96 The Urge to Splurge asking about them, for example, holds the disadvantage that it might affect their impulsive behavior. Awareness of one’s urges can restrain people from acting on them (e.g., Papies, Barsalou, & Custers, 2012). This would argue against measuring impulse buying urges before measuring behavior. However, when desire is not explicitly measured and urge is only measured by asking to what extent someone wants to buy an item, as we did in Chapter 4, it remains uncertain if consumers experienced a strong sudden desire. Since we only used hedonic products in our studies, such as cookies or flowers, we can assume that the purchases were driven from desire, but we cannot know for certain. Concerning the second part of the definition of impulse buying, we aimed to measure unplanned buying behavior. It is difficult to rule out the possibility that participants already planned to buy the items to which they were exposed. We limited this possibility as much as possible, for example, by asking afterwards if they had planned to buy these items or by exposing the participants to very explicit products, such as vegan body lotion, while people were not in a shopping environment. This makes it very unlikely that people were already planning to buy these items in that moment. However, asking about whether a purchase was planned after the purchase was finalized could have resulted in biased answers, since consumers are prone to justify their impulsive behaviors (Warden, Wu, & Tsai, 2006). Furthermore, exposing people to explicit products does not guarantee that they were not already planning to buy these items. Therefore, it can be concluded that measuring impulse buying behavior remains challenging. We dare to state that an optimal methodology for accurately measuring impulse buying behavior has yet to be developed. Nonetheless, the present work does provide a feasible and valuable option for measuring impulse buying behavior, and herewith aimed to contribute to the literature on impulse buying. We showed that urges do not necessarily lead to behavior (Chapter 3) and that traits do not necessarily flow into urges or behavior (Chapter 4). Researchers studying this topic should, therefore, be aware and acknowledge that measuring only impulse traits or urges, as is frequently done (e.g., Dhandra, 2020), will not provide information on impulse buying behavior per se. Therefore, we encourage researchers on this topic to measure actual impulse buying behavior as well. This dissertation offers a viable option to measure impulse buying behavior, which could be replicated or built upon by other scholars in the field of impulse buying. Lastly, we appeal to researchers in the field of impulse buying behavior, to focus more on the topic of prevention. The body of knowledge on impulse buying contains mostly descriptive studies (e.g., the characteristics of impulsive buyers) or positive relational studies (e.g., how impulse buying urges can be increased). Although these studies provide valuable insights into the construct, they postulate a relatively one-sided view on impulse buying, namely who and when are people the most susceptible to buy on impulse. There is still much to gain on the topic of decreasing impulse buying behavior. Studies focusing on prevention can potentially contribute to environmental preservation. The environmental challenges that we are facing, makes this ethical perspective on consumer research increasingly important (Ma et al., 2024).
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