The role of justice motives, just world beliefs, and personal values in consumer brand experiences

Justice plays a vital role in shaping consumer decisions. Despite the valuable insights that market justice perceptions, just world beliefs, and personal values provide in understanding fairness throughout the customer journey, there is a lack of research on how these factors collectively impact brand experiences during the pre-purchase stage. The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice message frames, just world beliefs, and consumers’ personal values on brand experience during the pre-purchase stage of the online customer journey. The study first conducted a best–worst scaling survey to determine which justice principles online shoppers value most. This was followed by an online 4x1 experiment using a fictional telemedicine website called Digihealth.life to assess the efficacy of justice frames in moderating the mediated relationship between just world beliefs and brand experience at the pre-purchase stage. The results of the 625 randomly assigned Amazon Mechanical Turk participants confirmed a positive correlation between belief in a just world and brand experience in the telemedicine context. The study also showed that individuals’ personal values of being well-respected and a sense of belonging contribute to the influence of just world beliefs on their brand experiences. This research advances the application of justice motive theory in a telemedicine context, and highlights the reciprocal relationship between justice and consumer psychological processes, and how personal values influence this dynamic, ultimately to impact online consumer brand experiences during the pre-purchase stage.