Indirect Impact of Hedonic Consumption and Emotions on Impulse Purchase Behavior : A Double Mediation Model

Impulse purchasing is a universal yet seldom discussed phenomenon. This research study was oriented with the objective to identify the double-mediated relationship between impulse purchasing behavior and fashion orientation through hedonic consumption and emotions. To achieve this objective, survey research method was deployed and data had been collected from 231 general fashion consumers of Karachi. Process macro developed by Hayes (2012) was used as a statistical tool in order to study the relationship between the studied variable. The results suggest that hedonic consumption and positive emotions fully mediates the relationship between fashion orientation and impulse purchasing. The implications portrayed that there is a significant positive indirect effect of fashion orientation on impulse purchasing behavior through hedonic consumption and emotions collectively.


Introduction
Impulse purchasing is a universal yet seldom discussed phenomenon (Woodside, 2012).Consumer behavior dominates on impulsiveness due to exceptional penetration of disposable income among consumers (Dittmar, 2005).In developed countries, impulse purchases account for more than 40% of overall sales, and generates approximately $4 billion yearly from just about 40% consumers (Kacen & Lee, 2002).This phenomenon warrants in depth study due to substantial sales growth especially with respect to developing countries like Pakistan where increasing number of shopping malls tend to influence shopping patterns.This facility of buying under one roof has eventually affected consumer unplanned purchase behavior.Now, people have more time, convenience hedonic pleasure, freedom of choice and peace of mind in making their purchase decisions.
Although recent researches have focused on regulatory orientations of consumers (Haws, Dholakia, & Bearden, 2010), studies in past had their main focus on the role of situational factors -like accessibility of cash and time etc. -while differentiating between impulsive and non-impulsive purchase behavior (Cobb & Hoyer, 1986;Piron, 1991;Dholakia, 2000;Hui, Inman, Huang, & Suher, 2013;Lee, Jeon, Li, & Park, 2015).However, this research, Current study may help retailers to devise their marketing strategies to create market opportunities.It may also help them to understand and manage the needs of fashionoriented consumers and encourage them to buy impulsively, thereby, increasing their market share.
This research paper consist of five sections.First section sets the foundation of the study.The next section describes the theoretical and empirical review of past studies.Third section details the methodology and data collection procedures.Section four depicts the result and findings of the study.Last section concludes the research.

Literature Review
In the literature, impulse purchasing had been given due attention throughout the world (Woodside, 2012).Past researches also implied that fashion variations directly affected impulse purchases (Vieira, 2009).When new fashion clothes come into market, they divert the attention of clients due to new style; who pay attention to pleasure (Hirche & Bruwer, 2014).This leads the information seeker to engage in impulse purchasing (E.J. Park, Kim, & Forney, 2006).Literature also provides evidences for positive emotion (Mogilner et al., 2012) and pleasure (hedonic) as mediators during shopping of fashion related products (Coley & Burgess, 2003).
A number of past researches empirically identified not only some non-economic factors, like fashion oriented buying and gender difference, but some economic factors such as availability of money and time as well (Bell, Corsten, & Knox, 2011) causing significant changes in buyers' behavior.Fashion can influence customer behavior through amazing and attractive indicators of latest design, shelf placement and style as people adopt fashion which society adopts (Bezawada, Balachander, Kannan, & Shankar, 2009).The product consumption was based mainly on the wants to experience desire and happiness.From the enjoyment point of view, during shopping, experience of buying can be more valuable the product (Holbrook & Hirschman, 1982).This means, customers are more interested in enjoying shopping, because many customers consider shopping a form of outing, they feel pleasure during shopping and due to these reasons, purchase those products that attract them and make them impulsive (Goldsmith & Emmert, 1991).
From strictly an economic perspective of the cause, Pattipeilohy and Rofiaty (2013) examined impulse buying through hedonic utilization and positive emotions in Indonesia.Availability of money, availability of time, impulse purchasing, hedonic utilization, positive emotion and fashion attachment were empirically tested using structured equations modeling (SEM).It was noted that women purchase behavior was more impulsive due to the habit of dressing carefully, fashionably, and collecting the latest fashions.Interestingly, money and time availability as well as fashion orientation also affected hedonic consumption tendency and positive emotions.
On the other hand, putting more emphasis on fashion O'Cass (2004) examined the relationship between fashion-orientation, fashion knowledge and decision confidence in Australia.The research showed a positive relationship between fashion garments participation, awareness, self-assurance and fashion oriented buying decisions.Phau and Lo (2004) considered fashion innovativeness, unique self-image, and demographic factors to affect impulsive purchase behavior.Sarabia-Sanchez, De Juan Vigaray, and Hota (2012) showed that purchasing styles impacts impulsiveness in fashion oriented products.Grant and Stephen (2005) explored the factors that affect fashion clothing among 12-13 year old girls' purchase decision.Using qualitative approach, they found awareness, knowledge and prior experience of the fashion brand attributes to buying of fashion stuffs.Another study in this domain reported that social interaction could also contribute to increase in unplanned purchases after controlling the influence of shopping goals (Inman, Winer, & Ferraro, 2009).
A more grounded research of Johnson and Attmann (2009) examined habitual purchasing of garments in USA.Path analysis results showed association among fashion interest, materialism, neuroticism and habitual purchasing of garments-connected objects.Findings from similar population also supported the fact that shelf facing may drive unplanned buying (Chandon, Hutchinson, Bradlow, & Young, 2009).In addition to that, Vieira (2009) examined fashion-clothing involvement in Brazil using variables: fashion association, information, self-confidence, patronage, commitment, greediness, moment, age, and gender.He found a positive association with fashion garments participation with a greater impact due to age.
While putting a greater emphasis on innovativeness in impulse purchase behavior, Kang and Park-Poaps (2010) examined the relationships between opinion of fashion guidance and practical/hedonic buying motivations in United States of America (USA).Using the responses from 150 students, they found that innovativeness of fashion was strongly linked to a range of hedonic buying motivation.
Alternatively, Kim (2005) examined the buyer profiles of clothing product participation and values using interest, pleasure, sign, and purchase probability.The result shows the positive relationship with dimension perceived and pleasure interest.In another study, E. J. Park et al. (2006) examined the associations along with fashion contribution through emotion and pleasure with buying, during shopping.The study was conducted in USA.The data was collected using convenience-sampling technique from 217 college students.Research showed that fashion connection and optimistic emotion had positive outcomes on customers' impulse purchase performance in fashion products.There are insufficient evidences, in the literature, about the features of product that cause sensory pleasure (Krishna, 2012).Moreover, hedonic utilization propensity was found to be a key mediator in determining impulse purchase.
In a gender-based study, Tifferet and Herstein (2012) examined the gender difference in impulsive purchasing, hedonic use, and brand commitment in Israel.They proposed that women had higher levels of brand commitment, hedonic consumption, and impulse buying in comparison to men.The findings supported the assertion that women had more sophisticated level of brand commitment than men and women portrayed higher level of impulse purchase behavior than men.
In a similar research conducted in a developing country, Foroughi et al. (2013) claimed the moderated impulse purchase behavior due to gender.They found that situational and personality linked variables have a helpful result on impulse buying alongside hedonic buying.The effect of hedonic shopping on the felt urge to buy impulsively does not increase by gender.
Similarly, emotional and cognitive make up is a vital contributing factor in the phenomenon of impulse purchase.Coley and Burgess (2003) examined the cognitive processes associated with impulsive buying behavior.Results suggested significant difference with respect to affective process components between males and females.Moreover, females are more emotionally and cognitively impulsive than their male counterparts.
A greater impact of positive emotions had been seen in the work of Vinagre and Neves (2008) that examined service quality and patients' emotions on satisfaction in Portugal.They considered service quality, positive emotion, involvement, and satisfaction expectations of 317 patients from six different health care centers.Results showed noteworthy influence due to service quality and emotional experience.Another analysis that linked fashion with positive emotion and, in turn, impulse purchase is done by Amiri, Jasour, Shirpour, and Alizadeh (2012) which examined impulse buying through involvement in fashion, hedonic consumption tendency and positive emotion.Results showed that fashion orientation and hedonic consumption tendency influences consumers purchase amount directly and indirectly, by positive emotion.
A more flexible approach was seen in Samue, Abeka-Donkor, and Awuah (2012) in which they studied student's impulse purchase behavior in Ghana.They established that demographic variables such as sexual category, age of human, income, personality type and religious conviction considerably influence impulse buying behavior.

Research Model and Hypotheses
The focus of this research paper builds its foundation on a coherent and unified framework.The research model was prone to explain unplanned purchase phenomenon toward fashionoriented products.The researcher used the S-O-R model as a theoretical framework to guide the relationship among four study variables.Past literature has recognized the prominence of employing the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework (Mehrabian & Russell, 1974) in examining environmental effects on consumer behavior.The framework hypothesizes that environmental cues act as stimuli (stimulus) that affect the consumers' emotional state (organism), ultimately affecting their behavior (response).
This framework is also known as buyers' black box model in consumer behavior literature.The black box model is related to the black box theory of behaviorism, where the focus is not set on the processes inside a consumer, but the relation between the stimuli and the response of the consumer.The stimuli may be planned and processed by the companies, or given by social factors, based on the economical, political and cultural cir-cumstances of a society.The buyer's black box contains the buyer characteristics and the decision process, which determines the buyer's responses.
Applied to the context of current research, when a fashion-oriented consumer is exposed to a fashion related update, it creates a desire in the receiver to explore further about that fashion product (stimuli).In order to satisfy this hunch, consumer experience the whole buying process (organism) and based upon one's experiences, one develop certain emotions -positive or negative -related to buying or not buying that product (response).
In the current study, fashion orientation was conceptualized a stimuli, which influences organism -i.e., positive emotion and hedonic consumption tendency -that ultimately affects response (impulse purchase behavior) in the shopping context.Figure 1 represented the schematic form of research model.
Based on reviewed literature and research model, following hypotheses were developed for this study: H 1 : There is a significant indirect effect of hedonic experience on impulse purchase behavior in developing countries.
H 2 : There is a significant indirect effect of positive emotions on impulse purchase behavior in developing countries.

Research Method
This study used quantitative approach and design was correlational in nature.In order to gather data, researcher constructed a structured questionnaire and distributed across the selected respondents through a survey method.The population for this research was the university aged fashion-oriented consumers.A sample of 260 respondent was selected using convenience sampling technique.Convenience sampling was appropriate for this study because of time and budget constraints and access to the sampling frame was not practically possible (Creswell, 2013;Haroon, Haq, & Najmonnisa, 2015).In addition to that, E. J. Park et al. (2006) had also supported the use of convenience sampling technique in similar type of study.A research questionnaire was developed using established scales (details of which are given below) and distributed across university aged fashion consumers.Data was empirically analyzed using bootstrapping procedure (MacKinnon, Lockwood, & Williams, 2004) from the macro developed by Hayes (2012) compatible with SPSS.An online survey form was also developed and sent to those who were interested in participating in this research.Another reason of using online survey form was to get the instant response.The Table 1 below depicted the descriptive profile of the respondents: Sample size of 260 was considered and questionnaires were distributed among the respondents from which 29 responses were dropped due to incomplete information.Therefore, 231 valid responses were considered for this study with the response rate of 88%.Out of 231 respondents, sixty-eight percent respondents were males and remaining thirty-two percent were females.In terms of age, 11.3% of the total respondent were aged between 16-20 Years.49.4% of the total respondents were aged between 21-25 years.36.8% of the total respondents were aged between 26 and 30 and remaining 2.2% were aged between 31 and 35.

Measures
The questionnaire used to collect data was divided into two sections.First section consisted of studying variables and second section incorporated the demographic information.Fashion orientation scale was adopted from J. Park and Lennon (2006).This scale was measured through four items measured on a five-point Likert scale ranging from 1=Strongly Disagree, 5=Strongly Agree.Beatty and Ferrell (1998) three-item scale was adopted to measure positive emotions.Hedonic consumption tendency and impulse purchase scales were adopted from Hausman (2000) and Han, Morgan, Kotsiopulos, and Kang-Park (1991) using three items each on five-point Likert scale ranging from 1= Strongly Disagree, 5= Strongly Agree.Following Table summarized the information regarding scale used in the study questionnaire.

Validity and Reliability
Instrument reliability and validity were tested using both subjective and objective methods.Four types of validity (namely -face, content, convergent and discriminant validity) were tested in this study.In order to ensure the face and content validity, questionnaire was proofread and approved by a panel of industry, academic and language experts during the process of pilot study.On their recommendations, researcher adopted a professional format and revised spelling and grammar related mistakes.For discriminant and convergent validity, researchers applied factor analysis.In the following Table 3 factor analysis results were reported.
In factor analysis, KMO and Bartlett test are most widely used methods for testing the overall model fit.As per guidelines provided by Hair, Black, Babin, Anderson, and Tatham (2010) overall MSA value more than 0.5 and significance of Bartlett test endorses overall model fitness.In the current analysis, KMO value of 0.85 and significance of Bartlett test (p value lesser than 0.05) implies fitness of overall model (Frooghi, Waseem, Afshan, & Shah, 2015;Afshan & Sharif, 2016).
Moreover, as per latent root and percentage of variance criteria, four dimensions can be extracted from the current study.The results of factor analysis showed strong factor loadings (factor loading more than 0.4) across identified dimensions and their related variables.This reflected the convergent validity among the constructs used in the instrument.No issue of cross loading implied the presence of discriminant validity in the instrument.
In addition to that, researchers endeavored to calculate the reliability of the instrument empirically.Chronbach's alpha is the most common source to check the reliability of the instrument.For statistical significance, Chronbach's alpha value of 0.6 is generally acceptable (Hair et al., 2010;Arif, Aslam, & Ali, 2016;Raza & Hanif, 2013).In this study, all the components depicted the alpha value more than .6,implying that the items used to measure the scale were reliable and consistent to measure the constructs (Ali & Raza, 2015).

Analysis
Using the process macro developed by Hayes (2012) for SPSS, double mediation model was tested at CI 95 percent with the bootstrapped sample equal to 5000.This macro is widely accepted and appreciated by researchers throughout the world as it incorporates bootstrapping approach to regenerate sample to aid for non-normal data.Moreover, it provides the lower and upper confidence level to test the significance of indirect effect.4 represents the output of double mediation model where overall effect is divided into three distinct parts -total, direct and indirect (mediated) effects.
Total effect reflected the overall explanation of impulse purchase behavior through fashion orientation.The R square of seventy-two percent ensured sufficiency of the model and significant value of 0.000 (p-value lesser than 0.01) implied overall model fitness.
The direct effect of fashion orientation on impulse purchases had also been found significant with the effect size of approximately 34 percent.This revealed that with every 1-unit increase in fashion orientation, likelihood of impulse purchase would enhance by 43 percent.The essence of this study was the mediated effect of organisms (hedonic consumption and positive emotions) on stimuli (fashion orientation) and response (impulse purchase behavior) variables.The overall indirect effect through mediators was found to be significant with the effect size of around 38 percent.Out of which, 32.8 percent indirect effect was due to hedonic consumption as single mediator and around 6 percent mediated relationship was due to hedonic consumption and positive emotions as combined mediators.
Both the single and double mediated effects were discussed, were found significant at five percent margin of error and resulted acceptance of H1 and H3.
However, mediated effect only due to positive emotions had not been found significant at confidence level 95 percent.The resulted contradicted H2.

Conclusion
The current study contributed to the literature of impulse purchasing by introducing a latest analytical technique.This empirical study was oriented with the objective to identify the double-mediated relationship between impulse purchasing behavior and fashion orientation through hedonic consumption and emotions.To achieve this objective, survey research method was deployed and data was collected from 231 general fashion consumers in Karachi.Process macro developed by Hayes (2012) was used as a statistical tool in order to test the relationship between the studied variable.
The results suggested that that there is a significant positive indirect effect of fashion orientation on impulse purchasing behavior through hedonic consumption and emotions collectively.Moreover, hedonic consumption had been found significant as a single mediator.On the contrary, positive emotions did not significantly mediate the relationship as a single mediator.
The research explored the relationship between fashion orientation, positive emotion, hedonic consumption tendency, and impulse purchase behavior from university-aged fashion consumers in Karachi, Pakistan.Results proposed that fashion orientation has an effect on impulsive buying behavior and positive emotion, affecting the buying behavior of consumer only when its effect studied directly.
Findings from current study provide insights to retailers and researchers for ascertaining fundamental relationships between consumer characteristics and fashion-oriented impulse buying behavior.The results suggested that that there is a significant positive indirect effect of fashion orientation on impulse purchasing behavior through hedonic consumption and emotions collectively.Moreover, hedonic consumption had been found significant as a single mediator.On the contrary, positive emotions did not significantly mediate the relationship as a single mediator.
These results are consistent with the theory as well as past researches (Jones, Reynolds, Weun, & Beatty, 2003;Seo, Hathcote, & Sweaney, 2001).Theory of individualism and collectiveness supported that due to emotion, pleasure and Social environment, people involved in impulsive buying.Fashion orientation, hedonic consumption tendency and positive emotion have an effect on impulsive buying behavior (Foroughi et al., 2013).It means positive emotion increases when hedonic consumption tendency is experienced by them in fashion retail outlets for fashion products in a rapid changing environment (Hausman, 2000;Chun, Song, & Ko, 2014).Hedonic consumption and positive emotion help in increasing impulse buying (Herabadi, Verplanken, & Van Knippenberg, 2009) because hedonic consumption and positive emotion have significant effect on impulsive buying behavior (Rahmawati, 2009).People feel more happiness, pride, and amusement during shopping when they need new experience, feel like exploring new world and sense of curiosity.
Retailers need to concentrate as much on entertainment, interest and excitement as they do on attaining the right product mix and pricing.By stressing the relative rationality and non-economic rewards of impulse buying in advertising efforts, retailers can make impulse purchases more risk free through convenient return policies, or they can enhance impulse purchase enablers such as extending credit and store hours.Further research is needed on this aspect.

Limitations
There were few limitation faced during this research.Firstly, this research was restricted only to the fashion related items.Future researchers are recommended to use multiple products or other products as unit of analysis to validate the findings.Secondly data was collected from consumers in one city only; different results may be expected in different scenario.Furthermore, for a more comprehensive view, data may be collected from several parts of the world.
Moreover, cross-sectional data was used to perform the analysis and generate findings in this research.Introduction of longitudinal and/or time-series data might be a new addition in this domain.From the method point of view, the introduction of double mediation among the study variables is studied for the first time.Therefore, generalizability of results may be limited to developing countries only -like Pakistan.Lastly, the scales used to measure the variables did not report exceptional reliability in Pakistan.Further studies are suggested to employ different scales for the measurement purpose.

H 3 :
and positive emotions collectively on impulse purchase behavior in developing countries.

Table 3
Factor Analysis and Reliability Statistics

Table 4
Total, Direct and Mediated Effect of FO on IPB