Impulsive buying behaviour among university-going female students in South Africa: An entrepreneurial perspective

Impulsive buying plays a vital role in marketing communication and influences customer purchasing decisions. These, in turn, facilitate the entrepreneurs’ strategic planning decisions. Manufacturers and marketers, as entrepreneurs, have established factors that influence impulsive buying as part of their marketing and planning strategy. It has been entrepreneurially perceived that females generally have higher levels of impulse buying than males, and because sensual cues promote impulse purchase, enterprises can use sensory signals in stores with products that appeal to female students. The study used factors that are more personal and psychologically based than those of previous studies. The study examined some factors influencing impulsive buying behaviour among female students at a selected institution in South Africa. Data was obtained from a self-administered questionnaire for female students who go shopping in purposively selected Spar supermarkets in six provinces of South Africa. Constructs such as sensory marketing, in-store environment, packaging design, and the use of stimulus-organism-response were discovered to have a substantially positive correlation with impulse purchase. Based on these findings, the study revealed that entrepreneurs perceived that manufacturers and marketers should consider customers’ impulsive buying behaviour important, as it is one of the marketing tools that increases sales in Small, Micro and Medium Enterprises (SMMEs) in South Africa. This study contributes to scholarship by providing empirical evidence on how multiple factors in retail and consumer behaviour jointly influence impulsive buying, offering fresh insights relevant to marketing theory and retail strategy.