Does Gender Matter in Buying Choice: Influence of Social Media on Purchase Behaviour of the Youth

Abstract

The use of social media is growing rapidly be it for networking or for making choices for online purchase. Today's youth, both men and women, are getting hooked to online purchase because of several factors such as convenience, comfort, availability, wider choice, pricing or time saving. For marketing professionals and companies, social media is a new outlet that can potentially be used to help increase the interest in a product or service of the surfer. This paper presents, analyses and interprets the results of a survey conducted in Delhi/NCR area on the influence of social media in framing product preference among the buyers, particularly youth. The structured questionnaire included several questions concerning the relationship between social media usage and online purchase behaviour of the young men and women and the overall impact socialmedia marketing has on purchase behaviour. In addition to the demographics, key questions aimed at eliciting the use of one particular social media dependency from amongst several popular socialmedia sites and the frequency of visits to these sites as well as the consequential frequency with which selected opinions were expressed during these visits.