C S S R 0 8’ 0 9 14 - 15 March 2009

C O N F E R E N C E ON S C I E N T I F I C & S O C I A L R E S E A R C H

THE CORRELATIO BETWEE BUYIG EXPESIVE BRADS,

EWEST STYLE PRODUCT AD YOUG ADULT DECISIO MAKIG
STYLE

Maznah Wan Omar1 and Mohd oor Mohd Ali2

1
Faculty of Business Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Kedah, MALAYSIA
2
Faculty of Applied Sciences, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Pulau Pinang, MALAYSIA

e-mail:1maznah199@kedah.uitm.edu.my
2
mohdnoorma@ppinang.uitm.edu.my (corresponding author)

ABSTRACT

Decision making is a complex issue and even more important for consumers today than in the past.
Consumers are besieged by advertising, news article, and direct mailings that provide an abundance of
information, much of it with messages. In addition, increases in the number and variety of goods,
stores, and shopping malls, and the availability of multi-component products and electronic
capabilities have broadened the sphere for consumer choice and have complicated decision making.
This study was conducted to examine the influence of consumer buying expensive brands and buying
newest style product on young adult decision making style. An instrument was developed to measure
the relationship understudy and was based on Sproles (1985) measurement of the general orientations
toward shopping and buying. Data for this study were selected among young adult Malays in the
Malaysian Public Universities. Samples of young adult consumers in the Northern states of Peninsular
Malaysia is used to measure basic characteristics of consumer-decision making styles particularly to
see the correlation of buying expensive brands and buying newest style product in relation to young
adult decision making style. Confirmatory factor analysis were used to measure the range of six
consumer decision-making styles traits in relation to the predictor variables which comprises of buying
expensive brands and buying newest style product. Correlation analysis was later performed to confirm
the objective of the study. Results show that the variable “buying expensive brands” and “newest style
product” have the highest significant value which is above 0.5.

Keywords: Expensive Brands, Newest Brand, Decision Making Style

1. ITRODUCTIO

Making a decision involves an individual’s thoughts, perceptions, attitudes, information, etc (Johnson,
1978). There are many factors that could have an influence on consumer’s decision making. Identifying
basic characteristics of decision-making styles is central to consumer-interest studies. Identifying the
young-adult basic characteristics of decision making styles is important to researchers in the consumer
interest studies. Information’s on individual’s style could help to educate these young consumers in their
financial management as well as to expose this consumer group on the decision-making characteristics
that exist among them so as to help them to make a better decision in the future. However, conceptualizing
and measuring consumer styles has not been a focus of the field lately.

2. LITERATURE REVIEW

Young adult today are playing an increasingly important role in consumer market research. However,
what marketers believe about consumers preferences often differ from what the consumer’s actually seek
for (Kane, 1996; Petersen et al., 2000). Theorist and researchers do not know a great deal about how

Paper number: [9010773]

C S S R 0 8’ 0 9 14 - 15 March 2009
C O N F E R E N C E ON S C I E N T I F I C & S O C I A L R E S E A R C H

consumers make decision. Most studies have focus on the general consumers and few discusses in the
aspect of young adult, especially among young-adult Malay consumers in Malaysia.
Scholars have suggested that the success of reaching the best possible decision or solution to a
problem in interpersonal, intra-group, and intergroup situations depends on many factors. These include
cohesiveness (Positive effect: Mullen et al., 1995; Negative effect: Galanes et al., 2000), presence or
absence of decisional conflict (Brilhart & Galanes, 1998), gender (Byers, 1997), group size (Wood et al.,
1992), group leadership (Patton et al., 1989; Ross, 1989), and goals or objectives (Hirokawa, 1992).
According to Hafstrom and Chung (1992), decision making is more complex and even more important
for consumers today than in the past. Consumers are besieged by advertising, news articles, and direct
mailings that provide an abundance of information, much of it with mixed messages. In addition, increases
in the number and variety of goods, stores, and shopping malls, and the availability of multi-component
products and electronic capabilities have broadened the sphere for consumer choice and have complicated
decision making.
The role of the young especially in consumer decision-making should be defined and examined for
several reasons. Young consumers are recognized as a specialized market segment for a variety of goods
and services (Moschis & Moore, 1979). The young within the family often influence family purchasing
decisions (Turk & Bell, 1972). Consumer socialization is defined as “processes by which young people
acquire skills, knowledge, and attitudes relevant to their functioning as consumers in the marketplace”
(Ward, 1974). Socialization usually takes place within the family and may shape consumption patterns. In
this way, it may affect not only present but also future consumer well-being. In addition, the
interrelationships between specific consumer decision-making styles and individual learning styles,
documented by Sproles and Sproles (1990), have important applications for consumer education.
This article reports research on consumer behavior which attempt to investigate the decision style in
decision making and find the most significant variable that have the greatest impact on young-adult
decision making style among young adult Malays in Malaysia. Unlike many past studies, we attempted to
control for the effect of gender that were evaluated by the decision makers.

2.1 Consumer Decision-Making Style

A consumer decision-making style is defined as a mental orientation characterizing a consumer’s

approach to making choices (Sproles & Kendall, 1986). It has cognitive and affective characteristics (for
example, quality consciousness and fashion consciousness). In essence, it is a basic consumer personality,
analogous to the concept of personality in psychology. The consumer-interest literature also identifies
fundamental consumer decision-making characteristics (Miller, 1981; Sproles & Kendall, 1986). This
range from rational shopping and quality consciousness to impulsiveness and information overload. Thus
approaches to characterizing styles differ, yet certain characteristics are keys to consumer decision-making
(Sproles & Kendall, 1986).

2.2 Research Questions

Prior studies have found that a decision maker’s beliefs about decision making may influence consumer’s
choices (Henderson & Butt, 1980). The decision a consumer makes to purchase products and service are
based on a process of learning (Sproles & Sproles, 1990). In particular, consumer decision-making styles
may be characterized by the lifestyle approach, the consumer typology approach, and the consumer
characteristic approach (Westbrook & Black, 1985). We seek to determine if consumer lifestyle approach
can be isolated as an important variable in explaining the choice behaviour of decision makers. Because
decision are never made in a vacuum, we attempted to control for respondents gender to explore how
expensive brands and newest style product significantly effect young-adult Malay decision style.

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C O N F E R E N C E ON S C I E N T I F I C & S O C I A L R E S E A R C H

3. METHODOLOGY

To examine the hypotheses, questionnaire asking public university students in the northern states of
Peninsular Malaysia were asked on how they judged their decision-making styles in eight basic
characteristics was developed. The consumer style characteristics were adapted from Sproles and Kendall
(1986) who reported that the factor analytic validation of a Consumer Styles measuring eight basic
characteristics of consumer decision-making styles best depicts the mental orientation characterizing a
consumer’s approach to making consumer choices (Sproles & Kendall, 1986).
Data used in this study were collected from Universiti Teknologi MARA Kedah (100 samples),
Universiti Teknologi MARA Perlis (93 samples), Universiti Teknologi MARA Pulau Penang (106
samples), Universiti Sains Malaysia (101 samples), and Universiti Utara Malaysia (104 samples). A total
of 600 samples were distributed, 509 questionnaires were returned. However, only 504 questionnaires
were usable for this analysis. The rest of the questionnaires had missing values for more than one of the
items asked.
University students were chosen as samples for this study as University students in these five public
Universities mentioned usually come from all over the country, therefore the sample has some
representation of young adult Malay in the whole country.
A set of questionnaire were used. The items in the instrument were Likert-scale items (five-point
scale). 1=strongly disagree, 2= somewhat disagree, 3 = neither agree nor disagree, 4 = somewhat agree,
and 5 = strongly agree. The instrument used was originally developed by Sproles and Kendall (1986) and
later used by Hafstrom et al., (1992). Items were on a scale of one to five, with ratings of “strongly
disagree” and “strongly agree” as end points. Those items that loaded significantly on the factors
identified in Hafstrom et al.’s study were retained.
Confirmatory factor analysis were used to measure the range of six consumer decision-making styles
traits in relation to the predictor variables which comprises of buying expensive brands and buying newest
style product. Correlation analysis was later performed to confirm the objective of the study.

4. RESULTS AD DISCUSSIOS

4.1 Profile of the Respondents

In terms of the age distribution of the respondents, majority (57%) of them were within the age group of
21-23 years. Meanwhile, 59.1% were male respondents and 40.9 % were female respondents. In terms of
home address of respondents, 18.3% of the respondents came from the state of Selangor and the least
number of respondents were those from Sabah (2.2%). There are 13 states in Malaysia and every state
have a representative of respondents in this study.

4.2 Correlation Analysis

The Pearson’s product moment correlation coefficients ( r ) were computed as measure of correlations to
examine the patterns and directions that exist in the association between variables. This analysis was
carried out to determine the interdependency of the study variable. In addition, the construct on inter-
correlation matrices among variables were done to determine the strength and direction of the bivariate
relationships between variables.
Before correlation analyses were performed, preliminary analyses were carried out to ensure no
violation of the assumptions for linearity, normality, and homoscedasticity. No violations of the
assumptions were found. In a behavioral science research, correlation coefficients of .10, .30, and .50,
irrespective of the sign, are typically interpreted as small, medium, and large coefficients, correspondingly
(Green et al., 2003).

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Table 1: Intercorrelations of the main variables

Variables 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
1. Buy well known brands 1.00
2. Nice dept offer best products .54** 1.00
3. Expensive brands are the best .33** .49** 1.00
4. Buy newest style .16** .36** .53** 1.00
5. Highly advertise brands are very good .12** .32** .32** .35** 1.00
6. I have favorite brands I buy repeatedly .14** .28** .16** .33** .32** 1.00
7. Decision making style .12** .27** .33** .36** .30** .22** 1.00
Note: N = 504, Significant levels: *p<0.05, **p<0.01

All 21 intercorrelations were statistically significant and positively correlated. All the component of
“Learning style inventory” were able to show a strong relationship with each other. Table 1 showed that
the dimension expensive brands (r = .33, p < .01) and newest style product (r = .36, p < .01) to have the
strongest relationship with decision making style as compared to the other predictor variables.
Results of the correlation analyses on the study variables suggested that if the young-adult Malay have
a high learning style inventory towards expensive brands and newest style, the young-adult Malay will
experience greater tendency of making decision to buy.

5. COCLUSIOS

Perhaps the most important findings with educational implications are the relationships found between
young-adult Malays in the Universities is, after controlling the variable gender it was found that young
consumers are more of brand conscious which can be related to non-adaptive learning, and for such
consumers, being conscious of brands and newest style simply is an escape mechanism to avoid learning.

ACKOWLEDGEMET

The authors are grateful to the Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) for the financial support of this work
under the grant IRDC 021016.

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