Impact of Price-Marked Packaging on Impulse Purchase Decision - Dissertation Example

Impulsive behavior has been defined variously by different scholars. One of the most interesting definitions of impulsive purchase was given by Weinberg and Gottwald (1982) where the researchers stated that impulsive shopping is a mystery, a mysterious behavior that often even goes unexplained for the customers themselves. This definition indicates that impulsive purchasing is an act that may happen randomly, and hence defeat all pre-planned marketing preparedness of the companies by deviating from the customers at the point of purchase.

It also indicates that this behavior was still not well researched or understood during the 1980s when the researchers called it a mystery. However, impulsive behavior, while having the potential to distract customers from making their regular or pre-planned purchases, also indicates the great vulnerability of the customers while in the store. What this translates into for the marketers is an immense potential of sales – and hence the need to explore, to understand the factors that are operational at the point of purchase that impact on the customers and make them buy impulsively.

This is the reason that there is a vast amount of literature already available on the subject of impulsive behavior and impulsive purchasing has become a major target for all the merchandising and in-store layout and logistics projects. There is a general consensus among the researchers as to what comprises of impulsive purchase, and there is an agreement that impulsive purchases are those that signify a deviation from the standard purchase that customers may be attributed with – this deviation being in the form of brand switch, size change, or replacement product (Rook and Fisher, 1995; Cobb and Hoyer, 1986; Hausman, 2000).

According to Cobb and Hoyer (1986), impulse buying is an ‘unplanned purchase’ that was never intended to happen initially. A similar definition can also be found by Kollat and Willett.