While research has traditionally viewed consumers as either planners or doers, the study published in the Journal of Consumer Research highlights the previously unrecognised “thinking phase” before planning and doing, and that consumers engage in deliberate planning only after considering alternatives.
“Prior studies tended to put people into two camps — planners and doers – and they found a lot of disadvantages to being a planner, such as having more rigid schedules, less spontaneous behaviour, and feeling less autonomous,” said Young Eun Huh, assistant professor of marketing in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and the study’s lead author. “Our study shows that most consumers are actually thinking consumers who plan ahead, but they don’t necessarily execute those plans.”
For the study, Huh and her co-authors surveyed more than 1,500 consumers using hypothetical purchases and real life scenarios to understand how they make decisions. Researchers developed a scale to measure planning-orientation on both time and money spending.
The findings reveal that:
- Most consumers are thinking planners: They think extensively about their purchases and make deliberate plans, but not all execute them.
- Planning pays off in a variety of ways: planners are better at resisting shopping temptations and making decisions aligned with their preferences and values.
- There are benefits to being flexible with planned purchases: Being able to adjust a plan based on new information or a surprise sale was associated with higher life satisfaction.
To further understand how consumers plan and make decisions, the researchers conducted an additional study with 88 students. They were assigned to either a planning condition (i.e., make a plan for their upcoming week with specific time allocations for their activities and budget for spending), or a control condition.
The results reveal that students in the planning condition made purchase decisions more aligned with their preferences and values, and they experienced higher levels of subjective well-being and perceived autonomy compared to those in the control condition.
The study, “Planners and Doers Redux: The Role of Planning Orientation in Consumer Decision Making,” was co-authored by Cornell’s Lisa Bolton and Stanford University’s Itamar Simonson, and was supported with funding from the Marketing Science Institute.
