Exploring the relationship among situational factors, price perceptions and purchasing outcomes in Klang valley

Abstract

Marketing researchers constantly come across issues related to consumers’ store choice across various purchasing situations and numerous consumer-related and situational factors that impact store choice. However, many researchers found situational factors and price as important areas of focus within the stream of research on patronage behaviour. Therefore, the objective of this study is to examine the relationship among situational factors, price perceptions and purchasing outcomes in the Klang Valley. Specifically, the research will examine the influence of store environment, social surroundings, temporal perspective, shopping task, antecedent, price proneness, price mavenism, and price consciousness on consumers’ purchasing process as described in the research frame work of Belk (1975) and the theory of Lichtenstein et al (1993). A cross-section of Klang Valley consumers (n=279) constitutes the sample for the study. In this study, a convenience sampling method is adopted to gain the respondents. In the process of collecting the data, the respondents were given a self-administered questionnaire containing 45 variables and the measures of information search. The data collected was analysed using Statistical Packages for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 16.0. The data analysis techniques used in this research are reliability test, description statistics, cross way ANOVA, and Pearson correlation. The findings of ANOVA showed that solitary vs social shoppers, the day shopping, capture time, shopping day, use of shopping list, way of shopping, and number of store patronized, tend to positively, price mavenism, and price consciousness impact purchasing outcomes. The study provides marketing implications to practitioners especially retailers, allowing them to better understand their consumers’ behaviour and undertake more efficient marketing strategies in store and reduce any uncertain decision-making or risk occurrence. The distinguished characteristic of this paper is that it simultaneously examines the impacts of eleven situational factors and three price perceptions on shoppers’ purchase decisions with multinational data. Keywords: Hypermarket retailer, situational factors, consumer behaviour, purchasing outcomes, store management, pricing, retailing.