Impulse Purchasing: A Literature Overview

Abstract

Impulse purchasing behavior is a mystery in marketing and in literature. Consumers themselves named it as the deviation from standard, which explains a big sale of different goods every year. At present when market competition is high and all types of companies apply promotion in their activities, stimulation of impulse purchasing in the market of consumer goods may become a strong competitive advantage. Evolution of impulse purchasing, process of consumer’s impulse purchasing behavior, theoretical framework of impulse purchasing and various factors that affect impulse purchasing are discussed in this paper. Several research of impulse purchasing had been conducted both in Developed and Developing countries. Based on those researches, four factors (consumer characteristics, store characteristics, situational factors and product characteristics) are revealed which activate the impulse purchasing behavior and a new impulse purchasing process is developed with these four influencing factors in this paper. As there is no adequate research on this phenomenon, there is a scope to do quantitative research on impulse purchasing traits in Bangladeshi consumers. Hopefully this paper will be helpful for different retail stores, marketing managers and marketing graduates of Bangladesh to understand the implementation of impulse purchasing.