The Relationship Between Consumer Socialization Agents And Consumer Decision-Making Style

After consumer decision-making style inventory was exploited by Sproles& Kendall, it was used by many scholars in many countries to do the research of adolescent consumer decision-making style in their countries. There are several researchers in our country who have done the survey of style of general consumers and that of students in university and college using CSI. But there is no CSI was used in the research of the generation of 1980s'. The generations born in 1980s' are good at computer skill and they surf internet in their study and day life, so they are called "e-generation". The study of consumer socialization was noticed in 1970s'. It has three basic factors, including antecedents,process of socialization and outcomes. According to M&C model, it is effected by three factors, including family,peers and mass media, and these factors will effect the consumer decision-making style as well. Consumer decision-making style is one of the results of consumer socialization, so it will be affected by the three factors above. The empirical research by Shim in 1996 supports this view.The questionnaire used in this paper is designed based on the research of many scholars and the informants are the e-generation college student. It is found that there are seven decision-making styles in the college student. We discussed the correlation between census variables,three factors which affect consumer socialization and consumer decision-making style. Then we found that there are six factors, saying, gender,education level,expenditure per month,attitude react to media,peers and family which had notable correlation with consumer decision-making style. Based on the conclusion, we recommended that the marketing practitioner should consider the advertisement and word-of-mouth marketing in marketing and gave suggestions for future research.