Effect of temporal landmarks on consumers’ preference for attribute alignability: The mediating role of creative self-efficacy

In the face of a rapidly changing consumer market, companies strive to innovate their products by either adopting a strategy of enhancement of attributes or focusing on uniqueness. Using the structural alignment model, we conducted two studies to investigate the influence of temporal landmarks on consumers’ diagnosticity of product attributes and the mediating role of creative self-efficacy in this link. Results indicated that consumers relied more on nonalignable (vs. alignable) attributes to evaluate a product when a start (vs. end) temporal landmark was activated. These findings have implications for marketing theory and companies’ product-communication strategies.