The Exploratory Study On Consumer Decision-Making Styles Of The College Students

Consumer Decision-Making Style, as we know, is those comparatively stable and consistent attitudes, habits, ways and methods as to making decision. According to Sproles (1985), it was also defined as a mental orientation characterizing a consumer's approach to making choices, and it can dominate consmers'choices. The great majority of consumers would be essentially influenced by one or more orientations when they are shopping.Even since the systematic research on Consumer Decision-Making Styles and the naissance of CSI (Consumer Style Inventory) by Sproles and Kendall in 1985, Consumer Decision-Making Styles has been a hot spot in consumer research with many a research being conducted, while most of which were application and development under different cultures (Hafstrom et al., 1992; Fan and Xiao, 1998; Lysonski and Durvasula, 1993 and 1995). The already known countries involved include America, Germany, Korea, New Zealand, etc. While few could be seen utilizing samples in undeveloped countries. In China, althrough Fan and Xiao (1998) has made an exploratory research, it has been 10 years. Given that consumer decision-making style is germane to the economic status, the result of Fan and Xiao's research is going to be verified in today's Chinese environment.Based on the above discussion, this dissertation aimed to explore the comsumer decision-making styles of the contemporary university students and probe into the relationship between Consumer Decision-Making Styles and Personal Values with the samples getting from Changchun City, Jilin Province. After the literature revies, we first determined the research scales, that is, CSI for Consumer Decision-Making Style and RVS for Personal Values. Then we selected five universities in Changchun City and distributed a total of 200 questionnaires, 40 to each university. A total of 165 questionnaires were returned. However, only 127 were usable for the analysis. During the formal data analysis, we gained the concrete consumer decision-making styles and the personal values at first of the contemporary Chinese university students respectively using the exploratory factor analysis and the reliability analysis. Than we used the method of PCS (Profile of Consumer Style) to make an overall description of the consumer decision-making styles and personal values of the contemporary college students. In the main while, we also made a cluster analysis to sort the students into several categories according to the consumer decision-making styles. Finally, we proceeded Pearson correlation and stepwise multiple regression analysis to find the relationship between Consumer Decision-Making Style and Personal Values. The following are conclusions drawed from this dissertation.(1) Ten consumer decision-making styles are identified within the college students: Brand Consciousness, Novelty-Fashion Consciousness, Perfectionism chased, Impulsiveness and Casualism, Recreation and Hedonism, Confused by Overchoice, Price Sensitive, Variety Seeking, Quality Consciousness and Influenced by Word-of-Mouth.(2) No prevalent relationship exists as we had expected between Consumer Decision-Making Styles and Personal Values except for several pairs, which are: Perfectionism chased and Goodliness and Harmoniousness; Novelty-Fashion Consciousness and Perfect Quality; Recreation and Hedonism and Perfect Quality; Recreation and Hedonism and Goodliness and Harmoniousness; Quality Consciousness and Perfect Quality; Influenced by Word-of-Mouth and Empressement and Friendliness.(3) We classified the students sample by consumer decision-making styles into four different groups: Shopping-unconcerned consumers, Brand-favored consumers, Quality emphasized consumers and Perfectionism-Fashionism consumers. These four types of students are significantly differed at 7 of the 10 decision-making styles, but are not significant at all personal values. The result of this research further confirm the already known conclusion that consumer decision-making style is germane to the economic level of a country or an area. Besides, it is proved that consumer decision-making style differs as well at different stages as to a country or an area's economic development. This dissertation, theoretically speaking, can be used for reference for the future research that would be preceded in other areas or within other groups, and what's more, it will conduce businessmen to know and understand better and deeper the college students. In this sense, it will lend implications for the enterprises to make marketing plans. However, there do exist undeniably certain insufficiencies in this research.To begin with, the sample size is relatively small. Because of the RVS scale itself, there were still quite a lot of unusable questionnaires with too much"4"and"5"deleted, despite the revise to the items before the distribution of the questionnaires. So, it is suggested that more attention in the future research be given to the sample, guarantee the sample size and improve the answer quality of questionnaires.In the second place, the appropriateness of the scales. The CIS and RVS scale were both developed in western countries and maybe they should be given certain revise in applying Chinese culture and economic environment, especially for RVS, whose too many'4'and'5'absolutely had certain influeces on the objectiveness of the research. The future research can attempt to do this.Finally, although this reseach has given a classification to the contemporary Chinese college student consumers, yet no method of effectively identifying the different groups and no discussion upon the marketing strategies concerning to different groups has been given. The future research can give more consideration.