A Quantitative Study on Fashion Consumers.
One of the most common behaviours in consumerism is impulse buying, that regards any purchase which a consumer makes that it was not planned in advance and it is a vital phenomenon for retail businesses and marketing and over the years, impulse buying behaviour has been approached from different angles. Therefore, this study aims to approach this phenomenon from a fashion perspective and detect if there is any relationship between fashion involvement and impulsive buying behaviour, so companies and marketers can be more aware of their consumer’s buying habits as hedonic consumption may have catastrophic effects on the environment.
Hypotheses and Results
"It was hypothesized that it will be a positive correlation between fashion involvement and impulse buying. People who score higher on fashion involvement will also score higher on impulse buying."
Men and women between the ages of 18 to 60 were asked to participate in an online survey. For the recruitment criteria random, convenience and snowball sampling were used, as also advertisements through social media to recruit participants with different ages and from different countries. Participants were asked to complete and online questionnaire.
Data Analysis
Data from 50 participants were collected. Data were analysed using SPSS statistics software. The reliability of both scales was tested using a Cronbach’s Alpha test. Then the results were tested to see whether or not data were normally distributed using Shapiro-Wilk tests of normality. After normality was tested, correlation between the two continuous variables of fashion involvement and impulse buying was used to test the main hypothesis. To answer the secondary research questions a standard multiple regression with a dummy variable of gender was used to explore the relationship with the independent predictors.
Results
"There will be a significant difference between men and women. Hence, women will score higher on both fashion involvement and impulse buying than men and differences will also be detected on age."
The findings indicate that there was positive relationship between fashion and impulse buying, but it cannot be assumed if the one affects the other. Therefore, it cannot be presumed that people who are more involved in fashion tend also to be more impulse buyers. However, it was unexpected that the study did not find significant results between gender and age. Maybe this was due to the sample size being not enough representative to support the secondary hypothesis.
Limitations and Future Suggestions
There are a few limitations regarding this study, as a lot of other factors may have been significant on impulse buying behaviour. The study might have been more consisted if all other factors were taken into account. There is also an aspect of the study that may experience a weakness, as the number of participants may not have been enough representative. Besides, a mixed methods approach with interviews or study groups might have been better for this study, but due to the limited time this was unlike to happen. The results open new directions for future research, a study using the eye-tracker in relation with impulse buying may be really interesting or a research on impulse buying in relation with personality and individual differences may be considered.
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