So hard to say goodbye? : a study on the impact of anthropomorphism on the retention of idle products

Anti-cold drugs prove effective in alleviating cold symptoms and minimizing complications. In recent years, there has been a growing tendency among the public to purchase these drugs online, driven by the prevalence of influenza. Maintaining a high level of consumer satisfaction is crucial for online pharmaceutical platforms. This study introduces a Multi-Attribute Decision Making (MADM) method to analyze online reviews from 31,392 consumers at JD Pharmacy. Unlike previous studies, multiple analytical tools are employed jointly to identify factors influencing consumer satisfaction. Four dosage forms of anti-cold drugs (granule, tablet, syrup, and spray) were analyzed using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model (LDA). Three tools (topic coherence curve, topic perplexity curve, and pyLDAvis visualization) were jointly applied. Then five satisfaction factors were identified as logistics distribution, drug efficacy, online consultation service, drug prices, and packaging quality. PROMETHEE II method was applied to rank the above factors. The results revealed variations in consumer satisfaction among different drug dosage forms. We conducted a detailed analysis of these distinctions. The results from this study will provide an effective reference to improve Through five studies, we examined how anthropomorphic design influences consumer retention of idle products during the post-purchase disposal phase. We also explored the psychological dynamics underpinning this effect and assessed how different types of message appeal-altruistic versus egoistic-modulate these dynamics. Our findings demonstrate that consumers are more likely to retain idle products with anthropomorphic designs compared to their non-anthropomorphic counterparts, owing to the anticipated guilt associated with the disposal of products with human-like qualities. This guilt-driven retention is mitigated by altruistic message appeals but remains intact under egoistic appeals, which provides an idea for alleviating the negative impact of product anthropomorphism.