Impulsive Fashion Apparel Consumption: The Role of Hedonism, Fashion Involvement and Emotional Gratification in Fashion Apparel Impulsive Buying Behaviour in a Developing Country

Impulsive buying has been an enigma, intriguing yet captivating the minds of practitioners and researchers for more than half a century in various domains of study. In today’s post-modern era, shopping has also emerged as a social and leisure activity, reducing the number of cognitively planned purchases, thus making impulsive buying a common practice and a socially acceptable phenomenon in developed and developing economies. This study complements the growing body of literature by examining three individual traits of human behaviour, namely hedonism, fashion involvement and emotional gratification and their effect on impulsive buying among a cohort of university students. The study is located within a post-positivist paradigm using a quantitative method. Participants were 385 randomly selected students registered in 2013 from a University in South Africa. Descriptive statistics were used to describe the composition of the sample. Correlations and regression analysis were used to test the relationships between the constructs. Validity and reliability were assessed through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and Cronbach alpha values. The results show that the three independent latent constructs, namely hedonic, fashion involvement and emotional gratification positively correlates with impulsive buying behaviour among the university cohort. However, only emotional gratification and fashion involvement were significant predictors of impulsive buying behaviour. For retailers and more specifically marketers, the constant need to generate opportunities for impulsive buying by appealing to consumers’ fashion involvement and the emotional gratification side of life in apparel purchases becomes apparent for this cohort of consumers. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n8p16