Impulse versus opportunistic purchasing during a grocery shopping experience
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Impulse versus opportunistic purchasing during a grocery shopping experience Francesco Massara & Robert D. Melara & Sandra S. Liu
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract The current study introduces a conceptual distinction between two types of unplanned purchases—impulse purchases (i.e., spontaneous decisions triggered affectively) versus opportunistic purchases (i.e., rational decisions elicited by stimulus exposure)—grounded in separate dynamics of the cognitive processes unfolding during the course of a shopping trip. In a temporal analysis of shopping behavior within a simulated grocery-shopping experience, we found that participants increased their impulse buying but decreased their opportunistic buying, as a function of the number of basket items chosen previously. Similarly, impulse purchases increased in the final stages of the trip, particularly in shoppers without the aid of a shopping list, whereas opportunistic purchases decreased. Ours is thus the first study to report time– course evidence of two types of unplanned purchases within the grocery-shopping experience. Keywords Unplanned buying . Impulse purchases . Opportunistic purchases . Shopping list . Grocery shopping experience
1 Introduction The belief that a significant number of the decisions about what to buy when shopping at mass merchandisers occur at the point of purchase increasingly drives marketing research to identify the factors underlying unplanned purchases (Deloitte F. Massara (*) Department of Economics and Marketing, IULM University, Via Carlo Bò, 1, 20143 Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] R. D. Melara Department of Psychology, City College, City University of New York, 138th Street and Convent Avenue, New York, NY 10031, USA S. S. Liu Department of Consumer Sciences and Retailing Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47906-1262, USA
Mark Lett
2007). Nevertheless, studies on unplanned buying are still relatively sparse (Bell et al. 2011), particularly from the perspective of the in-store consumer–environment interaction (Inman et al. 2009), with most studies focusing on the person rather than the purchase (Beatty and Ferrel 1998; Kollat and Willett 1967; Park et al. 1989). The purpose of the current investigation was to employ a temporal analysis of purchases at the basket level, where unplanned purchases are considered integral to the shopping experience. 1.1 A cognitive model of the shopping experience A conceptual framework is helpful in characterizing the mental processes that accompany planned and unplanned purchases as the shopping trip unfolds. Yet while much research has emphasized the strategic importance of the store entrance (Sorensen 2010; Underhill 1999) and even the initial adaptation to the store environment, there still is relatively little understanding of how mental states evolve dynamically once the consumer has passed the entrance. To address this void, we propose a three-stage model of the perceptual and executive control activities that develop through the course of the shop
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