Goal‐directed behaviors in marketing: The role of emotion, volition, and motivation

Much of marketing behavior is purposive. Yet little theory and even less research can be found in the literature concerning purposive marketing activities. This special issue focuses upon the role of emotions in goal-directed consumption. Emotions perform different functions and operate at different levels under various stages of consumer decision making. The five articles presented in this issue reflect this. In the first article, Mano explores the moderating effects of emotions. Pleasantness and arousal interact with involvement to govern the course of information processing in a persuasion context. In the next two articles, emotions function as intervening variables. Miller and Marks study the ability of emotions to mediate the effect of personality on product satisfaction. They operationalize emotions as positive and negative affects, where each component of affect consists of an aggregation of multiple discrete emotional responses. Sherman, Mathur, and Smith investigate the power of emotions to mediate the effects of environmental retail stimuli on shopping behaviors. Emotion here was conceived as a two-dimensional pleasure/arousal phenomenon. Emotions function as well as important dependent variables in the fourth article, by Mooradian and Olver. Here emotions were measured through a number of positive affect and arousal/activity items. Gould