Measuring Purchase ‐ decision involvement

Article history: Received January 28, 2014 Accepted 20 June 2014 Available online June 26 2014 Nowadays, increasing competition is forcing businesses to pay more attention on customer satisfaction providing strong customer services. Increased competition has also increased marketing activities. This paper presents an empirical investigation to determine important factors influencing purchase decision involvement in food industry in city of Tehran, Iran. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale, distributes it among 270 experts in food industry and, using principle component (PCA) analysis, extracts important group of factors. The questionnaire consists of 27 questions, which is reduced to 23 questions because of sensitivity of the PCA to Skewness of data. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.81, which is well above the minimum acceptable level. The results indicate that there were four factors including individual differences, product validation, triggers and dependent behavior influencing purchasing decisions. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
Nowadays, increasing competition is forcing businesses to pay more attention on customer satisfaction providing strong customer services (Vukasovic, 2010;Manjeshwar et al., 2013;McCutcheon et al., 2013).Increased competition has also increased marketing activities.Hahn and Kean (2009) explored the relationships between self-construals and decision-making styles of Korean college students.They reported that Korean college students' decision-making styles could vary based on their self-construals.Kavkani et al. (2011) identified seven decision-making styles influencing customer satisfaction including perfectionism consciousness, novelty and fashion consciousness, recreational and hedonistic consciousness, confused by over choice, impulsiveness and carelessness, price and value consciousness, and brand loyalty.Baoku et al. (2010) determined Chinese peasant consumers' decision-making styles.They reported three consumer segments including confused by over choice peasant consumer; fashion and impulsive peasant consumer; and perfect peasant consumer.Anic et al. (2012) studied decision-making styles of young consumers in Bosnia and Herzegovina by examining the applicability of Sproles and Kendall's Consumer Style Inventory (CSI).They also segmented young consumers based on their decision-making styles (CDMS), profile consumer segments, and explore differences in gender and household income among segments.They reported that young consumers in Bosnia and Herzegovina could be classified into five segments based on their decision-making styles.Young males were detected to be impartial, middle ground consumers, while females were more hedonistic-oriented consumers.Razzaque and Chaudhry (2013) investigated the effect of religious commitment of Muslim consumers in a non-Muslim country on their purchase decision-making process and developed a broad-based taxonomy of these consumers based on that.They used responses obtained from a convenient sample of Muslim consumers living in different suburbs of Sydney metropolitan area, who were the main grocery buyers of their respective households.They reported that food and personal hygiene products, generally viewed as low-involvement products in the non-Muslim cultures, were actually high involvement products to religious Muslims.Chang and Kukar-Kinney (2011) compared and built two kinds of shopping aids, namely; research-supporting and solutionoriented shopping aids, and tested their effectiveness, considering both consumer and situational factors.In their survey, knowledgeable consumers and less time-pressed consumers ought to benefit from research-supporting shopping aids.Lysonski and Durvasula (2013) measured psychological variables with established instruments with adequate reliabilities.They reported that four of the eight decision making styles changed statistically between 1994 and 2009.

The proposed study
This paper presents an empirical investigation to determine important factors influencing purchase decision involvement in food industry in city of Tehran, Iran.The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale.In our survey, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy is equal to 0.734 and Bartlett's test of Sphericity yields a Chi-Square of 1657 with P-value = 0.000.These statistics validate the overall questionnaire.Table 1 demonstrates the results of communalities.In addition, Scree plot has been used to extract the most important groups and Fig. 1 demonstrates the results of our findings.

The results
In this section, we present four groups of factors influencing on customer satisfaction in food industry.

The first group: individual differences
The first group is associated with individual differences, which consists of five items summarized in Table 3 as follows, As we can observe from the results of Table 3, family value is the most important factor followed by cultural differences and individual factors.In addition, religion and social orientation are other important factors influencing individual differences.

The second group: Product validation
The second group of factors is associated with product validation with three components, which are summarized in Table 4 as follows, The results of Table 4 show that genuine package is number one important factor followed by standard sign and product reputation.

The third group: triggers
The third group of data is associated with triggers with three factors summarized in Table 5 as follows, According to the results of Table 5, "Psychological effects of purchase" is the most important factor followed by "stimulate purchases factors" and "purchases pleasure seeking".

The fourth group: Dependent behavior
Dependent behavior is the last group of factors affecting purchase intention in food industry, which consists of five factors summarized in Table 6 as follows, According to Table 6, market penetration is number one priority followed by costs of major symbols, propensity to buy custom, advertisement and market share.

Discussion and conclusion
In this paper, we have presented an empirical investigation to determine important factors influencing purchase decision involvement in food industry in city of Tehran, Iran.The results indicate that there were four factors including individual differences, product validation, triggers and dependent behavior influencing purchasing decisions.In terms of individual differences, family value has been recognized as the most important factor followed by cultural differences and individual factors.In addition, religion and social orientation were other important factors influencing individual differences.In terms of product validation, genuine package has been number one important factor followed by standard sign and product reputation.Influencing triggers are the third groups of the influencing factors with three components including, psychological effects of purchase was the most important factor followed by stimulate purchases factors and purchases pleasure seeking.Finally, dependent factor is the last group where market penetration was number one priority followed by costs of major symbols, propensity to buy custom, advertisement and market share.

Fig. 1 .
Fig. 1.The results of Scree plot According to Table 2 a Fig. 1, there are four factors influencing on customer satisfaction and we present them in the next section.

Table 1
The summary of CommunalitiesAs we can observe from the results of Table1, all communalities are well above 0.5, which validates the overall questionnaire.Table2demonstrates total variance explained.

Table 2
The summary of total variance explained

Table 3
The summary of factors associated with individual differences

Table 4
The summary of factors influencing on product validation

Table 5
The summary of factors influencing triggers

Table 6
The summary of factors associated with dependent behavior