Model to Grab the Digital Natives’ Purchasing Behaviour

Abstract

Generation Z is considered to be the most puzzling consumers as they appear to behave as tech-savvy and educated users of technologies in the marketplace. These digital natives are predicted to account for around 40% of all consumer shopping by 2020. Ninety-three percent of parents of this generation agree that Generation Z offspring are going to be the significant influencer of household spend. Their cognitive power and social media networking have made them the market mavens who possess a wide range of information and consumer knowledge about many dimensions of markets. To be the leader in the market with so many options due to free trade economy, marketers have to escalate their knowhow about their customers if they want to capture the attention of this segment of the market. Though there are models to evaluate the consumer behaviour like Engel-Blackwell-Miniard model and Nicosia model of customer behaviour, the practicality in the application of them is vague due their mechanical overview of human behaviour. In order to catch the attention of the discerning Generation Z consumer, marketers have to venture the extra mile to develop a unique model that has the ability to factor the unique characteristics of this market segment. The paper proposes a conceptual model to determine the purchasing behaviour of Generation Z consumers as an extended model of Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). Theory of Planned behaviour is a prominent consumer behavioural model which distinctly elaborate the factors that affect consumer behavior. The model collaborates physical, psychological and sociological aspects without limiting to a single field. In TPB, attitudes, subjective norm and perceived behavioural control act as the main constructs to determine the purchasing behaviour. The proposed extended model of TPB incorporates the additional constructs of market mavenism, social identity and technology self-efficacy to capture the specific characteristics of Generation Z. Market mavenism captures the degree of influence from the consumer knowledge, social identity captures the influence of self-identity in social media and technology self-efficacy captures the efficacy in using computing technologies and the Internet by Generation Z, for product purchasing decision making. Expert opinion from selected personnel in academia and industry were used to validate the proposed model. Implications of this validated model can be utilized to assist in predicting potential consumer adoption behaviour and in designing favourable shopping environments that are compatible with these specific consumer traits