EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Essential item purchases during COVID-19: A cluster analysis of psychographic traits

Pearlyn Ng, Xuan Quach, Omar H Fares, Myuri Mohan and Seung Hwan (Mark) Lee

Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science, 2022, vol. 32, issue 4, 579-600

Abstract: This research seeks to profile consumer segments formed during the COVID-19 pandemic via a set of psychographic consumption traits: Narcissism, Psychological Entitlement, Status Consumption, Fear of Embarrassment, and Fear of Missing Out. Based on a cluster analysis of 281 consumers, the data generated four distinct groups: Egalitarians, Agentic Egoists, Communal Egoists, and Conformists. Further, we compared the segments in their acquisition behavior as it pertains to importance of purchase, quantity of purchase, sharing of purchase, and willingness to pay for essential items. Our results showed that each cluster was associated with a unique set of consumer preferences. For instance, Egalitarians placed less importance on medical items. Conformists placed greater importance on acquiring disposable masks than others. Communal Egoists were interested in food-related items such as bottled waters and snacks. Agentic Egoists reported that they would spend more money on cold/cough medicines than Egalitarians and Conformists. Overall, our findings provide key insights and recommendations to retail managers. Some limitations include our sampling approach (i.e. US consumers) and determining clusters based on select psychographic traits. We acknowledge that there are other characteristics that can differentially influence consumers’ acquisition behavior during the pandemic.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/21639159.2022.2033132 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jgsmks:v:32:y:2022:i:4:p:579-600

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RGAM20

DOI: 10.1080/21639159.2022.2033132

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science is currently edited by Seong-Yeon Park

More articles in Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:taf:jgsmks:v:32:y:2022:i:4:p:579-600