the effect of parenting motivation on variety-seeking behaviors. First, because time-crunched parenting is a pressing social issue, many support programs and products have been developed to help parents save time (Sani and Treas 2016; Smith et al. 2016). When people think of these means of saving time in parenting, time crunch may become less of a problem for them, and the effect of parenting motivation on variety seeking should be reduced. Stated formally,
Second, our conceptualization predicts that people engage in less variety-seeking behavior when parenting motivation is activated because they experience greater feelings of time crunch, which discourage variety in choices (Iyer 1989; Litt et al. 2011). If that is the case, then leading people to believe that they have ample time for shopping should mitigate the perception of time crunch and thus weaken the effect of parenting motivation on variety seeking. Stated formally,
Finally, our theorizing predicts that parenting motivation decreases variety seeking because enhanced feelings of time crunch inhibit consumers from exploring alternative options and make them more likely to simply choose the default product option most salient in their mind, based on their prior product consumption or usage. Brand loyalty—defined as biased behavioral responses toward one brand expressed over time due to psychological commitment or emotional connections to the brand (Jacoby and Chestnut 1978; Jacoby and Kyner 1973)—can influence consumers’ default choice. In actual marketing practice, established brands tend to enjoy more brand loyalty among consumers and thus are motivated to discourage variety-seeking behavior, whereas new market entrants often aim to encourage consumers to seek variety and try new brands. Such marketing strategies are grounded in the fact that consumers who are highly loyal to a brand tend to treat it as a default option (Tellis 1988). Thus, the effect of parenting motivation on variety seeking should be mitigated among those who do not have much loyalty to any brands offered in the product category and therefore do not have any top-of-mind product choice, because they cannot save time by simply choosing the default option. Stated formally,
Overview of Studies
We test these hypotheses in six studies, the results of which are summarized in Table 2. To obtain real-world evidence for our proposed effect of parenting motivation on variety seeking, Study 1 uses a within-subject, longitudinal design involving NielsenIQ panel data to illustrate that the same consumer chose less variety in multiple product categories after becoming a parent than before. Study 2 establishes the causal relationship between parenting motivation and variety-seeking behavior by inducing parenting motivation, and it provides direct support for our proposed mechanism based on feelings of time crunch. Studies 3–5 are conducted among pure nonparents (i.e., Studies 3, 4, and 5a) or pure parents (i.e., Study 5b) to tightly control for impacts of actual parental status and demonstrate that the effect on variety seeking occurs when thoughts about parenting are induced without the interference of chronic parental status. These studies shed additional light on the mechanism with a moderation-of-process approach. Study 3 shows that the effect diminishes when consumers perceive that abundant support is available to help them with various parenting chores, which reduces feelings of time crunch. It also provides additional evidence for our proposed mechanism by exploring participants’ listed thoughts related to feelings of time crunch. Studies 4, 5a, and 5b offer further evidence for the proposed mechanism by showing that the effect of parenting motivation on variety seeking is weakened when consumers are led to perceive time abundance in their shopping trips (Study 4) or lack loyalty toward the brands in the choice set (Studies 5a and 5b). We determined the appropriate sample size of each study in advance according to the sample sizes in published studies using similar methods and procedures.
Summary of Results by Study Condition.
Notes: Standard deviations are in parentheses. We also examined the percentage of participants “taking-all-of-one-choice” or “taking-one-of-each-choice” across Studies 2–4 and Study 5a (and not Study 5b, in which variety seeking was measured by the binary decision to choose a new option; Web Appendix E).
Study 1: Panel Data Analysis
Using secondary data of actual purchases and consumer parental status, Study 1 aims to find evidence of a causal relationship between parenting motivation and variety seeking by comparing consumers’ purchasing behavior before and after they become parents. We expect that they will purchase less-varied products after, as compared with before, becoming parents (H1). It is challenging to draw causal relationships across individuals because their parental status is not randomly assigned, and thus, cross-sectional variation in parental status may be confounded by individual characteristics that may also affect variety seeking. Therefore, our approach relies on the within-individual variation in parental status and a difference-in-difference (DiD) design to control for both individual characteristics and temporal factors related to variety seeking.
Sample and Summary Statistics
We used the NielsenIQ consumer panel data set, a longitudinal panel of U.S. households that provided their consumption information to NielsenIQ from 2004 to 2015. The data contain every shopping trip for the panelist, including the date (but not the exact timing) and every purchase record of the trip. The data also contain demographic information, including the number of children, for each household on a yearly basis. Thus, the observed change of parental status for a given household provides the basis of our within-subject identification strategy.
To focus on the effect of changing from nonparent to parent, we included only households satisfying the following two conditions: (1) they did not have children at the beginning of the data period and (2) they had children during the data period. Becoming a parent is a critical life decision and thus a highly endogenous choice. We focus on these households because they all experienced a change of parental status during the data period. We believe such a sample selection rule is helpful to our identification strategy, which we discuss in detail subsequently.
To focus on the effect of parenting motivation on variety seeking, we selected several product categories according to two principles: first, the products are primarily for general consumer decision making and not limited to parenting activities (i.e., their consumption is less affected as a direct consequence of parenthood); and second, the products are typically grouped in assortments with a number of selections placed in close proximity to one another, providing an appropriate context to test for variety seeking (for a list of the products, see Table W1 of Web Appendix A). Most of them are common choices in the variety-seeking literature (Fishbach, Ratner, and Zhang 2011; Gullo et al. 2019; Huang et al. 2019; Levav and Zhu 2009; Trivedi 1999; Mittelman et al. 2014).
Following Gullo et al. (2019), we pulled all categories together in the analysis among shopping trips with purchase of the focal categories. An observation in the analysis is a combination of household, shopping trip, and category. The final estimation sample contains 1,511,092 observations generated by 887,648 shopping trips of 2,049 households (for a summary of each category, see Table W1, Web Appendix A). Carbonated beverages is the largest category, followed by candy. In terms of the percentage of trips with multiple purchases (i.e., more than one item was purchased), yogurt, frozen dinners, and carbonated beverages are the most frequent, while table syrups, ketchup, lotion, and shampoo are the least frequent. In the estimation sample, a household has an average of 6.49 years of observations, with 2.68 and 3.81 years for pre- and postparent status, respectively. Households slightly decreased their shopping frequencies and spending (for the focal categories) after becoming parents, with, respectively, 5.74 and 5.09 trips per month pre- and postparent, and expenditures of $53.26 and $51.78 per month pre- and postparent (for demographic distributions, see Table W2, Web Appendix A).
Identification
We followed the DiD approach for identification. First, since becoming a parent is among the most consequential lifetime decisions, it is possible that parental households are different from nonparental households even after controlling for the observed characteristics. In other words, parental status is not randomly assigned, so parents and nonparents could be different in unobserved dimensions. Therefore, our sample focuses on those with observed change of parental status, and the identification relies on within-household comparison (i.e., the change of variety seeking before and after becoming a parent). Second, although such within-household change is revealing for the impact of parenting motivation, it is confounded by the general time trend in consumption. Using DiD, we aimed to compare the difference before and after becoming parents for a given household relative to the difference before and after the same time point for other control households—the DiD—to capture the “pure” parenting motivation effect. Intuitively, the first difference captures both the effect of parenting motivation and other temporal effects on variety seeking that are not related to the change of parental status, while the second difference captures only the temporal effects. Following the literature (Datta, Knox, and Bronnenberg 2018; Manchanda, Packard, and Pattabhiramaiah 2015), we exploited the variation in timing of becoming parents in our sample to use the late-parental households as a control for the early-parental households. Specifically, consider an early-parental household of people who become parents at t and a late-parental household of people who become parents at t + T. We can identify the parenting motivation effect by comparing the difference in variety seeking between the early- and late-parental households in periods [0, …, t – 1] with the difference in their variety seeking in periods [t, …, t + T – 1]. 1
Model
Following prior studies (Gullo et al. 2019; Levav and Zhu 2009), we measured variety seeking as the ratio of unique Universal Product Codes (UPCs) in a category out of all the products purchased in that category per shopping trip. The UPC is the most basic level of information available, and it distinguishes among such factors as brands, products within a brand, and package sizes. The variety seeking of household i in category C for shopping trip t is defined as follows:
Results
The estimate of δ is of primary interest, as it represents the parenting effect on variety seeking after controlling for other potentially confounding factors. The main result is presented in Column 2 of Table 3. We included only observations with purchase quantity in the focal category greater than 1. When the quantity is 1, the dependent variable is also 1 without any randomness, thus yielding a potentially biased model. Nevertheless, for completeness, we included such cases in Column 1, as well as cases for quantities greater than 2 and 3 in Columns 3 and 4, respectively, of Table 3. The results show that the key coefficient—that of 1(Parent)—is significantly negative in all cases, which offers supportive evidence for H1 that parenting motivation can lead to less variety seeking.
Study 1: Did Estimates of Variety Seeking for Parenting.
*10% significance, **5% significance, ***1% significance.
Notes: Y = yes. SEs are clustered at the household level.
The DiD analysis relies on the assumption that preparental trends of variety seeking are parallel for parents and would-be parents. Since our sample selection criterion ensures the selected households are relatively homogeneous—that is, they all became parents at some point during the sample—we believe this assumption is reasonable in this case. Nevertheless, following the literature (Wang and Goldfarb 2017; Wang, Xiong, and Yang 2019), we formally conducted a falsification check to examine this assumption with the inclusion of preparental periods in the analysis. In addition to the variables in the main analysis, we include three dummies for one year, two years, and three years prior to the household's first parental year. The baseline is more than three years before the first parental year. For the DiD analysis to be valid, we should observe common preparental trends in variety seeking, so the coefficients of the three additional dummies should not be significant. As shown in Table W3 of Web Appendix A, the coefficients of the additional dummies are not significant, and their magnitudes are much smaller than the key coefficient.
Robustness Checks
We further conducted several robustness checks. First, we considered alternative definitions of variety seeking. We considered the number of unique UPCs as the measure of variety seeking. A potential concern of such a measure is that it may inflate variety seeking when households simply buy more items. Although the inclusion of basket size in the regression ameliorates this concern, we believe our main measure (i.e., ratio of unique UPCs to purchase quantity) is more appropriate because previous studies have adopted it (Gullo et al. 2019; Levav and Zhu 2009). Nevertheless, Column 1 of Table W4 in Web Appendix A shows that the result is robust to this alternative definition. The main analysis examines variety seeking at the UPC level, and we further explored it at the brand level as a robustness check. Specifically, we used the ratio of unique brands purchased to the number of items bought within the focal category in a trip as the dependent variable. The result, reported in Column 2 of Table W4 in Web Appendix A, indicates that our finding is robust. We further investigated variety seeking from an alternative angle similar to that of Kahn and Raju (1991); specifically, we considered two alternative dependent variables: whether a UPC is in the current shopping basket that was not bought during the last shopping trip that identifies a purchase in the focal category, and the percentage of UPCs in the current basket that were not bought during the last shopping trip from the focal category. Similar to Gullo et al. (2019), we treated households as less variety seeking when these two variables are smaller. The results, reported in Columns 3 and 4 of Table W4 in Web Appendix A, show that our finding is robust.
Second, we considered an alternative definition of category. The NielsenIQ data first classify products into a product group (upper level) and then a product module (lower level). For example, pet food is a product group at the upper level. Under pet food, wet cat food and dry cat food are two product modules. In the main analysis, we mostly defined categories at the product group level, and so we replicated this analysis with product module as the definition of category. The result, reported in Column 5 of Table W4 in Web Appendix A, confirms that the main finding is robust.
Finally, although the categories in our analysis are common in the variety-seeking literature and we believe their consumption is unlikely to be affected as a direct consequence of being parents, completely ruling out this possibility is challenging. Therefore, we conducted robustness analyses to test whether a particular category drives the main finding. Specifically, we replicated the main analysis but excluded categories one by one. We report the results in Table W5 in Web Appendix A; for example, Row 1 of Table W5 reports the result with the candy category excluded. The results indicate that our main finding is not driven by any single product category.
Discussion
Using secondary data, Study 1 provides strong evidence for the external validity of the effect of parenting on variety seeking (H1). Specifically, we applied the DiD approach based on the parental status change within a household to identify the causal effect of parenting on variety seeking for several categories. The main finding is robust to alternative definitions of variety seeking and product category, and it is not driven by any single product category.
While Study 1 demonstrates the predicted effect in a robust and highly marketing-relevant manner, the nature of the panel data does not allow for direct tests of the underlying mechanism based on feelings of time crunch. To this end, we conducted a follow-up supplementary study in which we asked 84 participants (Mage = 33.86 years, 37 male), all of them parents, about their change in purchasing habits after becoming parents. They reported that their time spent purchasing products in the categories covered in Study 1 significantly decreased after they entered parenthood (“To what extent has the amount of time you have to purchase this type of product changed after you became a parent?”; 1 = “has decreased a lot,” and 7 = “has increased a lot”; M = 3.20, SD = 1.50; difference from the scale midpoint of 4: t(83) = −4.89, p < .001, Cohen's d = .53). This result is consistent with our theorizing that people with parenting motivation experience time crunch. In the following studies, we examine the process based on feelings of time crunch.
Study 2: Manipulated Parenting Motivation
Study 2 has several objectives. First, we aimed to provide further experimental evidence for the effect of parenting motivation on variety seeking with an established manipulation of parenting motivation (e.g., Li, Haws, and Griskevicius 2019). Specifically, viewing kindchenschema (baby schema; Lorenz 1943)—a set of infantile features including a large head, big eyes, and round forehead—can induce cognitions and actions related to caregiving regardless of people's actual parental status (Gilead and Liberman 2014; Sherman, Haidt, and Coan 2009). Thus, following a procedure used in prior research (Li, Haws, and Griskevicius 2019), we situationally activated parenting motivation in Study 2 by having participants view a set of human infant faces and imagine that one of them is their baby.
Second, to better localize the causation, we added two control conditions: an “inactive” control condition that did not include any manipulation materials and an “active” control condition with neutral filler materials of the same length as that of the parenting-motivation manipulation (Higgins and Green 2011). Specifically, in the active control condition, we exposed participants a set of adult faces and asked them to imagine that one of them was their friend. By activating such a friendship orientation, the active control condition could help demonstrate that the effect of parenting motivation cannot be generalized to another interpersonal context.
Third, we intended Study 2 to shed light on the process. We predicted that consumers with activated parenting motivation tend to engage in less variety-seeking behavior due to feelings of time crunch, given that substantial time investment is required to complete various parenting chores. We thus directly tested the mediational role of feelings of time crunch (H2).
Fourth, we evaluated possible alternative accounts for the effect of parenting motivation on variety seeking. For example, as consumers might engage in variety-seeking behavior to fulfill their desire for novelty (McAlister 1982), thinking about parenting could offer sufficient novelty that weakens people's desire for novelty in ordinary everyday product choices, thus reducing variety seeking. In addition, prior research suggests that positive emotions can sometimes lead to decreased variety seeking (Roehm and Roehm 2004) and that viewing cute infant faces and imagining oneself becoming a parent might induce positive emotions (e.g., joy, excitement). We evaluate whether desire for novelty or affect could explain the effect in this study.
Finally, with Study 2 we aimed to further demonstrate the robustness of the effect in a laboratory setting by investigating whether the effect persists after controlling for demographic variables including age, gender, working status, and actual parenting status.
Method
Participants and design
We recruited 458 U.K. participants (Mage = 36.26 years, 149 male, 193 parents; gender and parental status splits did not vary across different experimental conditions, χ2s(2) < 4.19, ps > .10) from Prolific Academic to complete the study for a small monetary compensation. We randomly assigned participants to one of three between-subjects conditions (motivation: parenting vs. active control vs. inactive control).
Procedure
Following prior research, we used kindchenschema (i.e., human infant faces) to induce parenting motivation (Brosch, Sander, and Scherer 2007; Glocker et al. 2009; Li, Haws, and Griskevicius 2019). Specifically, in what was presented as an imagination task, participants in the parenting-motivation condition viewed a set of 12 images of baby faces of different ethnicities. We instructed participants to select one baby that looked most like one that could be their child and to elaborate on what it might be like to spend a typical day as a parent taking care of the baby. We included a parallel imagination task in the active control condition in which participants saw a set of 12 adult faces of different ethnicities with mixed genders. We asked them to choose one person who looked most like one who could be their new friend. Participants then wrote about what it could be like to spend a typical day with this person as a friend (Web Appendix B). Those in the inactive control condition skipped the imagination task. A pretest conducted among a separate group of participants (N = 141) indicated that the manipulation conditions did not influence affective state (Web Appendix C).
After that, we asked all participants to complete an ostensibly unrelated alcoholic beverage choice task to measure their variety seeking (Huang and Wyer 2015; Kahn and Isen 1993; Menon and Kahn 1995), which required imagining that they could select one of four alcoholic beverage brands sold in the United Kingdom (Hardys, Barefoot, Meguigan, and Yellowtail) in each of four consecutive weeks. We asked participants to choose their preferred brand sequentially for each week, and they could select any combination of brands across the four weeks. The number of different brands chosen served as an index for variety seeking along a four-point scale, with 1 representing no variety seeking and 4 representing maximum variety seeking. To test our prediction that parenting motivation makes consumers feel time-crunched for other activities including shopping, we asked all participants to indicate how well the five items about perceived time crunch in shopping described them (i.e., “I must rush if I am to complete my shopping trip on time,” “I feel pressured to complete my shopping quickly,” “I do not have enough time to shop,” “I must hurry to complete my shopping on time,” and “There are other things I need to be doing right now”; 1 = “strongly disagree,” and 7 = “strongly agree”; α = .93; Herrington and Capella 1995; Vermeir and Van Kenhove 2005). Then, we asked participants to respond to a ten-item scale measuring desire for novelty (e.g., “I wish something new and exciting would happen,” “I feel that life is boring,” “I wish for some major change in my life”; 1 = “strongly disagree,” and 7 = “strongly agree”; α = .87; Pearson 1970). They also responded to an eight-item affect scale (e.g., “I feel good,” “I feel pleasant,” “I feel sad” (reverse-coded); 1 = “not at all,” and 7 = “extremely”; α = .96; Williams, Davies, and Chadury 2000). At the end of the study, participants indicated their age, gender, work status, and whether they were parents.
Results
Variety seeking
As expected, results from a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed a significant main effect of the motivation manipulation on variety seeking in alcoholic beverage choices (F(2, 455) = 3.59, p = .029, η2 = .02). Participants in the parenting-motivation condition displayed less variety seeking (M = 2.34, SD = 1.36) than those in the active control condition (M = 2.67, SD = 1.26; t(455) = −2.17, p = .031, Cohen's d = .25) and those in the inactive control condition (M = 2.71, SD = 1.30; t(455) = −2.46, p = .014, Cohen's d = .28).
4
,
5
Variety seeking between the two control conditions was not significantly different (t < 1, n.s.). The effects of parenting motivation remained robust (F(2, 450) = 3.44, p = .033,
Feelings of time crunch
Results from a one-way ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of parenting condition on feelings of time crunch (F(2, 455) = 27.30, p < .001, η2 = .11), with participants in the parenting condition showing greater feelings of time crunch (M = 3.89, SD = 1.62) than those in the active control condition (M = 2.83, SD = 1.44; t(455) = 6.12, p < .001, Cohen's d = .69) and the inactive control condition (M = 2.76, SD = 1.38; t(455) = 6.69, p < .001, Cohen's d = .75). In addition, greater feelings of time crunch significantly predicted lower variety seeking (B = −.12, SE = .04; t(456) = −3.19, p = .002, f2 = .02). Results from PROCESS Model 4 (5,000 bootstrapping samples; Hayes 2018) further indicated a significant indirect effect of motivation condition on variety seeking through feelings of time crunch (parenting vs. active control: indirect effect = .03, boot SE = .02, 95% confidence interval [CI] = [.0044, .0728]; parenting vs. inactive control: indirect effect = .04, boot SE = .02, 95% CI = [.0063, .0803]).
Ancillary analysis
We observed that the motivation manipulation did not significantly influence participants’ desire for novelty (Mparenting = 1.47, SD = .34 vs. Mactive = 1.47, SD = .33 vs. Minactive = 1.46, SD = .32; F < 1, n.s.). In addition, participants’ affective state did not significantly vary across conditions (Mparenting = 5.19, SD = 1.21 vs. Mactive = 5.19, SD = 1.14 vs. Minactive = 5.23, SD = 1.17; F < 1, n.s.). 7
Discussion
In Study 2, we temporarily induced parenting motivation by having participants view human infant faces and imagine being in a parental role. As predicted, parenting motivation led to less variety seeking as compared with the two control conditions. The inclusion of two control conditions provides strong evidence that the effect is driven by induced parenting motivation rather than by certain confounding factors, such as the length or mere presence of manipulation materials. The different results between parenting-motivation and active control conditions helped rule out the possibility that the observed effect occurs in any interpersonal context (e.g., friendship orientation). In addition, the mediational role of feelings of time crunch offers direct evidence for our proposed mechanism (H2). We ruled out affect and desire for novelty as alternative explanations for the effect of parenting motivation on variety seeking in this study. Note that prior research suggests that need for stimulation may also lead to variety seeking (Menon and Kahn 1995; Raju 1980). To evaluate this account based on need for stimulation, we conducted a posttest among a separate group of participants (N = 154) and found that perceived stimulation did not differ between the parenting motivation and active control conditions and thus is less likely to account for the effect on variety seeking (Web Appendix G).
Research shows that consumers tend to seek more variety in a public context for impression-management reasons (Ratner and Kahn 2002). Although not directly related to our current research on parenting motivation, the relationship of Study 2 findings to this prior research is worth considering. One might wonder why we did not observe more variety seeking among participants in the friendship-orientation condition than in the inactive control condition, as friendship can be considered a public social relationship. We believe the answer to this question lies in a key difference between the two study settings, namely, the extent to which participants perceived that their choices were under public scrutiny. In Ratner and Kahn's (2002) study, the impression-management motive was particularly salient because participants knew that their choices would be revealed to others. In this study, however, participants made their choices in private, with no one to impress at the time of choice. Therefore, we did not observe an increase in variety seeking in the friendship-orientation condition.
Study 3: The Mediating Role of Feelings of Time Crunch
Study 3 is intended to provide additional evidence for the underlying mechanism of feelings of time crunch. According to our theorizing, parenting motivation elicits feelings of time crunch due to the significant amount of time investment required by parenting activities. If this is true, when consumers are led to believe that abundant parenting support from others can help reduce the time they spend handling parenting-associated obligations, they may feel less pressed for time, and the effect of parenting motivation on variety seeking should be weakened (H3). This study tests this prediction by manipulating the availability of parenting support. In addition, whereas Study 2 used an established scale to measure feelings of time crunch, Study 3 is aimed to replicate the mediational role of feelings of time crunch with a less obtrusive open-ended thought-listing approach to rule out possible demand effects associated with scale measurement.
Furthermore, given prior research suggesting that parents are more likely to engage in saving behavior (Canova, Rattazzi, and Webley 2005; Lee, Hanna, and Siregar 1997), one might wonder whether the reduced variety-seeking results from money-saving motives. Study 3 examines this alternative explanation. The study also uses a real behavioral measure of variety seeking. Finally, as we observed no difference between the active and inactive control conditions in Study 2, we use only an inactive control condition in this study.
Method
Participants and design
Four hundred seventy full-time undergraduate students from a large Asian university, none of whom were parents, took part in this study for a nominal payment (Mage = 21.59 years, 122 male; gender split did not vary across different experimental conditions, χ2 < 1, n.s.). We randomly assigned participants to one of three conditions (parenting: parenting vs. parenting with support vs. control).
Procedure
Participants in the parenting and the parenting-with-support conditions completed an imagination task similar to the one in Study 2 to manipulate parenting motivation, except that they were presented with a set of 12 Asian infant baby faces. Participants in the parenting-with-support condition were further told that they had capable helpers (e.g., nannies, their parents, their parents-in-law) who could help take care of the baby in various time-consuming tasks. We asked participants to imagine a typical day as a parent for this baby but with abundant aid from other helper(s). Participants in the control condition skipped the imagination task. A pretest conducted among a separate group of participants (N = 149) indicated that the manipulation conditions did not influence affective state (see Web Appendix H).
Next, participants learned that as a token of appreciation for taking part in the study, they would receive some ballpoint pens as gifts and that they could choose from four brands: Jim Knock, Uni Loknock, SARASA, and Juice. Participants were further instructed to choose three ballpoint pens in any combination of brands they liked and to complete a thought-listing task in which they were asked to use several sentences to elaborate on how they made their choices. The experimenter recorded the number of brands chosen as an index of variety-seeking behavior (with 1 representing the least variety chosen and 3 representing the most variety chosen). Finally, participants indicated their affective state with the same measure used in Study 2 (α = .88). At the end of the study, participants received the ballpoint pens they had chosen.
Results
Variety seeking
A one-way ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of the parenting manipulation on variety seeking of ballpoint pens (F(2, 467) = 5.05, p = .007, η2 = .02). Participants in the parenting condition chose less variety (M = 1.98, SD = .81) than did those in the parenting-with-support condition (M = 2.25, SD = .75; t(467) = −2.97, p = .003, Cohen's d = .35) and the control condition (M = 2.20, SD = .79; t(467) = −2.49, p = .013, Cohen's d = .27). We observed no difference between the parenting-with-support condition and the control condition (t < 1, n.s.). The effects of parenting motivation remained robust (F(2, 464) = 4.93, p = .008,
Thought listing
Two independent raters coded participants’ listed thoughts. The coders reached 94% agreement and resolved any divergent codes through discussion. Specifically, we coded each participant's listed thoughts as 1 if they were related to time crunch (e.g., “To save time, I just pick the brands that I used before”) and as 0 otherwise. Results from a logistic regression revealed that the occurrence of thoughts related to time crunch differed significantly across conditions (χ2(2) = 13.57, p = .001), with a greater percentage of participants in the parenting condition reporting time crunch as they made their product choices (20.53%) than those in the parenting-with-support condition (10.14%; B = −.83, SE = .34; χ2(1) = 5.99, p = .014, OR = .44) and the control condition (7.02%; B = −1.23, SE = .36; χ2(1) = 11.63, p = .001, OR = .29). In addition, thoughts related to time crunch predicted variety seeking (B = −.46, SE = .11; t(468) = −4.22, p < .001, f2 = .04), with the presence of time-crunch thoughts associated with lower variety seeking. Given that we coded the proposed mediator, time-crunch thoughts, as a binary variable, we could not use the PROCESS macro to test mediation; thus, we used the Sobel test (Baron and Kenny 1986) to investigate its mediational role. Results indicated a significant indirect effect of parenting condition on variety seeking through time crunch–related thoughts (parenting vs. active control: p = .044; parenting vs. inactive control: p = .010).
We also coded each participant's listed thoughts related to money saving (e.g., “SARASA's pens are quite expensive; choosing them as gifts could help me save more money on stationery”; coded as 1 if the listed thought mentioned saving money and as 0 otherwise). Results from a logistic regression revealed that money-saving-related thoughts did not differ significantly across conditions (χ2(2) = 3.09, p > .20).
Discussion
Study 3 provided additional support for our conceptualization with a real behavioral measure of variety seeking. Replicating previous studies, the results show that activating parenting motivation decreases variety seeking in the real choice of ballpoint pens. The listed thoughts pertaining to time crunch reveal mediation and offer additional evidence for our proposed mechanism (H2). Consistent with H3, we further demonstrated that when parenting is perceived as less time consuming due to abundant parenting support, parenting motivation does not lead to a greater sense of time crunch and subsequently less variety seeking. We also ruled out money saving as a potential alternative explanation for the effect of parenting motivation on variety seeking.
Study 4: Moderation by Time Availability
With Study 4, we sought to provide further evidence that feelings of time crunch underlie the effect of parenting motivation on variety-seeking behavior. Our conceptualization suggests that parenting motivation will lead to less variety seeking due to feelings of time crunch, as a large amount of time is required by the myriad of parenting chores. If this is the case, then the effect should be mitigated when consumers are led to feel that they have abundant time for their shopping trips (H4). In addition, to further enhance external validity, in Study 4 we activated parenting motivation with materials that are common in mass media and the marketplace—specifically, by presenting participants with a video clip featuring various parenting activities (e.g., feeding, bathing).
Method
Participants and design
For a nominal payment, 607 full-time undergraduate students in a large Asian university participated in this study, none of whom were parents (Mage = 21.07 years, 171 male; gender split did not vary across different experimental conditions, χ2(2) < 2.38, ps > .30). We randomly assigned them to conditions of a 2 (motivation: parenting vs. control) × 2 (time availability: baseline vs. time-available) between-subjects design.
Procedure
We instructed participants to watch a short video clip ostensibly to be used in public communications. The video presented in the parenting-motivation conditions featured various parenting activities, including feeding, bathing, and educating children, and the video presented in the control conditions featured a city landscape. A pretest among a separate group of participants (N = 108) indicated that the two versions of videos did not influence affective state (see Web Appendix I). Next, under the cover story of an in-store poster-evaluation task, we presented participants with a series of posters designed for supermarkets. Participants in the time-available conditions were shown in-store posters depicting supermarket scenes with the headlines inducing a perception of time availability (e.g., “you can always find enough time to shop with us,” “time is always available for your every choice”); in contrast, in the baseline conditions, participants were shown a series of in-store posters containing the same visuals but with generic headlines (e.g., “you are welcome to come to visit us,” “we are here for your every choice”; see Web Appendix J). A pretest among a separate group of participants (N = 96) confirmed that the time-available in-store posters elicited less feelings of time crunch than those in the baseline condition (F(1, 94) = 6.14, p = .015) and that the two sets of posters did not differ in terms of perceived design quality (F(1, 94) = 2.12, p > .10) or affective state induced (F < 1, n.s.; see Web Appendix K for details).
Next, we asked all participants to complete a hand soap choice task that served to assess their variety-seeking behavior. They were instructed to imagine that they could select one brand of hand soap for each of four consecutive months from four international brands: Dove, Dettol, Lux, and Nivea. We told them they could select any combination of brands across the four months. The number of different brands chosen by each participant served as an index for variety seeking, ranging from 1 (no variety) to 4 (maximum variety). Finally, participants indicated their affective state with the same scale used in the previous studies (α = .86).
Results
A two-way ANOVA revealed a significant interaction effect of motivation and time availability on variety seeking (F(1, 603) = 5.05, p = .025,
Study 4: Variety Seeking of Hand Soap as a Function of Motivation and Time Availability.
Discussion
Study 4 demonstrated that feelings of time crunch play a critical role in the observed effect of parenting motivation on consumer variety seeking. Consistent with H4, the effect of parenting motivation on decreased variety seeking was attenuated when consumers were led to feel that they had enough time for their shopping trips and thus were relieved from the situationally activated feelings of time crunch. In addition, the effect of parenting motivation on variety seeking was evident when parenting motivation was triggered in a public communication context—that is, by exposure to videos featuring parenting activities. Given that video commercials are often shown in both entity and online stores, marketers should consider influencing consumers’ variety-seeking behavior with in-store videos at the time they make product choices.
Study 5: Moderation by Brand Loyalty
With Study 5, we aimed to investigate brand loyalty as another moderator of the proposed effect of parenting motivation on variety seeking. Brand loyalty is of paramount importance in brand management and has important implications for marketing managers regarding consumers’ variety-seeking behavior. We predicted that feelings of time crunch induced by parenting motivation decrease variety seeking. Consumers who are making a decision under time crunch tend to engage in less exploratory behavior and consequently are more likely to simply pick the most salient option to which they are loyal (Jacoby and Chestnut 1978; Jacoby and Kyner 1973). Thus, the effect of parenting motivation on variety seeking should be mitigated among those who do not have much loyalty to any brands in the product category and consequently cannot save time making choices by picking a brand to which they are loyal (H5).
Brand loyalty may be captured in various ways, such as self–brand connection and brand attachment (Batra, Ahuvia, and Bagozzi 2012; Escalas and Bettman 2005). To investigate the role of brand loyalty, we adopted different proxies of brand loyalty in Studies 5a and 5b. Specifically, in Study 5a we captured brand loyalty by self–brand connection (i.e., the extent to which individuals have incorporated brands into their self-concept; Escalas and Bettman 2005), and in Study 5b by brand attachment (i.e., consumers’ emotional passion, attachment, and commitment to a brand that arise from a long-term relationship with the brand; Batra, Ahuvia, and Bagozzi 2012; Carroll and Ahuvia 2006). Finally, we demonstrate that the effect of activating parenting motivation can be generalized to both nonparents (Study 5a) and parents (Study 5b).
Study 5a
Method
We recruited 596 undergraduate students in a large Asian university, none of whom were parents (Mage = 21.48 years, 193 male; gender split did not vary across the two conditions, χ2(1) = 1.96, p > .10), to participate in this study for a nominal payment. The study employed a mixed design, with parenting motivation (motivation: parenting vs. control) manipulated between subjects and self–brand connection as a proxy for brand loyalty measured individually.
To manipulate parenting motivation, participants in the parenting condition completed the same imagination task as in Study 3, and those in the control condition skipped the imagination task. Next, we asked all participants to imagine that they could select one brand of shampoo for each of four consecutive months from four brands: Vidal Sassoon, Aussie, Alberto Balsam, and GUHL. While all four brands are from well-known international fast-moving consumer goods companies (i.e., Vidal Sassoon and Aussie from P&G, Alberto Balsam from Unilever, and GUHL from KAO), only Vidal Sassoon was available to local consumers; the other three had not been launched in the local market. A pretest conducted among a separate group of participants from the same pool (N = 67) suggested that participants’ self–brand connection toward Vidal Sassoon, the in-market brand, had a moderate value with considerable variation across individuals, whereas their self–brand connections toward the other three brands not available in the local market were unanimously extremely low (Web Appendix L). Such a setting of brand options enabled us to investigate how participants’ self–brand connection toward the in-market brand influenced the effect of parenting motivation on consumers’ tendency to explore unfamiliar nonmarket brands and seek variety instead of sticking with the in-market brand. The number of different brands chosen by each participant served as an index for variety seeking, ranging from 1 (no variety) to 4 (maximum variety).
We then asked participants to indicate their perceived connection with the focal in-market brand, Vidal Sassoon, using the Inclusion of Other in the Self (IOS) scale (Aron, Aron, and Smollan 1992; Donovan and Lutz 2016). Specifically, participants viewed seven Venn diagrams with various degrees of overlap between Vidal Sassoon and the self, and they indicated which image best represented their connection with the brand (1 = “no or negative relationship with Vidal Sassoon,” and 7 = “having close relationship with Vidal Sassoon”). Finally, participants indicated their affective state, as in the previous studies (α = .84).
Results
While a higher score on the IOS scale indicates higher self–brand connection with the in-market brand Vidal Sassoon (M = 3.15, SD = 1.72), the measured self–brand connection did not vary across the motivation conditions (F < 1, n.s.). An ANOVA showed that parenting motivation led to less variety seeking (M = 2.49, SD = 1.33) than in the baseline condition (M = 2.82, SD = 1.29; F(1, 594) = 9.51, p = .002, η2 = .02). To test the predicted moderation, we regressed variety seeking in the choice of shampoo brands on the motivation-condition dummy (0 = control, 1 = parenting), mean-centered self–brand connection, and the interaction between them. The results showed that parenting motivation (B = −.30, SE = .10; t(592) = −2.93, p = .004, f2 = .02) and self–brand connection had significant effects on variety seeking (B = −.12, SE = .04; t(592) = −2.99, p = .003, f2 = .07), which were further qualified by their interaction (B = −.17, SE = .06; t(592) = −2.82, p = .005, f2 = .01). As shown in Figure 2, parenting motivation resulted in significantly less variety seeking than the control only when consumers’ self–brand connection to the in-market brand, Vidal Sassoon, was not low (i.e., higher than 2.62; 57.38% of the participants). We observed no significant difference in variety seeking when self–brand connection was lower than 2.62. These results are consistent with our prediction that the variety-seeking behavior of those with limited self–brand connection with the in-market brand is not influenced by parenting motivation. The effects remained robust after we controlled for participants’ gender, age, and affective state (interaction effect: t(589) = −2.70, p = .007, f2 = .01).
Study 5a: Variety Seeking of Shampoo as a Function of Motivation and Self–Brand Connection (Raw Score).
Study 5b
Method
We recruited 863 parents (Mage = 31.57 years, 349 male; gender split did not vary across two between-subjects conditions, χ2(1) < 1, n.s.) from the online crowdsourcing platform Credamo (Gai and Puntoni 2021; Gong et al. 2020) to participate in the study for a nominal payment. This study manipulated parenting motivation (motivation: parenting vs. control) between subjects and measured brand attachment as a proxy for brand loyalty.
We asked participants in the parenting condition to recall and describe a typical day when they took care of children. In the control condition, participants recalled and described a typical day in their daily lives. Then, we asked them to imagine that they were shopping in a supermarket and planning to purchase a bottle of fabric softener. The participants viewed a product from ATTACK—a brand from KAO company available in the local market. We then asked participants to imagine that this was the only brand they found in the supermarket and put it into their shopping carts. Next, they viewed the other fabric softener brand (i.e., New Beads, a brand from the same company unavailable in the local market) and imagined they found this brand on the way to the cashier. A pretest conducted among a separate group of participants from the same pool (N = 80) showed that the brand attachment with ATTACK in the local market was medium with considerable variance (M = 4.08, SD = 1.83), whereas New Beads was unanimously unfamiliar to local consumers (M = 1.26, SD = .33; Web Appendix M). As in Study 5a, such a setting of brand alternatives allowed us to investigate how different levels of brand attachment as a proxy for brand loyalty toward the default brand, ATTACK, influence the effect of parenting motivation on consumers’ variety seeking, which was captured by the tendency to switch to the other brand instead of sticking to the default option.
After participants indicated their brand choice (0 = stay with the originally taken brand, 1 = switch to a new brand), they indicated the extent to which they agreed with three statements that measured their brand attachment toward the default brand, ATTACK (i.e., “I feel a bond between me and this brand of fabric softener,” “this brand of fabric softener feels like a friend to me,” and “I am emotionally connected to this brand of fabric softener”; 1 = “strongly disagree,” and 7 = “strongly agree”; α = .91; Batra, Ahuvia, and Bagozzi 2012). At the end of the study, all participants reported their affective states, as in previous studies (α = .89).
Results
Brand attachment (M = 4.59, SD = 1.38) did not vary across different parental motivation conditions (F(1, 861) = 2.44, p > .10). A logistic regression showed that participants in the parenting-motivation condition displayed less variety seeking than did those in the control condition (B = −.55, SE = .14; χ2(1) = 14.73, p < .001, OR = .58). To test the predicted moderation, we regressed variety seeking in the choice of fabric softener brand on motivation-condition dummy (0 = control, 1 = parenting), mean-centered brand attachment, and the interaction between them. The results showed that parenting motivation (B = −.58, SE = .15; χ2(1) = 14.30, p < .001, OR = .56) and brand attachment (B = −.41, SE = .08; χ2(1) = 28.39, p < .001, OR = .67) had significant effects on variety seeking, which were further qualified by their interaction (B = −.28, SE = .12; χ2(1) = 5.80, p = .016, OR = .75). As shown in Figure 3, parenting motivation significantly decreased variety seeking only when consumers’ brand attachment toward the default brand was not low (i.e., higher than 3.72; 73.58% of the participants). We observed no significant difference in variety seeking when brand attachment was lower than 3.72. These results are consistent with our prediction that the variety seeking of those with limited brand attachment is not influenced by parenting motivation. The effects remained robust after participants’ gender, age, and affective state were added into the model as covariates (interaction effect: χ2(1) = 6.03, p = .014, OR = .75).
Study 5b: Variety Seeking of Fabric Softener as a Function of Motivation and Brand Attachment (Raw Score).
Discussion
Studies 5a and 5b tested the moderating effect of brand loyalty, which was proxied by self–brand connection (Study 5a) and brand attachment (Study 5b). Both studies show that parenting motivation decreases variety seeking when consumers have adequate brand loyalty. However, the effect diminishes when consumers’ brand loyalty toward the focal brand is limited (H5). In this situation, consumers do not have any top-of-mind preferred product option that they can simply choose under time-crunched decision making. In addition, the effect on variety seeking was evident when parenting motivation was triggered among a nonparent sample (Study 5a) or parent sample (Study 5b). It should be noted that there is a potential confound in the variety-seeking measure of Study 5b, such that the process of switching to the other brand described in the scenario (i.e., taking the new brand on the way to the cashier and putting the previously selected fabric softener brand back to the shelf) might take longer than sticking with the default brand. Despite the fact that the variety-seeking measure in Study 5b was open to this alternative interpretation, the convergent results from Studies 5a and 5b suggest that marketers can influence consumers’ variety seeking by switching parenting motivation on and off among different groups of target consumers. Nevertheless, we conducted a posttest (N = 101) to evaluate such a possibility, and the results revealed that consumers did not seem to perceive any significant time difference between the act of switching to a new brand and that of sticking with the default option (see Web Appendix N). Thus, the effect on variety seeking in Study 5b is unlikely to be driven by perceptions of additional time being needed to switch brands.
General Discussion
Parents are a sizable market segment, and marketing materials that induce thoughts related to parenting are commonplace. Therefore, it is important to understand how parenting motivation affects consumer behavior. This research explored the impact of parenting motivation on a pervasive decision-making tendency—namely, variety seeking—across various consumption domains. With the transition to parenthood marking a new chapter of life, new parents need to remain open to the associated challenges, so it is likely that they become more open-minded (Bornstein, Hahn, and Haynes 2011), which may spur greater variety seeking. Our interviews of managers in our pilot study also suggest that they intuit that parenting might lead consumers to seek more variety. However, the present investigation, through consumer panel data and experiments, shows the opposite: that parenting motivation decreases variety-seeking behavior. Study 1 used actual, longitudinal consumption data from a NielsenIQ panel data set to demonstrate that consumers choose less variety after becoming parents. Study 2 showed that inducing parenting thoughts is sufficient to decrease variety-seeking behavior, independent of one's own actual parental status. We found this effect to be driven by feelings of time crunch (Studies 2 and 3). Thus, the effect of parenting motivation on variety seeking was mitigated when people thought they could depend on ample support from other sources in the parenting process, which weakened feelings of time crunch (Study 3), when they were led to perceive that they had ample time for shopping (Study 4) and when they did not have much brand loyalty toward any of the product options and thus could not save time by picking their top-of-mind option (Studies 5a and 5b). The robustness of this effect is supported by different operationalizations of parenting motivation (i.e., actual parental role and exposure to stimuli that evoke thoughts about parenting) and a combination of hypothetical and real behavioral measures of variety seeking (i.e., NielsenIQ panel data and incentive-compatible and hypothetical choices in lab and online experiments).
We assessed several alternative explanations. First, thoughts about parenting might be so novel or stimulating that they reduce consumers’ need to seek novelty or stimulation in product choices (McAlister 1982; Raju 1980). As a result, consumers with active parenting motivation might seek less variety for this reason. However, we considered this explanation less viable because desire for novelty could not mediate the effect of parenting motivation on variety seeking, and the manipulation of parenting motivation did not affect perceived stimulation between the parenting and active control conditions (Study 2). Second, because consumers’ tendency to choose variety can be influenced by their affective states (Kahn and Isen 1993; Roehm and Roehm 2004), parenting motivation may affect variety seeking via consumers’ affect. However, our finding that the effect of parenting motivation still held after we controlled for affect contradicts this alternative account. Third, using thoughts listed by participants, we ruled out money saving as an alternative explanation for the effect (Study 3). Finally, parenting motivation may induce risk aversion (Eibach and Mock 2011) and consequently lead consumers to avoid risk by relying on familiar and trusted options rather than exploring alternatives (Kahn and Meyer 1989). However, this account based on risk attitude is less likely to explain why the effect of parenting motivation on variety-seeking behavior was weakened when consumers were led to believe that they had ample time for shopping (Study 4), since the perception of time available is unexpected to affect risk attitudes. Still, future research is necessary to formally evaluate this alternative account by directly measuring consumers’ risk attitudes in their choices.
This research contributes to the literature on parenting motivation in several ways. First, it uncovers a pervasive decision-making tendency that is affected by parenting motivation. Existing research on the impacts of parenting motivation on consumer behavior is scant, despite its indispensable role in human reproduction. An exception is the finding that parenting motivation prompts men to become more future-oriented and women more present-oriented when making intertemporal choices (Li, Haws, and Griskevicius 2019). The current research goes beyond the extant literature by showing that parenting motivation can also influence decision making in contexts that do not involve intertemporal decisions (i.e., variety seeking) by inducing feelings of time crunch. This effect was robust across genders. The finding generates opportunities for future research to explore other effects of parenting motivation on consumer decision making via feelings of time crunch. Second, the current research identifies feelings of time crunch as a mechanism for how parenting motivation may affect consumer behavior. Previous research focuses on how the social role of parent influences people's feelings of time crunch due to parenting activities (Bradbury 2008; Reeves and Szafran 1996; Zuzanek 1998). The current research expands the boundary of the association between parental role and time crunch by showing that the feelings of time crunch triggered by parenting motivation generalize to product choices unrelated to parenting activities. Third, the current research yields rich insights into the parenting process. For example, Study 3 demonstrated how the availability of external social supports during parenting might help reduce feelings of time crunch and thus weaken the effect of parenting motivation on variety seeking. Study 4 further showed that perceived time availability can also mitigate feelings of time crunch and thereby reduce the observed effect on variety seeking.
The current research also adds to the literature on variety-seeking behavior. Other studies have found variety seeking to be influenced by several factors, including decision context (Levav and Zhu 2009; Ratner and Kahn 2002), cognitive activation of variety-related concepts (Maimaran and Wheeler 2008; Shen and Wyer 2010), an inherent need for stimulation (Steenkamp and Baumgartner 1992), and variables related to consumers’ circadian rhythms (Gullo et al. 2019; Huang et al. 2019; Roehm and Roehm 2004). The present research demonstrates that consumers’ specific social roles can also affect variety seeking. Becoming a parent, or just the thought of it, can make consumers less likely to diversify their choices.
This work highlights several directions for future research. For example, feelings of time crunch induced by parenting motivation may lead consumers to focus more on the peripheral route when processing persuasion messages (Petty and Cacioppo 2012), which may make them more likely to rely on country of origin when making product evaluations (Gürhan-Canli and Maheswaran 2000) and on pictorial rather than textual product information (Pieters and Warlop 1999). These possibilities may be worth testing. Another intriguing question is when the parenting motivation becomes active for actual parents. The results from Studies 2 and 5b suggest that parents’ variety seeking does not decrease when parenting motivation is situationally overridden by other motives or thoughts (in our context, social motive in Study 2 and thoughts about mundane activities in Study 5b). Future research can further explore when parenting motivation might be most salient and when it can be suppressed. Moreover, future research can investigate whether the effect of parenting motivation on variety seeking is affected by the age of children to be parented. It is possible that parenting older children requires less time-consuming activities, weakening the observed effect in this research. Future research can also examine whether variety-seeking behavior is influenced by transitions to other social roles or the mere thought of them, such as becoming a husband or wife, or being an immigrant in another country. Finally, it would be worthwhile to investigate the downstream consequences of reduced variety seeking by parents in real life. One might wonder whether reducing variety in product choices helps at least partially fulfill parents’ need to save time, thereby relieving feelings of time crunch associated with parenting activities to a degree that may improve the well-being of parents.
This research focuses on consumers’ variety seeking among different brands or products within a specific product category. However, variety seeking may be conceptualized on a more global level, such as the number of different product categories to be purchased (Dhar, Hoch, and Kumar 2001; Sun, Rajiv, and Chu 2016). Becoming a parent may mean that a consumer needs to make purchases in new product categories they have never considered before (e.g., diapers, baby formula). It would be worthwhile to explore whether parenting motivation, in addition to restricting the variety sought in a given product category, may increase the variety of product categories considered or included for purchase. Relatedly, as parenting is a complex phenomenon, its impact on variety seeking may be multiply determined. To this extent, while this research shows that feelings of time crunch contribute to the effect of parenting motivation on decreased variety seeking, future research may examine whether consumers’ desire for variety is satisfied by the choice of more varied product categories and, consequently, they reduce their within-category variety seeking when parenting motivation is activated.
This research also contributes to a vast stream of research on brand loyalty by examining its role in the effect of parenting motivation. While loyalty for one brand is associated with less variety seeking in brand choices by encouraging consumers to engage in habitual or repeated purchases toward the loyal brand (Jacoby and Chestnut 1978), our findings suggest that such a tendency can be strengthened by activating parenting motivation among consumers. That is, consumers with parenting motivation are more likely to stick with the loyal brand due to a perception of time crunch triggered by parenting motivation. In this sense, while prior research has identified various factors influencing the role of consumers’ brand loyalty in habitual purchase (e.g., temporary stockouts of the brand to which they are loyal at the visited store; Day, Shocker, and Srivastava 1979), the current research suggests parenting motivation as another situational factor.
This research offers novel insights for marketing practitioners. As revealed in our pretest surveying managers in fast-moving consumer goods companies, parents are unanimously regarded as an important consumer group, and variety seeking is a significant factor to consider when designing marketing strategy to them. Information about parental status is also readily available to managers through public records (e.g., births, family members) and purchase patterns (e.g., purchase of baby diapers). While marketing managers have already strategically used parental-status information recorded in consumer big data to promote certain product categories (e.g., Target mails coupons for baby clothes to pregnant women or new mothers; Duhigg 2013), companies could do more with such information by considering the impact of parental status on general variety-seeking tendencies. For example, in the context of e-commerce, after a company detects a change in parental status, focusing on improving a few appealing options might be a better strategy to match the reduced variety-seeking tendency than recommending many different product options.
More importantly, our research shows that the effect on decreased variety seeking also occurs for nonparents who are cued to think about parenting. Exposure to advertisements or commercials featuring baby faces (Studies 3 and 5a) and parenting activities (Study 4) is sufficient to induce parenting motivation among nonparents. This creates an opportunity for marketers to manage consumers’ variety seeking through the use of marketing materials (e.g., advertisements featuring baby faces or parenting activities) that may evoke parenting-related thoughts. When a company does not have an advantage in product variety over its competitors, it may depict the use of its products by parents or use images of cute babies that induce thoughts about parenting in its advertisements or commercials. Similarly, the results from Studies 2 and 5b suggest that marketers can also prevent a decrease in variety seeking among actual parents by activating a different motivation to override parenting motivation (e.g., activating social motive in Study 2) or by making unrelated thoughts more salient (e.g., leading parents to think about nonparenting, mundane activities in Study 5b).
Finally, our findings on the role of brand loyalty have important managerial implications. For example, established brands, which tend to enjoy more brand loyalty among consumers, should consider activating parenting motivation among their target consumers to reduce their variety seeking and reinforce their stickiness to the brands; meanwhile, when brands want to introduce a newly launched product to their parent consumers, they can use marketing communications to prevent the effect of parenting motivation by making other motives salient.
Supplemental Material
sj-pdf-1-mrj-10.1177_00222437221136491 - Supplemental material for Too Time-Crunched to Seek Variety: The Influence of Parenting Motivation on Consumer Variety Seeking
Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-mrj-10.1177_00222437221136491 for Too Time-Crunched to Seek Variety: The Influence of Parenting Motivation on Consumer Variety Seeking by Yitian (Sky) Liang, Zhongqiang (Tak) Huang and Lei Su in Journal of Marketing Research
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
Researchers’ own analyses were calculated (or derived) based in part on data from Nielsen Consumer LLC and marketing databases provided through the NielsenIQ Datasets at the Kilts Center for Marketing Data Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The conclusions drawn from the NielsenIQ data are those of the researchers and do not reflect the views of Nielsen. Nielsen is not responsible for, had no role in, and was not involved in analyzing and preparing the results reported herein. The authors thank the JMR review team for their helpful comments.
Author Contributions
The authors contributed equally to this article, and Lei Su is the corresponding author of this article.
Associate Editor
Shailendra Jain
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by research grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71902095; 71991461; 72222006) awarded to the first author and to the second author (71832015), the General Research Fund by Hong Kong Research Grants Council awarded to the second author (17503122) and to the third author (CityU 12501722), the HKU Seed Fund for Basic Research awarded to the second author (202111159021; 202011159066), and the Start-up Grant for New Faculty awarded to the third author (7200738).
Notes
Correction (March 2023):
Article updated to correct Figure 3 with the dotted and solid lines swapped.
References
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