Title: Mobile shopper typology: a shopping motive-based clustering approach to discovering differences in shopping patterns along the mobile path-to-purchase

Authors: Michael Groß

Addresses: Department of Planning and Innovation Management, Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg, Erich-Weinert-Str. 1, 03046 Cottbus, Germany

Abstract: Since m-shopping has gained widespread popularity in society, it has become mainstream in many parts of the world. Consumers not only use mobile devices during their entire path-to-purchase in and around the brick-and-mortar business, but they also increasingly make direct internet purchases with their mobile devices. Consequently, one can expect the shopping behaviour of consumers to be diverse. Therefore, based on a typology approach, this study provides a detailed insight into the different buying routines of m-shoppers. Using a sample of 799 consumers, in a first step this study extracts and verifies three m-shopper clusters: while motivated shoppers and casual shoppers are located at the extremes of the cluster profiles, smart shoppers are somewhere in the middle. Then, in a second step, the empirical findings reveal further significant differences between all three m-shopper types in terms of their individual path-to-purchase, thereby confirming diverse consumption patterns where the m-channel is used.

Keywords: mobile shopping; m-shopping; mobile purchasing; shopping motive; shopper segmentation; consumer typology; path-to-purchase; shopping behaviour; mobile shopper; cluster analysis.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMC.2019.098596

International Journal of Mobile Communications, 2019 Vol.17 No.3, pp.326 - 352

Received: 24 Dec 2016
Accepted: 30 Oct 2017
Published online: 28 Mar 2019 *

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