A descriptive analysis of personal values on Zambian women' consumer decision-making styles in the context of hair extension products

Abstract

Cultural, social, personal and psychological factors were identified by Rani (2014) as the four major influences on consumer’s buying behavior. While There are many studies about the personal values and consumer purchase behavior, but there is very little research to study Africa women’ consumer behavior, and in Zambia there is even less studies which are conducted to analyze their women’ values and their consumer decision-making styles. The purpose of this study is to explore Zambian women’ personal values and their consumption decision-making styles and how personal values influence their consumer decision-making styles in the context of human hair extension products. It is very important to analyze the consumer values of Zambia women and their consumer decision-making styles in the context of human hair extension, because the demand for hair extension in Zambia is growing fast and the hair extension has become a muti-billion dollars industry This paper had reviewed literature regarding consumer behavior, in specifically personal values and consumer decision-making styles. The LOV scale proposed by Kahle (1983) and the Consumer’s decision making styles proposed by Sproles and Kendall (1986) were adopted to analyze the inter relationship through methodology of multiple regression. The author conducted a descriptive analysis of the primary data collected by a field survey of research questionnaire toward Zambian women. All the questionnaires are distributed and collected at the main shopping malls and universities in Lusaka, Zambia. Through a series analysis of the sample by SPSS, the paper had detected all the list of values and decision-making styles of Zambian women. There are only two consumer values namely Security related with physical and financial safety and Self-fulfillment related with achievement of consumption which achieved a reasonable degree of reliability, and the consumer decision-making styles of Confused by Over-choice related with lacking ability of information analysis and Novelty-Fashion Consciousness related up-to-date fashion pursuit achieved a reasonable degree of reliability. The results reveal that the higher the value of Security, the greater the adoption of Novelty-Fashion Consciousness, and the higher the value of Self-fulfillment, the greater the adoption of Confused by Over-choice Decision-making Styles. However the Security value does not have any significant impact on the adoption of Confused by Over-choice Decision-making styles and the effect of Self-fulfilment value on Novelty-Fashion Consciousness is not significant.