Consumer Behavior

The Relationship of Consumer Smartness to Demographic and Behavioral Characteristics

---

Abstract

As consumers have transformed into influential entities in the recent consumption environment, a new concept is needed to describe their characteristics. This study adopts Ryou and Ahn (2018)’s comprehensive approach which integrated innovativeness, opinion leadership,emergent nature, market mavenship, consumer savvy,self-disclosure, and lead-userness to account for consumer smartness. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify the consumer smartness and examine how it is related to demographic and behavioral characteristics. A professional online survey company which secures over 1.3 million consumer panels nationwide in Korea was hired to collect the data. A total of 309 consumers responded to the self-administered questionnaires asking about their consumer smartness (Ryou & Ahn, 2018), demographics, and shopping behavior online. Based on the diverse concepts of consumer traits, this study attempts to identify dimensions of consumer smartness and examine its relationship to demographic and behavioral characteristics. First, this study empirically extracted six traits of consumer smartness: innovativeness, opinion leadership, self-disclosure,dissatisfaction, technology acceptance, and marketing literacy. Also, this study found its meaningful relationship to consumer smartness and demographic characteristics and shopping behavior. This result implies that smart consumers are not only buyers who buy more than non-smart consumers, but also are potential influencers who have the power to affect others’ decisions by sharing information.

Keywords: Shopping Behavior, Demographics, Consumer Smartness

How to Cite:

Ahn, S., Ryou, E. & Jeon, S., (2019) “The Relationship of Consumer Smartness to Demographic and Behavioral Characteristics”, International Textile and Apparel Association Annual Conference Proceedings 76(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/itaa.8433