Assessing and Predicting Apparel Impulse Buying

Abstract

Apparel offers consumers a high hedonic value associated with experiential pleasure. Being fashion driven with a focus on newness and change, apparel products can create an illusion of something fantastic. In turn, this subjects apparel to various hedonic behaviors such as impulse buying. The more consumers browse apparel stores to get an idea about the latest trends in the market, rather than relying on a shopping list, the greater the possibility of impulse shopping. Moreover, consumers are likely to be more divergent on what they want than what they need. This suggests apparel as a product category as a stimulus effecting impulse purchases. Impulse buying is considered a pervasive phenomenon in modern lifestyles and it accounts for a substantial percentage of products sold across a broad range of categories. One explanation may be that consumers buy products for a variety of non-economic reasons or hedonic tendency, such as fun, fantasy and social or emotional gratification. By stimulating consumers to recognize product needs, in-store browsing plays an important role in influencing impulse buying behavior. Also, impulse buying is activated by the emotions aroused in the proximity of an appealing object. This emotional response may occur largely without regard to financial or other consequences. Based on the extant literature, we developed a conceptual framework to analyze how predictors (hedonic tendency, in-store browsing, and shopping emotion) affect apparel impulse buying. Five hypotheses were tested during an apparel shopping episode to determine if: hedonic tendency is positively related to shopping emotion (H1); hedonic tendency is positively related to in-store browsing (H2); in-store browsing is positively related to shopping emotion (H3); in-store browsing is positively related to impulse buying typologies (H4); and shopping emotion is positively related to impulse buying typologies (H5). A questionnaire was developed based on literature review. Data were obtained from 290 college students enrolled at a southwestern state university in the U.S. Following verification the measurement items, path analysis was conducted using LISREL 8.53. A path model shows that six paths have significantly positive relationships. This empirical study of assessing and predicting apparel impulse buying extends the understanding of predictors for and provides an extended structural model of apparel impulse buying. This study reveals three typologies underlying apparel impulse buying: Fashion-oriented impulse buying, Memory-oriented impulse buying, and Browsing-oriented impulse buying. Findings indicate a consumer’s hedonic tendency is a significant predictor of shopping emotion and in-store browsing and it is pertinent to apparel impulse buying. This suggests that hedonic tendency can drive consumers to act on apparel impulse buying when they experience a positive feeling and are in-store browsing. This result implies that positive shopping emotion tends to reduce decision complexity, including impulse buying. Therefore, typologies of apparel impulse buying can be predicted in a path model by an attitudinal component (e.g., hedonic tendency and in-store browsing) and emotional factors (e.g., satisfied and excited). In particular, shopping emotion serves as an important mediating predictor of impulse buying of apparel products. This suggests that impulse buying of college students is more conjunct with an emotional unplanned purchase of apparel products. Also, this finding supports impulse buying as satisfying a hedonic need or providing emotional gratification. This study provides insights to retailers and researchers in understand structural relationships between consumer characteristics and impulse buying of apparel products.