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14 - 15 March 2009
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Paper number:[9010773]
THE CORRELATIO BETWEE BUYIG EXPESIVE BRADS,EWEST STYLE PRODUCT AD YOUG ADULT DECISIO MAKIGSTYLE
 
Maznah Wan Omar
1
and Mohd oor Mohd Ali
2
 
1
 Faculty of Business Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Kedah, MALAYSIA
2
 Faculty of Applied Sciences, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Pulau Pinang, MALAYSIA
e-mail:
1
maznah199@kedah.uitm.edu.my
2
mohdnoorma@ppinang.uitm.edu.my (corresponding author)ABSTRACTDecision 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 electroniccapabilities 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 buyingnewest style product on young adult decision making style. An instrument was developed to measurethe relationship understudy and was based on Sproles (1985) measurement of the general orientationstoward shopping and buying. Data for this study were selected among young adult Malays in theMalaysian 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 tosee the correlation of buying expensive brands and buying newest style product in relation to youngadult decision making style. Confirmatory factor analysis were used to measure the range of sixconsumer decision-making styles traits in relation to the predictor variables which comprises of buyingexpensive brands and buying newest style product. Correlation analysis was later performed to confirmthe 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. ITRODUCTIO 
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 theyoung-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 characteristicsthat exist among them so as to help them to make a better decision in the future. However, conceptualizingand 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
 
C S S R 0 8’ 0 9
 
14 - 15 March 2009
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Paper number:[9010773]
consumers make decision. Most studies have focus on the general consumers and few discusses in theaspect 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 includecohesiveness (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 importantfor consumers today than in the past. Consumers are besieged by advertising, news articles, and directmailings that provide an abundance of information, much of it with mixed messages. In addition, increasesin 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 complicateddecision 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 goodsand services (Moschis & Moore, 1979). The young within the family often influence family purchasingdecisions (Turk & Bell, 1972). Consumer socialization is defined as “processes by which young peopleacquire 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. Inthis way, it may affect not only present but also future consumer well-being. In addition, theinterrelationships 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 indecision making and find the most significant variable that have the greatest impact on young-adultdecision making style among young adult Malays in Malaysia. Unlike many past studies, we attempted tocontrol 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’sapproach 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 identifiesfundamental consumer decision-making characteristics (Miller, 1981; Sproles & Kendall, 1986). Thisrange from rational shopping and quality consciousness to impulsiveness and information overload. Thusapproaches 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’schoices (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 stylesmay 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 approachcan be isolated as an important variable in explaining the choice behaviour of decision makers. Becausedecision are never made in a vacuum, we attempted to control for respondents gender to explore howexpensive brands and newest style product significantly effect young-adult Malay decision style.
 
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14 - 15 March 2009
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Paper number:[9010773]
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 basiccharacteristics 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 basiccharacteristics of consumer decision-making styles best depicts the mental orientation characterizing aconsumer’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 (106samples), Universiti Sains Malaysia (101 samples), and Universiti Utara Malaysia (104 samples). A totalof 600 samples were distributed, 509 questionnaires were returned. However, only 504 questionnaireswere usable for this analysis. The rest of the questionnaires had missing values for more than one of theitems asked.University students were chosen as samples for this study as University students in these five publicUniversities mentioned usually come from all over the country, therefore the sample has somerepresentation of young adult Malay in the whole country.A set of questionnaire were used. The items in the instrument were Likert-scale items (five-pointscale). 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) andlater used by Hafstrom et al., (1992). Items were on a scale of one to five, with ratings of “stronglydisagree” and “strongly agree” as end points. Those items that loaded significantly on the factorsidentified in Hafstrom et al.’s study were retained.Confirmatory factor analysis were used to measure the range of six consumer decision-making stylestraits in relation to the predictor variables which comprises of buying expensive brands and buying neweststyle product. Correlation analysis was later performed to confirm the objective of the study.
 
4. RESULTS AD DISCUSSIOS 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 leastnumber of respondents were those from Sabah (2.2%). There are 13 states in Malaysia and every statehave 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 toexamine the patterns and directions that exist in the association between variables. This analysis wascarried 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 bivariaterelationships between variables.Before correlation analyses were performed, preliminary analyses were carried out to ensure noviolation of the assumptions for linearity, normality, and homoscedasticity. No violations of theassumptions 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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