Consumer innovativeness and consumer decision styles: a confirmatory and segmentation analysis

Consumer decision styles (CDS) are important for marketers because they determine consumer behaviours that are relatively stable over time and hence are useful for market segmentation. The study has confirmed the existence of the original US characteristics as well as put forward two new characteristics specific to the Indian context, namely, ‘dissatisfied shopping consciousness’ and ‘store loyal’. Thereafter, a multi-step cluster analysis was employed to classify the respondents into groups based on their CDS. Five homogeneous and distinct decision-making segments have been identified. In order to validate the cluster solutions, a K-means clustering procedure was performed by taking random initial seeds to set the cluster centres. The paper also seeks to investigate whether consumers’ innovativeness is associated with their CDS. The findings are discussed and recommendations are proffered for managers and future research.