Styles, Affecting the Consumer Buying Behavior in the Men’s Casual Wear Market in India- Hypothesis Testing and Factor Analysis

Abstract

Sproles and Kendall, 1986, defined a consumer decision-making style as 'a mental orientation characterizing a consumer's approach to making choices. 'In the extant consumer behaviour literature, most studies assume that all consumers approach shopping with certain decision-making traits that combine to form a consumer's decision-making styles. They developed a comprehensive instrument called Consumer Style Inventory to measure consumer decision-making styles. This instrument measures eight mental characteristics of consumer's decision making: perfectionism, brand consciousness. Novelty-fashion consciousness, recreational, price-value consciousness, impulsiveness, confused by over choice, and brand-loyal/habitual. Consumer Style Inventory has been used in the study to determine the consumer decision-making styles in India with respect to casual wear market for urban workingmen. Exploratory Factor Analysis was used to determine the factors that affect consumer decision making among men in India with respect to casual wear This study also made use of chi square analysis for hypothesis testing to determine the dependency or independency of demographic factors on behavioral variables. The study concluded that there are nine consumer decision-making styles amongst urban Indian workingmen in the Casualwear market, which deviate marginally from the original Splores and Kendall, 1986 model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)