Impulse Buying Causes/Reasons That You As A Marketing Strategist Must Know

As a marketing strategist it is imperative to know and understand the causes/reasons of impulse buying, as this would help you a lot in developing an effective marketing strategy and to benefit from impulsive buying. Impulse buying is a situation where the buyer of a product never pre planned to buy that product. While Engel and Blackwell defined it as A buying action undertaken without a problem previously having been consciously recognized or buying intention formed prior to entering a store1.I have dug out some key causes/reasons that lead to impulse buying.

Impulse Buying Causes/Reasons

• Price Drop

This is one of the many reasons that may cause your potential customer to buy (impulse buying) your product/service, especially if the product/service is very popular one and was priced higher. Imagine if Samsung galaxy S4 price drops to around a hundred dollar bill, World would be out to buy it.

• Product return policies

Now if your product return policies are customer friendly like giving your potential customer flexibility to return product after use or in case of any problem and he would be refunded with total paid amount so on and so forth. This would encourage your potential customer to buy (impulse buying) your product without any second thoughts. This element of impulse buying was also identified by (Geoff Bayley, Clive Nancarrow 1998) 2.

• Rise in income

This is obvious, people with great wealth are more extravagant than those with less, the more you have the more extravagant you become, I am not generalizing that on the whole humankind but isn’t that obvious we at times buy things that we ourselves don’t use or never planned to buy, when we have large amount of money at hand. 

Rather most of the time we do all that shopping not that we need those things but as way of expressing and acquiring self identity. And this had been verified by (Welles 1986)3 that most shoppers in developed countries (in such people earn good money) do impulse buying than planned buying.

• One stop shops

This is another reason that leads to impulse buying, as all the goods and services are made available to potential buyer thus when a potential customer goes in to one stop shop for buying one service there is a high chance that he/she would buy some other things too.

• Amazing Features of a Product

It happens right, when you go to the market and see a product with amazing/impressive features and you are able to pay for it. It is more likely that you will buy that product; we might be doing window shopping or just went to market for specific few products but end up buying several others too.

• Hypermarkets and Superstores

According to (Bowlbey 1997) 4  shoppers at hypermarkets and supermarkets do impulsive buying as at hypermarkets and supermarkets everything is made available for example we find almost all brands their different versions, types, kinds of products consider Super Kmart, Wal-Mart etc. Such heavy number of products and ease of comparison (at hypermarket/supermarket) makes pre purchase planning unnecessary.

• Friends/Colleagues pressure

Most of the time it happens that an individual might just accompany his/her friends/colleagues to the market and end up buying things they never planned to buy. Emotional satisfaction is one of the key reasons for such impulsive buying like he/she might do it for his/her emotional satisfaction due to the discontent caused by his/her friends by buying just for themselves. Another reason could be to get noticed among friends/colleagues or to make a point for some personal reasons.

• Materialists

According to another study by Podoshen, Jeffrey S. and Susan (2012) 5 Materialists give considerable significance, importance to goods and services and thus are more likely to involve in impulse buying.

So these are few of the key reasons or causes that lead to impulsive buying of a product and I believe it is imperative for any marketing strategist to consider these points while devising marketing strategy.

References:

1. Engel, J and Blackwell, R. (1982), Consumer Behavior, Dryden Press, Chicago, IL

2. Geoff Bayley, Clive Nancarrow 1998, “Impulse purchasing a qualitative exploration of the phenomenon”         Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, Vol. 1 Iss: 2 pp. 99-114.

3. Welles, G. (1986), “We’re in the habit of impulsive buying” , USA Today, Vol. 1,21 May.

4. Blowbelly, R, (1997), “Supermarket Futures”, in Falk , P. and Campbell C. (Eds), The Shopping Experince, Sage, London.

5. Podoshen, Jeffrey S., and Susan A. Andrzejewski (2012), “An Examination of the Relationships between Materialism, Conspicuous Consumption, Impulse Buying, and Brand Loyalty,” Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, 20 (Summer), 319–33.