Psychological distance as a working tool for managers

Abstract

This article presents a synthesis of research that has drawn on the concept of psychological distance around questions related to prosocial consumer behavior, digitalization of consumption, and marketing practices. Our study is based on a meta-synthesis of 584 articles from psychology and marketing journals. It consolidates and validates the knowledge of the concept of psychological distance in these different marketing themes. It also shows how psychological distance can be used by managers to improve consumer responses. Managers can act directly on distance by reducing or increasing it to take advantage of the benefits of psychological proximity or remoteness. They can also adjust the variables of the marketing mix according to the psychological distance experienced by the consumer in order to make information processing more fluent and, ultimately, to improve the consumer’s responses.

How psychological distance shapes hedonic consumption: The moderating role of the need to justify

“…Consequently, consumer attitudes and preferences toward hedonic products are unstable (Lu et al, 2016) and may be impacted by several external factors such as promotion (Khan & Dhar, 2010;Kivetz & Zheng, 2017), product presentation (Okada, 2005), "magic price" (Choi et al, 2014), and the psychological distance experienced with these products (Didi Alaoui & Cova, 2021;Laran, 2010a;2010b;Maglio, 2020). Psychological distance plays an important role in hedonic consumption because it influences the difficulty in performing cognitive tasks (Thomas & Tsai, 2012), such as justifying the choice of hedonic products, and also impacts affective processes such as the intensity of feeling a positive emotion (i.e., excitement intensity) (Williams et al, 2014).…”