1.Introduction

The goal of this research is to observe and investigate consumer behavior in a specific market and use the psychological approach of personality to research the preferred shopping habits of customers.

Several past research have explored the same field of research, such as consumer psychology behind brands, behavioral approaches, and cross-cultural dimensions.

But these studies looked at consumer psychology from a very general and scientific point of view, which would be, e.g., theories that psychologists have made [1] . Therefore, this research will analyze the consumer behavior from a different approach – that is, how personality affects consumer psychology in a specific type of basket of goods – retail stores.

2.Methods

A quasi-experiment [2] was conducted and samples were gathered by using the opportunity sampling method. That is, interviewing people who happened to be at the location at the time. All the interviews were done in a KKV shop in a high-end shopping center surrounded by office buildings located in Beijing’s CBD area. KKV is China’s leading fashion retailer aiming Gen-Z. With the question list, participants were asked about their shopping habits and questions relevant to the store – for example, how do they know about the shop KKV and what are their favorite products within the shop. Next, there were some questions about introversion/extroversion, or whether or not they like to go to socializing events.

100 shoppers were approved, and 50 responses were received. All the interviews were done during weekends. Most of the shoppers who were interviewed are women who are around 20-40 years old. This could therefore create a gender bias with the results, which means the results could have a lack of generalizability to larger populations.

Interview question list:

1.Are you seeking for a specific product today or just looking around?

2.How do you know KKV (the name of the store)?

3.Are you attracted to the designs of the layout of the store or the product types more?

4.What are your preferences amongst the product types in the store?

5.Do you prefer purchasing online or offline?

6.What kind of advertisements increase your desire to purchase the product? Phone ads? TV ads? Advertisement boards?

7.How often do you come to the store?

8.What is your average spending every time you come here?

9.Do you like to spend more money on entertainment products or daily products?

10.Do you consider yourself as more introverted or extroverted?

11.Do you think most people have a kind heart?

12.Do you often worry about things that doesn’t matter much?

13.Do you like to participate in socializing activities?

3.Results

Overall, there are cause-and-effect relationships between the independent variables and the dependent variables. For example, there is a very obvious relationship between the preference of purchasing methods and the personality of the interviewees. Introverted people are more likely to purchase on an online way and extroverted people are more likely to purchase at offline stores. On the other hand, there are also points where there are no significant correlations between the two variables – for example, the correlation between extrovert/introvert and the types of products that the interviewees prefer.

The reason for this occurrence could be caused by several factors: The price of the products, the way that the customers know about the shop, and the possible reasons of why they are attracted to the store[3].

Among the 50 shoppers, 25 regarded themselves as introvert, 16 regarded as extrovert, and the rest 9 regarded as neutral. This is shown in Table 1 below.

Table 1: Breakdown of interviewees' personality

20 shoppers like social activities, and the rest 30 dislike them, as shown in Table 2 below.

Table 2: Breakdown of interviewees' social behavior

3.2.Personality’s impact on preferences of product type

As shown in Table 3, there is no clear correlation between shoppers’ personality and their preferences over product categories. Note: in this table, interviewees who answered 50/50 were not considered since they would not make a clear categorization

Table 3: Relationship between personalities and preference of product types

3.4.Social behavior’s impact on preferences of product types

The preference for social activities both have similar patterns. Preferences for social activities do not create differences amongst product preferences. This result is shown in Table 4 below.

Table 4: Relationship between social behavior and preference of product types

3.5.The combined impact of personality and social behavior on the way “to know KKV”

The 50 shoppers were further grouped in four categories, introvert + social dislike, introvert + social like, extrovert + social like, and extrovert + social dislike as shown in Table 5. The 9 interviewees have 50/50 (neutral) personality are not included in the analysis.

Table 5: Breakdown of combined personality+social behavior

Walking in the mall, working nearby, and passing by contributed 66% of customers flow to this KKV shop, which means KKV can attract shoppers with different personalities and social behaviors, and physical appearance of KKV seems to be the single most important factor to attract its customers. This result is shown in the Table 6 below.

Table 6: Personality and social behavior's combined impact on the way to know KKV

3.7.The combined impact of personality and social behavior on the selection of shopping method

It’s quite in line with our common sense that Table 7 shows that introverted people prefer shopping online, while extroverted people prefer shopping offline. There is no trend in people who likes both shopping ways.

Table 7: Personality and social behavior's combined impact on shopping methods

3.9.The combined impact of personality and social behavior on the acceptance of advertisement

As shown in Table 8, 66% of the shoppers think phone advertising impacts them most importantly, which is another strong evidence that mobile internet advertising is the most effective way to reach potential customers.

Table 8: Personality and social behavior's combined impact on the acceptability of advertisement

3.11.Additional supportive analysis

Correlation between average unit price of product type and shoppers’ preferences.

As shown in Table 9 and Figure 1, most of shoppers coming to KKV are quite price sensitive. The better price performance, the more shoppers prefer. Accessories, food, and cosmetics are the top three categories of preferred by KKV shoppers.

Table 9: Relationship between average unit price and interviewees' preference

Notes: the lower the ranking, the lower average unit price

Figure 1: Correlation between price and interviewees' preference

4.Discussion

The results have shown that there are different ways of how personality and the way of knowing the product would have various impacts upon the will to purchase a specific product. Comparing my research to the research by Bernd Schmitt – The consumer psychology of brands, both of the studies looked at the effects of various types of products on consumer psychology. [4] Differently, the studies looked at different categories – my research looked on retail products while Schmitt only looked at different brands. The analytical view were also different – the research looked at how the product types and personality/social preference could be combined and create an effect, whilst Schmitt looked the cognitive and sensory approach of psychology.

There are multiple articles referenced about researching consumer psychology, and they only either looked at it from the cognitive approach or the biological approach but never on the sociocultural approach although Sharon Shavitt [5] did look at it from the cultural approach, but no study seem to approach it from the personality side, as in the personality of the customers. Therefore, it would be interesting to see what can be found when the results are analyzed through the independent variable of personality and social preference.

Another example would be The influence of behavioral psychology on consumer psychology and marketing by [6] Victoria K. Wells. Published in 2014, this research article looked at consumer psychology in the aspect of marketing, which is how psychology can affect market planning, and especially looked at the aspect of [7] social psychology – classical conditioning. This conditioning means that an individual would continue to carry out the activity when they get positive results from it, so this aspect also differs from the aspect of personality [8].

5.Conclusion

In conclusion, different personalities do have impacts upon the purchasing behavior of individuals in a specific market. This testifies and supports the hypothesis of claiming that personalities of extroversion/introversion would affect customers preferences in choosing specific products and shopping ways. Different correlations and analysis between personality/socializing preferences and product preference/ways of purchasing/ways of knowing the shop showed trends indicating that introverted individuals have an overall cautious way of purchasing and prefer online shopping more. On the other hand, extroverted individuals have a less cautious way of purchasing products and more prefer shopping offline in stores.