How Consumers Cope with Buying Counterfeits: Effects of Dissonance Reduction Strategies

Abstract

Previous research has provided weak results for the impact of the consciousness of illegality or moral reasoning on purchase decisions for counterfeit products (Eisend and Schuchert-Güler 2006). Those studies have further shown that consumers tend to be satisfied with counterfeit purchases and have a strong inclination to repurchase (Bloch, Bush, and Campbell 1993; Kwong et al. 2003; Tom et al. 1998). Given the fact that purchasing counterfeit products is an illegal behavior, these results let us question how consumers manage to ignore moral concerns.