The data reveal that, when making hedonic purchases (such as toys), consumers employ social media and on-site product pages as early as two weeks before the final purchase. By contrast, for utilitarian purchases (such as office supplies), consumers utilize third-party reviews up to two weeks before the final purchase and make relatively greater usage of search engines, deals, and competitors’ product pages closer to the time of purchase. Importantly, channel usage is different for sessions where no purchase is made, indicating that consumers’ information channel choices vary significantly with the H/U characteristics of purchases.

1. From: Li et al. (2020)
Path to Purpose?
How Online Customer Journeys Differ
for Hedonic versus Utilitarian Purchases
Marketing spending allocation strategy should
be adjusted based on shopping purchases

2. From: Li et al. (2020)From:
 Google’s Zero Moment of Truth finds consumer search
behaviors to be driven by purposes, such as the need for
experiences, surprise and thrill.
 We examine consumers’ information search for hedonic and
utilitarian (H/U) consumption purposes.
What is a Path-to-Purchase?

3. From: Li et al. (2020)From:
Utilitarian Purchases
 Goal-driven
 Cognition focused
 Focus on tangible product
attributes
 More brand switching
 Deliberate attribute processing
 Examples:
- Office supplies
- Paper products
Hedonic Purchases
 Fun, experiential, variety seeking
 Emotion focused
 Focus on intangible product
attributes
 Less brand switching
 More heuristic or holistic processing
 Examples:
- Toys
- Jewelry
Utilitarian versus Hedonic Purchases

4. From: Li et al. (2020)From:
 We examined shopping behaviors (around $1.2 million sales) on 20
product categories and 40 online retailers across two-years.
 We compared information search on search engine, social media,
product reviews, deals and product pages of hedonic/utilitarian
purchases between converted and unconverted sessions across early,
middle and late stage of the customer pre-purchase journeys.
 We found that consumers use different information channels to realize
their hedonic versus utilitarian purchases.
Research Insights

5. From: Li et al. (2020)
 We conducted a survey involving 3,250 Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT)
participants to report their H/U perceptions towards 115 common retailer-
categories.
 We found that the same product category is perceived differently across retailers
- For example, garden supplies are hedonic when purchased from Home Depot but not Walmart
 These differences in the hedonic and utilitarian characteristics could lead to
different customer journeys
Hedonic and Utilitarian Characteristics
of Purchases at Three Retailers

6. From: Li et al. (2020)
Hedonic Products
Usage
Early (8-14 days) Middle (2-7 days) Late (0-1 day) Purchase
Competitors’
product pages
Target
Product Pages
Target
Product Pages
Usage
Early (8-14 days) Middle (2-7 days) Late (0-1 day) Purchase
Utilitarian Products

7. From: Li et al. (2020)From:
 Marketing strategies and spending should reflect these information search differences
 For retailers selling hedonic products:
 Embrace social media: Advertise on social media; design social coupons
 Monitor on-site product page views: improve the experiential features of the product pages; reach out to
heavy browsers with promotions with a longer redemption time.
 Black Friday Strategy: market their promotional content on social media and send reminder emails
inviting on-site traffic two weeks earlier than Black Friday.
 For retailers selling utilitarian products:
 Benchmark price and product: conduct price and product benchmark analysis; invest in automated
benchmarking tools
 Prioritize search engine marketing: prioritize SEM over SEO; choose paid keywords that are more
related to product features and benefits
 Black Friday Strategy: extend sales period up to one week.
Marketing Implications