This dissertation, like all research, carries limitations that are discussed next. The limitations serve as bridges to new research ideas that merit attention in future studies.
This dissertation begins with an extensive conceptualization effort to understand the concept of ambivalence. As a result, an improved definition for ambivalence is provided.
In the definition, it is argued that ambivalence can be a property of any evaluative psychological concept. Preliminary supporting evidence for this argument can be found from recent literature suggesting that, for example, by adopting an ambivalence perspective to trust research, it is possible to develop more accurate insight about trust (Ou and Sia 2010; Moody et al., 2014). Accordingly, the wide use of ambivalence in different areas of research in marketing is advocated, and ambivalence is proposed as a framework with broad applicability to various areas of marketing. However, in this dissertation, the focus has been on attitudes, and therefore more specific insight on ambivalence in different evaluative concepts was not studied. Future research is encouraged in this area, as it would generate relevant insight for a wide audience of researchers in marketing. Additionally, the objective of the conceptual work (Publication I) was to develop the definition of ambivalence, or in other words, generate an improved understanding of what ambivalence is. To take this work further, additional conceptual work is needed to, for example, synthesize the attitude strength approach to ambivalence (Petty and Krosnick, 1995) and the MAID model (van Harreveld et al., 2009) to generate a more holistic conceptual understanding of the antecedents and consequences of ambivalence in the area of marketing.
While applying the ambivalence concept more widely, future research is also needed to understand the differences between ambivalence and other psychological conflicts in greater depth. Although the conceptual differences between ambivalence and, for example, cognitive dissonance are understood, comparative research on the consequences of these different conflicts on decision-making would enable understanding when and to what extent these conflicts are elicited though different factors and resolved differently.
In other words, a more comprehensive and general theorizing around different types of conflicts (including ambivalence) in research in marketing is necessary. This would also involve research on the relationship between choice conflicts (i.e., not knowing which alternative to choose when all alternatives area equally attractive; Tversky and Shafir, 1992) and ambivalence.
In this dissertation, many of the negative implications of ambivalence have been outlined, accompanied with preliminary findings regarding the positive consequences of ambivalence. The negative orientation toward ambivalence is in line with most research in marketing addressing individual responses to ambivalence, where it is widely assumed, and found, that ambivalence leads to negative outcomes from a marketing perspective (Jewell et al., 2002; Berndsen and van der Pligt, 2004; Costarelli and Colloca, 2004; Olsen et al., 2005; Penz and Hogg 2011). However, researchers in the field of management have proposed that ambivalence may also lead to positive outcomes (Fong 2006; Rees et al., 2013). Additionally, sometimes individuals might even seek experiences that generate ambivalent emotions, such as in the case of high-risk leisure activities (Celsi et al., 1993), and ambivalence has also been associated with increased attitude-behavior consistency (Jonas et al., 1997). Yet, there is little research on the potential positive consequences of ambivalence for consumer or organizational decision-making. This dissertation shows that ambivalence has positive consequences in the early stages of the decision-making process, on the landing page of a company website (Sipilä et al., 2016), thus providing preliminary insight into this topic. It would be relevant for future researchers to study what drives these effects. Perhaps when asked to evaluate a service, ambivalence on a landing page of a website has a positive influence on behavioral intentions because the customer needs to cope with ambivalence by searching for additional information about the company. Subsequently, once the customer has reached product information pages but still has not been able to resolve ambivalence, it might begin to have a negative influence on behavioral intentions because the customer does not believe that ambivalence toward this particular option can be resolved and stops engaging in further coping efforts. Additional research is needed on such dynamics, as well as the individual and environmental factors that turn the consequences of ambivalence positive or negative from a marketing perspective. Such an understanding would not only be theoretically interesting, but it would also help companies to understand when ambivalence should be minimized and in which cases it may not be equally problematic.
In terms of the decision-making process, one limitation of this dissertation is that the post-decision or post-purchase stage is not included in the empirical studies. However, ambivalence affects the pre- and post-purchase stages of the decision-making process (Roster and Richins, 2009), and many consequences of ambivalence, such as satisfaction or loyalty (Olsen et al., 2005), take place after the decision-making process for the focal product or service has been completed. In addition, the question remains as to whether ambivalence is reduced only before choice, or also after choice, and accordingly, whether there is a difference between post-decisional ambivalence and cognitive dissonance (Jewell et al., 2002). Future studies taking the post-decision or post-purchase processes into account as a part of the multi-stage decision-making process would provide an even more complete understanding of the role of ambivalence in decision-making processes.
While ambivalence was studied in multiple time points in this dissertation, the dynamics of ambivalence could be studied on a more detailed level in future research. In this dissertation, ambivalence was studied on the level of an entire stage of a decision-making process, or an aggregate of visits to certain types of web pages. However, encouraging
advancements have been made recently on the continuous measurement and analysis of ambivalence (Larsen et al., 2009; Larsen and McGraw 2011; Schneider et al., 2013;
Schneider et al., 2015). Studying the dynamics of ambivalence in such a detailed manner would be a natural next step to take the research conducted in this dissertation further.
For example, it was found that ambivalence on product information web pages has a negative influence on intentions to proceed in the decision-making process, and future research could analyze ambivalence data on a more fine-grained temporal level to determine whether there are specific elements on product information pages that systematically trigger ambivalence. This would enable an understanding of not only the consequences, but also the antecedents of ambivalence on a moment-to-moment basis.
The empirical research was mostly conducted in different “real-life” decision-making contexts. While this permits greater external validity than, for example, laboratory experiments, it also makes it more difficult to know all of the factors that contributed to ambivalence (Jewell et al., 2002). Hence, experimental research is recommended to further validate the results. On the other hand, larger-scale studies in various contexts are necessary to increase the generalizability of the results. This dissertation is among the first attempts to build an understanding of the role of ambivalence in the decision-making process, and therefore is partly exploratory in nature. Hence, future studies will have to confirm the findings through rigorous theory testing and continue building a holistic understanding around this important topic.
Finally, this dissertation presented the concept of ambivalence into the area of organizational buying behavior. In this work, consumer research and psychological research were applied to the area of organizational buying behavior. This was seen as a reasonable starting point because although the organizational and consumer buying contexts can be very different, in the case of complex, high-involvement decision-making, they are quite similar. Additionally, to move toward a more general understanding of marketing phenomena, it is beneficial to place less emphasis on the differences between consumer and organizational marketing because “industrial and consumer marketing are more similar than different” (Fern and Brown, 1984, p. 69).
Further, it has been suggested that the differences within consumer and industrial marketing are greater than the differences between the two (Fern and Brown, 1984).
Furthermore, in this dissertation the level of analysis was individual behavior, and therefore it was assumed that consumer and psychological research, which focuses on the behavior of individuals, would be applicable to organizational buying behavior. However, organizational buying behavior often involves a buying group, and different group dynamics and conflicts may come into play in organizational decision-making, which were not addressed in this dissertation. Furthermore, organizational buying may involve more interpersonal negotiations than consumer decision-making. Therefore, future research should broaden the level of analysis from individual to group decision-making and interpersonal communication when studying ambivalence in organizational decision-making processes.
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