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AUSTRALIAN CONSUMER DECISION-MAKING STYLES FOR PURCHASING EVERYDAY PRODUCTS
This study investigates Australian consumers’ decision-making styles for everyday products. The CSI is based on preliminary work done by Sproles (1983), in which he argued that there are certain fundamental styles that all consumers apply to their shopping and buying. These styles included brand, price, or quality consciousness and provided a conceptual framework for describing consumer decision making styles. Consumers’ decision-making styles influence how they negotiate their way through the decision-making process, i.e., how they approach information search, evaluation and selection, and purchase behaviour (Durvasula et al., 1996). The characteristics of decision-making styles can be effective in profiling an individual’s consumer style in terms of their product evaluation and selection process (Canabal, 2002). The CSI, however, has some limitations. First, previous studies using the CSI have mostly focused on non-specific product types (Durvasula et al., 1996; Leo et al., 2005). Secondly, most of the research using the CSI has focused on student samples (Fan & Xiao, 1998; Hafstrom et al., 1992; Shim, 1996; Sproles, 1983) that have limited income and marketplace experience, and are still learning their consumer styles. In the light of above limitations, this research is developed focusing on specific products (e.g., confectionary) and distributing the CSI within heterogeneous sample. Based on a sample of 229 respondents, an exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis was adopted to validate Sproles and Kendall’s (1986) Consumer Styles Inventory (CSI). Results found that six decision-making styles: ‘perfectionist, high quality’, ‘confused by overchoice’, ‘impulsive’, ‘habitual/brand loyal’, ‘novelty/fashion’, and ‘recreation conscious’ were retained from the original Sproles and Kendall’s (1986) CSI and one decision-making style such as ‘rational, price conscious’ was developed for Australian consumers. Results also found that 24 items were removed from the original CSI for better fit and ‘brand conscious’ decision-making style showed less than satisfactory reliability indicated that the original CSI inventory needed modification when being applied to Australian consumers. The findings of this study has extended the literature by determining the applicability and the generalizability of the CSI in context of everyday products which is yet to be known in relation to Australian consumers.
