Can planning prompt be a boon for impulsive customers? Moderating roles of product category and decisional procrastination

Extant research in the Impulse Buying (IB) domain has predominantly focused on how it can be enhanced and has mostly benefitted marketers. This research, however, shifts the focus to consumers and how they can mitigate or reduce impulse buying. Drawing on Action Regulation Theory (ART), we posit that planning prompts mitigates impulse buying; and that this mitigating effect is stronger for individuals with high (vis-à-vis low) decisional procrastination as also for vice (vis-à-vis virtue) products. Hypotheses were tested using two studies conducted in India. Study 1 (n = 200) was conducted using a vignette-based experiment in a hypothetical scenario while Study 2 (n = 200) was a field experiment conducted on consumers in a mall setting. Our research advances knowledge with regard to mitigating avoidable impulse buying and adds to extant research on planning prompts. We also document key theoretical and managerial implications of our findings.