The first systematic approach to conceptualising orientations toward buying was the construction of diverse shopper types (e.g. Stone, 1954). A relatively recent example is a survey of UK respondents (Lunt & Livingstone, 1992), which identified five types: routine shoppers, who buy according to need rather than on impulse; leisure shoppers, who come close to the stereotype of “I shop therefore I am”; thrifty shoppers, who are economical; careful shoppers, who get some pleasure from buying; and alternative shoppers, who have an anti-consumerist stance and prefer second-hand outlets. These types vary on a host of economic, psychological, and socio-demographic factors. For instance, more women and younger people are leisure shoppers. Similar to the
leisure shopper, Campbell (2000) recently added the recreational shopper to
Stone’s original US typology of economic, personalising, ethical, and apathetic shoppers.
These typologies clearly have merits: they provide an analytical map of possible buying dimensions and orientations. However, they are based on the assumption, at least implicitly, that an individual can be characterised sensibly in terms of a single, stable, and coherent buying orientation, which generalises across different buying situations. This inflexibility of buyer typologies might be one of the reasons why a number of researchers have focused instead on buying dimensions—motives and orientations toward buying—to analyse and understand consumer behaviour, such as utilitarian versus hedonic values (Babin, Darden, & Griffin, 1994), or leisure, economic, and social involvement in shopping (Bergadaa, Faure, & Perrien, 1995). As I will demonstrate in this chapter, there is good evidence for the usefulness of using buying motives to help us understand what drives people when they buy consumer goods in different buying environments, such as conventional shops compared to the internet.
Functional concerns on the one hand, such as usefulness or good value for money, and emotional–social factors on the other, such as fun and the benefits of social interactions during shopping, emerge as two major buying dimensions from previous studies. However, they neglect to include consumer concerns with identity construction, despite good evidence that consumers are motivated to buy goods as symbols of who they are or would like to be. Expressing identity and searching for a better self through consumer goods is proposed to be a core feature of modern consumption (Benson, 2000). Open-ended accounts of buying motives in women’s shopping diaries we collected show that concerns with identity seeking were reported as fre- quently as concerns with whether goods are useful or good value for money (see Chapter 5 for more detail). In a set of UK studies, we used questionnaire scales to measure buying motives (Dittmar, 2000, 2001), where respondents rated how important different motives are for them personally for diverse types of consumer goods, so that each person gave multiple ratings for each buying motive. Here I report on the average importance accorded each motive across the different consumer goods. The first two items focused on functional concerns—“good value for money”; “useful and practical”—and the third assessed the extent to which people bought goods because “it puts me in a better mood”, focusing on emotional benefit. The remaining three items measured identity-related concerns: the extent to which individuals buy goods to express who they are (“expresses what is unique about me”), to move closer to the kind of person they would ideally like to be (“makes me feel more like the person I want to be”), and to enhance their social image (“improves my social standing”). When we researched these buying motives, our sample included both ordinary buyers and individuals who had problems with compulsive buying. As the focus in this chapter is on ordinary buying, I report buying motives only for those individuals whose buying behaviour
did not show any problematic or dysfunctional dimensions (n = 236, see Chapter 5 for comparisons between ordinary and compulsive buyers).
Functional motives were reported to be most important, receiving mean ratings of 4.1 for both usefulness and good value for money (on a six-point scale). This is not surprising, given that popular conceptions of what it means to be a “good” consumer centre on being able to get the best value for money and pick goods that are fit for their purpose. However, the buying motive to improve one’s mood emerged almost as powerfully, with a mean rating of 3.7. Although identity-related buying motives were not quite as strong, they nevertheless emerged as concerns that were of importance. The motive to move closer to an ideal self was close to the scale mid-point, with a mean rating of 3.0, and the strongest of the identity-related concerns, as expected. This was followed by the motive for self-expression, with a mean rating of 2.9, whereas social status improvement was seen as less important (mean rating 2.0).
Thus, three main dimensions of buying motives can be identified. In addition to instrumental and economic motives, there are two main sets of non-functional buying dimensions, which have a motivational component: individuals engage in buying and shopping to obtain emotional and identity- related benefits. Knowing that psychological motives are significant when people buy consumer goods is important, of course, but there are the even more interesting questions concerning the type of person who is most strongly driven by these motives, as well as the type of context in which these motives become particularly salient. Here, we consider gender as an influence on buying motives, and type of good and impulsive buying as contexts of interest.