Healthy food exposition attendees’ purchasing strategies: a mental budgeting perspective

Purpose Grounded in the theory of mental budgeting, this paper aims to investigate how the regret and perfectionism of exposition attendees influences their purchasing strategy. Design/methodology/approach This research collected on-site data at a well-established specialty food exposition in China. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were applied to test the proposed model. Findings The findings confirm the effect of psychological mechanism (regret and perfectionism) on exposition attendees’ purchasing strategy as one that boosts/impairs their confidence in purchasing healthy food at the exposition. Specifically, regret and perfectionism show differential contributions to purchasing strategy dimensions. Variety seeking has a positive effect, whereas price consciousness has a negative effect, on purchase confidence. Practical implications Event organizers and exhibitors should understand attendees’ consumption-related psychological mechanism and devise effective management and marketing strategies for optimal consumption experiences at expositions. They can create an informative and worry-free experience that facilitates a pleasant thought process to reduce uncertainty in attendees’ on-site decision-making. Originality/value The current research pioneered a unique model conceptualizing the important, yet underexplored, phenomenon of purchasing mechanism in the exposition setting. Addressing the emerging interest in food expositions, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first for examining purchasing mechanism from the perspective of mental budgeting, providing insightful knowledge about how the psychological mechanism affects exposition attendees’ pre-purchase evaluation and confidence toward purchasing healthy food at expositions.