The Impact of Digital Marketing on Impulse Buying and Post-Purchase Dissonance

Modern digital marketing strategies often have the upper hand when it comes to psychological triggers, such as flash sale countdowns, promotional pop-up ads, and one-click checkouts, to encourage immediate, unplanned purchases. Extending Festinger’s (1957) Cognitive Dissonance Theory to consumer behavior as conceptualized by Sweeney et al. (2000), this study examines how exposure to digital marketing stimuli and individual impulsivity levels influence post-purchase cognitive dissonance. Specifically, this study investigates whether more intense marketing triggers elicit greater levels of post-purchase dissonance and whether an individual’s baseline impulsivity acts as a key predictor of psychological discomfort. Sixty undergraduate students (N = 60) from Murray State University’s Department of Psychology will be recruited through the SONA system. Participants will complete a single-session online study with three parts. First, participants will be randomly assigned to low and high digital marketing stimuli conditions and will complete a simulated purchasing task where they must choose between two different housing options. Immediately following the task, participants will complete the Multidimensional Cognitive Dissonance Scale (Sweeney et al., 2000) to measure their post-purchase dissonance. Finally, participants will complete the Impulse Buying Tendency Scale (IBTS; Verplanken & Herabadi, 2001) to evaluate cognitive and affective trait impulsivity as a predictor of dissonance scores. Data collection is actively in progress following Institutional Review Board approval. It is hypothesized that participants exposed to intense marketing stimuli will experience significantly higher post-purchase dissonance compared to those in the low stimuli condition. Additionally, higher scores on the IBTS are expected to positively predict post-purchase dissonance scores. The findings from this study will contribute to a better understanding of consumer decision-making in digital environments and highlight the psychological impact of aggressive online sales tactics.