Impulse Buying Of Tourists: Behavior, Experience Marketing And Effect Of Post-Purchase

With the accelerative development of China's tourism industry, the success and the survival of many retailers depend more on tourist shopping than local shopping. Consequently, retailers attach more importance to tourist shopping and are prepared to encourage impulse buying through effective marketing stimulus. But a large mount of research about impulse buying centers in the resident buying, empirical research about nonresident buying not found. Obviously these are two different environments, will customer purchase behavior change? Can the already existing theory models explain these changes? Because of these, this paper puts forward the following four questions. First, what's the impact of nonresident characteristic on impulse buying? Second, as the method of retailers concerned, are there any differences among the impulse buying behaviors induced by different experience activities? Which kind of experience activity is better? Why? Third, why are there obvious differences between impulse buying intention and behavior? Besides known limiting factors, are there other key factors? Fourth, how should we carry out the post-purchase evaluation of impulse buying? Does impulse buying definitely cause remorse?In order to answer the above four questions, this paper proceeding from the empiricism, using the knowledge from consumer behavior, psychology, economics and philosophy, adopting the methodology of questionnaire survey, interview and content analysis, taking tourists and tourism shopping as the sample, based on the Dholakia's impulse buying behavior model, adds nonresident, an independent variable and trust, a moderate variable into the model, studies the differences of impulse buying behaviors in different experience activities and explains them by assessing the role of emotions as mediators, finally makes the post-purchase evaluation of impulse buying behavior by introducing two dependent variables i.e. post-purchase satisfaction and post-purchase regret.For the first question, this paper adds nonresident variable to the Dholakia's impulse buying model, constructs four measurement dimensions including culture diversity, time pressure, repurchase cost, and purchase pressure via interview and content analysis, and then founds structural equation modeling of the relationship between nonresident variable and impulse buying behavior and tests the model hypotheses. The results show that perceived culture diversity, repurchase cost and purchase pressure have significantly positive correlation with impulse buying intention and behavior, among which the effect of purchase pressure is largest and then culture diversity, which of repurchase cost is comparative least.As to the second question, based on the experience dimension brought up by B.Joseph Pine and James H.Gilmore (2002), this paper divides experience activities in tourism shopping into three kinds: customer participation, customer learning, customer entertainment by interview and content analysis. Then on the basis of controlling vital statistics, the difference of impulse buying behavior in three different experience activities is discussed according to experience activities grouping and the explanation is given by assessing the role of emotions as mediators. The results indicate that customer participation is the most effective way on stimulating impulse buying, and customer learning and customer entertainment retain the second and third place respective. Customer participation can lead to more response of pleasure which produces the strongest impact on impulse buying. Customer learning can lead to more response of domination which has more influence on impulse buying.About the third question, trust is added as a moderate variable on the basis of Dholakia's impulse buying model which affecting impulse buying behavior. In this paper, the trust in tourism shopping is carved up into three dimensions: quality trust, price trust and service promise trust, the trust perception of tourists in the course of tourism shopping and the impact of trust perception on impulse buying behavior are also studied. Results suggest that tourists totally have low trust degree in tourism shopping, and trust can significantly affect impulse buying behavior and quantity; among the three dimensions of tourism shopping trust, tourists'trust perception to commodities quality is relatively the highest, service promise is relatively low and commodities price is relatively the lowest; as for the trust perception to service promise, tourists'trust perception to invoice is the highest, the second is guarantee against defects, field identification and product warranty which have no significant differences among them, and oral introduction is the lowest.Concerning the fourth question, two variables which are post-purchase satisfaction and post-purchase regret are introduced into this paper to make post-purchase appraisal to impulse buying behavior. On the basis of literature, nine major indicators which are price, commodities quality, local characteristic, practicability, triggering tour memory, service attitude, shopping experience, deserving collecting, worthy of giving as a present are abstracted by interview and content analysis, then post-purchase satisfaction of impulse buying in tourism shopping is analyzed by employing the Expectancy Disconfirmation Model, and the relationship between impulse buying behavior and post-purchase regret is tested by adopting the post-purchase regret scale (Youn, 2000). The indications of results are as follows: the perceived performance of tourists to tourism shopping is lower than expectation totally; the discrepancy between perceived performance and expectation of commodities quality is the biggest, the discrepancy of price is the least; the perceived performance of triggering tour memory is the biggest, which has relatively little discrepancy with expectation; impulse buying behavior will bring on post-purchase regret, and the more customers buy, the more remorse they feel, and there are significant differences between men and women in post-purchase regret, moreover, women have more post-purchase regret than men.In the end, conclusions and innovative achievements are summarized. Limitations and future research are also pointed out.