Consumer buying behaviour analysis in housing sector: An Indian perspective online retailer

Abstract

The understanding of the consumer behaviour in terms of any purchase decision and the rationale based on which the decision is take is of prime importance when it comes to marketing. Consumer research aims to answer two important questions: How the consumers make their decisions and how they should actually make decisions. Thus one can clearly understand that decision making is the most critical part of consumer behaviour study. This decision making behaviour varies with respect to the nature of the product being purchased. If it is a perishable or FMCG product, the rationale of decision making is different from that of one which involves a durable. Many researcher are of the opinion that the situation and the product type govern the underlying dynamics of the purchase behaviour. Housing purchase decision is a high involvement process. The entire process of purchase involves a lot of decision making and in all these steps the consumers do a lot of analysis to finally arrive at a decision. This is owing to the fact that purchase is very complicated process as there are multiple factors that play a role in the decision making. These factors not only involve internal factors that are specific to the house or individual but also encompass family, social and economic ones. House purchase in most cases is a one-time investment, the monetary value of the purchase and the number of people involved in the decision making play a crucial role. In this paper we would like to analyse the determinants of consumer housing purchase behaviour with respect to the Indian context. We have chosen this because there has not been much research done previously to understand the consumer purchase decision in this sector in India. With this as our motivation, we decided to start the research by choosing one of the metros– Bangalore, as our target city for analysis. This choice is based on the fact that in the past decade, Bangalore has shown a huge growth in the real estate space. Our analysis will focus on exploratory methods for understanding the customer needs, the thought process that they employed during the search & selection of the property and finally other factors that influence the purchase. Finally we will develop hypotheses regarding the purchase behaviour.