The Influence of Consumers' Innovativeness on their Shopping Decision Making Styles

Innovation and new products have an important role in any company. Successful launching and marketing of new products require targeting innovative consumers. Difference in dimensions of consumers' innovativeness demands different marketing plan. A good understanding of decision-making styles of innovative consumers is imperative for such marketing activities. The main objective of this research is to investigate the effect of consumers' innovativeness on their shopping decision-making styles. Specifically, it aims at evaluating the relationship between two types of innovativeness, i.e. sensory and cognitive, and consumers' shopping decision-making styles. In this descriptive research which is performed as a survey, research population includes students of Islamic Azad University at the campus of Tehran Science and Research Branch of which, a random and proportional sample has been selected. A pretest has been used to check the validity and reliability of the research tool, i.e. questionnaire. Content validity and face validity of the questionnaire have been ascertained. Questionnaire reliability has been assured through the use of both retest reliability and internal consistency reliability. This paper integrates the consumer innovativeness and consumer shopping decision-making styles literature. It is built on the premise that if consumer innovativeness is regarded as a general personality trait, then it would also be reflected in consumers' shopping approaches. Test and analysis of the relationship between cognitive and sensory innovativeness and various shopping styles has been performed by the use of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) using LISREL software. After investigating of eight hypotheses, only four of them have been supported. The findings indicate that cognitive innovativeness positively influences perfectionist and high-quality conscious shopping decision-making style; and sensory innovativeness, positively influences three shopping decision-making style (i.e. brand conscious, novelty and fashion conscious and recreational and shopping conscious). The findings of this research help managers to develop a deeper insight into product development and marketing. Marketing communication and brand management of new product should be based on two different types of innovative consumers (cognitive and sensory) and their shopping styles. The findings also provide valuable insights to marketing managers in segmenting and targeting their markets