A Impulse Buying Study Based On Personality Trait

Impulse buying is pervasive and has been studied by western researchers for almost 60 years. In recent years, with the rapid growth of Chinese economy and the change of consumer's consumption attitude, impulse buying is accounting for more and more proportion of Chinese retailing.Consumer's personality trait is one of the antecedent variables which researchers have been focusing on. However, in the past, the studies focusing on personality trait mainly were limited to impulse buying tendency and classified consumers as high, middle and low impulse buyer according to impulse buying tendency. But it is known that the impulse buying tendency measures the result of desire conflicting with self-control. In fact, the process of impulse buying includes both impulse impetus and self-control which pull consumer in opposite direction. Therefore, impulse buying tendency can not classify the consumers with high impulse buying impetus from the one with low impulse buying impetus. The consumers with high impulse buying impetus may not behave more impulsively than others because he/she may be also can control him/herself more effectively. For the retailer, however, only the consumers with high impulse buying impetus will really contribute to his sales greatly. If he can manage to change this kind of consumers' attitude and make them think impulse buying appropriate, he will get the great potential sales from these consumers. On the contrary, for the consumers with low impulse buying impetus, even if their attitude is changed successfully, the retailer can not increase their sales too much from these consumers.The development of study in psychology and further understanding of individuals provides theory for further study of impulse buying based on consumer's personality traits. Higgins proposed that individual's self-regulation involves two separate systems: the promotion system, which regulates nurturance needs and goals related to aspiration and accomplishment (i.e., "ideals"), and the prevention system, which regulates security needs and goals related to safety and responsibilities. Regulatory focus influence consumer's behavior widely. Study 1 of this thesis investigated that how chronic promotion focus affect impulse buying. In the study, a hypothetic scenario was used. A total of 256 students (46.7% male) participated in the test. With SEM (AMOS 7.0) analysis showed that (1) chronic promotion focus had a positive direct effect on impulsive buying tendency; (2) chronic promotion focus had a positive direct effect on self-control trait; (3) chronic promotion focus had a negative indirect effect on impulsive buying tendency through self-control trait; (4) chronic promotion focus had neither direct on impulse buying nor the total indirect effect is significant. The findings suggest that retailers should target the individuals with high promotion focus as their customers.While impulse buying behavior is the result of desire conflicting self-control, whether the consumer exert self-control depends on normative evaluation. Past research never investigated the influence of normative evaluation on impulse buying based on personality trait. The development of self-construal theory contributes to fill this gap. Self-construal refers to an individual's sense of self in relation to others. Two primary types of self-construal have been identified: the independent and the interdependent. People with independent self-construal see the self as stable and separate from interpersonal context and value self-promotion, autonomy, assertiveness, and uniqueness. People with interdependent self-construal, on the other hand, see the self as more flexible and intertwined with the social context and value maintaining group harmony and fitting in. Accordingly, self-construal is assumed to affects how individuals perceive the normative evaluation and the extent to which individual comply with it. However, the presence of different company affects the consumer's normative evaluation. In order to investigate how self-construal affects impulse buying with different company, hypothetical scenarios were used. Results of two experiments showed that self-construal has different influence on impulse buying when shopping with different company. Especially, when shopping with company who tends to approve impulse buying, the difference of impulse buying level is not significant between interdependent and independent self-construal individuals; when shopping with company who tends not to approve impulse buying, the difference of impulse buying level is significant between the two types of self-construal individuals. The findings suggest that retailers should put more attention on consumers with independent self-construal. Especially, in some buying situations which are not consistent to traditional value, the retailers should make the independent consumers to affect dependent ones.This thesis has some limitations. For example, extant literatures indicate that there are some inherent links between regulatory focus and self-construal. But this thesis has not put them together and investigates that how they affect impulse buying together. In further study, this can be an interesting research topic.