Impulse buying tendencies among Indian consumers: scale development and validation

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize, develop and validate the measurement of impulse buying tendency India, an emerging market in Asia. Design/methodology/approach The conceptualization of India’s impulse buying tendency (IBT) has been based on a review of academic literature and an analysis of qualitative data from 30 observations at retail stores and 25 in-depth consumer interviews. The scale’s reliability and validity were assessed by content, convergent, discriminant, nomological and predictive validity using statistical techniques such as exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. Findings A two-dimensional measure for IBT was developed for the Indian market, and then tested and validated using appropriate statistical measures. Research limitations/implications The study was skewed towards offline retail with both observations and interviews focusing on the bricks-and-mortar model. With e-retailing in India growing at a rapid rate, future research should extend the study and verify the IBT instrument’s validity specifically for impulse buying behaviour online. Originality/value To the best of authors’ knowledge, the present study is the first to bridge the gap in the existing research of impulse buying in context of emerging markets like India that are culturally, unlike both the western/developed and other Asian/emerging markets; and socio-economically, facing an interplay of variety of factors that are in a state of flux. The developed IBT scale would help by providing academics and practitioners with means of broadening their perspectives and understanding of retail behaviours in a context that is characterized by unprecedented consumer spending, increasing proliferation of modern retail and influence of a culture traditionally been given to simplicity and frugality.