Goal specificity or ambiguity? Effects of self-quantification on persistence intentions

Purpose: The current study implies self-quantification to consumer behavior and investigates how self-quantification influences consumers' persistence intentions, then indicates the underlying mechanism and examines the role of sharing in social media context. Design/methodology/approach: The hypotheses are tested by three experimental studies. In study 1, the authors test the main effect of self-quantification on persistence intentions and demonstrate goal specificity as the mediator. In study 2 and 3, the authors explore sharing and sharing audience as the moderators. Findings: The current research demonstrates that quantifying personal performance increases consumers' persistence intentions because self-quantification makes the focal goal more specific. However, sharing self-quantification performance with others has a negative effect on the relationship between self-quantification and persistence intentions. Building on goal conflict theory, sharing diverts consumers' focus away from the goal itself and toward others' evaluation and judgment, which makes the focal goal more ambiguous. Moreover, the negative effect depends on who is the sharing audience. When consumers share with close others who hold a similar goal with them, the negative effect of sharing is dramatically reversed. Practical implications: The present research offers guidelines to managers about how to design self-tracking system to increase user's engagement and how to establish social community on social media platform to motivate users' goal pursuit. Originality/value: This study contributes to the research of self-quantification from consumer behavior perspective. It also enriches interactive marketing literature by broadening self-quantification relevant research from social interaction dimension.