The Impact of Culture on Impulse Buying Behaviour

Abstract

Beatty and Ferrell (1998) define impulse buying as a sudden and immediate purchase without pre-shopping intention to either buy a specific product or fulfill a task. Several studies have been conducted to understand the factors that encourage/ affect impulse buying (Lim and Yazdanifard, 2015). Muruganantham and Bhakat (2013) state impulse buyers are influenced by several factors that could be either related to the shopping environment, shoppers' traits, situational factors, or cultural factors. Cultural aspects of impulse buying can help both practitioners and researchers to develop a better understanding of impulse buying (Muruganantham and Bhakat, 2013; Park and Choi, 2013; Kacen and Lee, 2008). Typically, the focus of marketers has been only on the individualism/collectivism or power distance dimensions at the cultural level (Zhang et al., 2010; Shoham et al., 2015); therefore consumer behavior researchers call for further research that includes several dimensions of Hofstede's cultural model which may reveal essential insights about the understanding of consumers' impulse buying behavior (Park and Choi, 2013; Shoham et al., 2015). This paper fulfills this gap and explores the impact of culture on impulse buying behavior in an emerging economy like Bangladesh. The study also expands the understanding of the insights gained by considering all six cultural dimensions of Hofstede, which has not been previously conducted in the context of an emerging economy. Bangladesh, with a GDP growth rate of more than 6% over the last decade along with an increasingly growing affluent middle-class consumers, has become a hotspot of global companies as more and more of these companies are expanding to the Bangladesh market. Thus marketers need to have some comprehension of the cultural context of the target market to formulate the right marketing strategies. Keywords: Impulse Buying Behaviour, Culture, Emerging Economy