2.1 Marketing tactical effects based on adjacency
Consumers are goal-based shoppers, and specific shopping goals influence behavior. Liu et al. (2008) suggest that consumer motivation influences sensitivity to specific information in the shopping environment. Consumers looking for deals will be more focused on deals than other shoppers, while those looking for a specific brand have a different task to locate the brand, and hence, different shopping motivations should lead to different contextual evaluations and, therefore, sales outcomes. When a specific item is featured (appears in the store flyer), consumers looking for (or at) the featured item will see adjacent items and potentially consider them for purchase. This has the simple effect of increasing attention for items adjacent to the featured item. As locating the featured item is the primary goal in this case, we expect an increased attention effect that is independent of price differences for the brands. Therefore, we posit the following hypothesis: