Impact of digital beautification on impulse buying behavior of consumers

Abstract

Impulse buying behavior of consumers attract many researchers to understand the psychology that stimulates it. It is dependent on several factors that can be affective or cognitive in nature, or it can be related to beliefs or attitude of a consumer. One such factor that we intend to research about is, whether digital beautification of self, is related to an impulse buying behavior, and whether it can lead to impulse buying. Our trigger for this taking up this project was the increment in digitization around us and consumers’ affiliation towards beautification apps. The world around us has become so digitized, with the ease of shopping through apps and customized recommendation. We want to research if such consumers could also be involved with impulse purchases. We developed a survey for a demographics of consumers who are students and working professionals between the age of 18 to 29 years living in tier 1/2/3 cities. We have used psychographics and lifestyle related statements to categorize our respondents into an impulse purchaser and non-impulse purchaser. We constructed product pages in our survey to simulate the shopping experience and categorized the respondents into two groups- one who preferred self-beautification and, the other who did not. We performed one-way ANOVA to test our hypothesis of digital beautification causing significant impact on impulse buying behavior of consumers. Through this test we were not able to reject our null hypothesis as the significance values were quite high, more than 0.05. Thus, it could not be established through this research, that digital beautification has a significant impact on impulse purchases. It conveys that there are several other factors which have a larger relation with impulse purchases, but digital beautification fails to affect this behavior significantly.