Influence of Lifestyle on Consumer Decision Making with Special Reference to Organized Retail Formats in Chennai

Life style has undergone changes in the last decades and considered as a personal variable known to influence the buyer decision process for consumers. Life style is a basic concept for understanding consumer behavior, and demonstrating the characteristics that are more modernized than personality and more comprehensive than personal values. Lifestyle has a significant positive influence on purchase decision. Marketing stimulation and personal value also has a positive significant impact on the influence of purchase decision and brand selection. The purpose of the study is to examine the influence of life style on consumer decision making process. The sample size of 600 was chosen from the visitors of retail formats and the questionnaire was administered to collect the primary data. In order to identify the factors affecting the life styles of consumers the factor analysis has been employed with principal component extraction with varimax rotation. To assess the influence of life styles on consumer’s preference of retail formats, the multiple linear regression analysis by Ordinary Least Square (OLS) estimation has been applied for identified variables. Hypothesis was framed and tested and results show that lifestyle is having the positive impact over the consumer decision making process. The factors determining the customer’s choice of retail formats would be helpful to identify the key inflectional factors for customers’ preference and level of satisfaction and would be effectively improve the purchasing behaviour of customers. The outcome of the present study would be helpful to modify their existing marketing strategies and attract new customers in addition to retention of existing customers. The study would be helpful to identify the major constraints and their impact on purchasing pattern on par with consumers’ life styles and decision making process of both customers and retailers.