An Empirical Research On Impulse Buying In Chinese Urban Consumer

The goal of Marketing lies in distinguishing varied and varying needs of consumer, and meets consumer's demand in a more effective way than competitors. To achieve this goal, the most important work is to research consumer behavior, to understand the relations among emotion, cognition, and behavior, as well as to identify links between above variable and environment variable and marketing strategy. The consumer behavior research is a time-consuming and "tasteless" work. But no one will deny its fundamental role in marketing, nor can we overlook its prime role in developing marketing strategy.In China, 20 more years has passed since domestic marketing research began. However, still little we know about Chinese consumer behavior. It is dare to say that we understand the behavior of American consumer than we understand that of Chinese. In consumer behavior research domain, most theories and partial conclusions have no differences between East and West, moreover along with development of world economics integration, progress of Chinese society, and increasing power of Chinese consumer, the difference between Chinese urban consumer and the western's will be smaller and smaller, however, just this kind of difference is our interest in . Moreover it is the foundation of formulating marketing strategy. In consumer behavior research, impulse buying which started 50 years ago is one of focus of enterprise and consumer researcher. To enterprises, impulse buying holds fairly high proportion in supermarket retailing sales, and even occupies 80%volumes in certain product purchase; also, the non-planed purchase has been rising steadily for many years. At the same time impulse purchases is very important to many new products marketing. As to consumer behavior researchers, the decision process of impulse buying is one of the most difficult aspects to explain, therefore a challenge for them.Reviewing research on impulse buying indicates that in the past 50 years, keypoint of research has shifted from the product to consumer behavior. In the early time, researchers took impulse buying and non-planed purchase regards as synonym, and operated it by measuring the difference between reported purchase after exit and shopping plan before entering store. This kind of definition facilitates researchers to focus on the store environment, thus to promote impulse purchases. At the same time, items are classified into impulse items and non-impulse items. This procedure helps retailers in making marketing strategy. In 1970s, researcher starts to discuss the rationality on classifying item into impulse items and non-impulse ones. When in 1985, Rook and Hoch's research starts to reveal the essence of impulse buying, which began to focus attention on the cognitive and emotional responses that consumers may experience during an impulse purchase. Afterwards, Rook and his colleague shifted the focal point of this domain from the product to the consumer behavior. Former researches had already discovered many factors which influence impulse buying behavior, such as Consumer's mood or emotion reaction, impulsive buying tendency, normative influence, self concept and demographic statistics. Generally speaking, present research concentrates in the consumer's personality and the behavior background.Researchers in this domain are interested in how to explain the impulse purchases decision making process, of which the key is how the preference come into being, why there be time inconsistence in the preference, and why consumer jump to a buying decision so hash. This dissertation attempts to explain all these questions by reviewing existing theory of psychology, economic and consumer behavior research. Preference formulation is explained by self-concept, time-inconsistence by delayed gratification and prospect theory, and rapidity by emotion theory and self-control theory.The main parts of my dissertation lie in 2 empirical researches on Chinese urban consumer's impulse purchases behaviors. Chapter 3, using the knowledge of psychology, neuropathology and former study on impulse purchases, is to develop an impulse buying tendency scale which conforms to the Chinese consumer culturalcontext. Based on student samples, we developed a 26 items impulse buying tendency scale. Also? the validity and reliability have been examined.In chapter 4, we introduced some emotion theory relating to impulse buying behavior, which will be part of theory background for our study in chapter 5.As the core of our research, chapter 5 examined the relations among some main influence factors, such environment variables, consumer emotion reactions, and buying intend and actual buying. At the same time, we also confirmed the predictive validity of our scale.In the final part, we concluded some implications for marketing strategy.Our study is exploratory in Chinese consumer behavior research, although we used confirmative method. Statistics on impulse buying rate in China is still lacking, which is important to researchers and managers.