Buying a family car: relevant factors for teenagers.
| Autor | de Sa, Joao Duarte Saleme |
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Introduction
Members of the same family can play different roles in the purchase process, such as initiator, influencer, information gatherer, gatekeeper, decision maker and purchaser (Lien, Westberg, Stavros, & Robinson, 2018). This paper intends to investigate the participation of teenagers as influencers in the buying decision of a family car in order to find out the relevant factors related to their preferences.
Even though the role played by the teenager as an influencer in the decision-making process in his/her family has stimulated interest in some researchers (see Foxman, Tansuhaj, & Ekstrom, 1989; Beatty & Talpade, 1994; Palan & Wilkes, 1997), social and economic changes may not represent exactly the decision-making process of the family (Wang, Holloway, Beatty, & Hill, 2007). Palan and Wilkes (1997) indicate, specifically, that there is a lack of research that details the interaction level between teenagers and their parents during the decision-making process in consumption.
Choosing an automobile as a product whose purchase will be evaluated is justified by the relevance of such product in the Brazilian context, considering that automobile sales were responsible for 4 percent of the country's GDP, employing 1.3m people, generating R$39.7bn in taxes and producing 2,156,356 automobiles--with these numbers, Brazil became the world's tenth largest producer of automobiles (ANFAVEA, 2016). Besides, bearing in mind that the purchase of such product is an important decision for the family and that an automobile is a durable good, buying a car can be seen as a complex purchase due to the values involved in the acquisition, specially taking into account that an automobile will serve the family for a considerable amount of time (Rivara, Rivara, & Bartol, 1998; Martinez & Polo, 1999; Nascimento, 2014).
The study by Nascimento (2014) investigated the determining factors for the purchase decision of new automobiles and pointed out that influencers may affect even an individual decision. Before such condition, our study, which intends to fill this gap, is guided by the following research question:
RQ1. What are the main factors considered by teenagers when purchasing an automobile?
It is important to emphasize herein that we do not intend to focus our analysis on the family as a decision-making unit, even though the results contribute for understanding the decision-making process of a single item in a specific way. The teenager, as part of the nuclear family--a couple and their children (Lien et al., 2018)--can be seen as the one who points out characteristics and alternatives or tries to persuade his/her parents to acquire the automobile considered the best choice.
Previous studies already investigated the role played by the wife in the decision making of household products, such as furniture and decoration articles, and the patterns of husband influence on car purchases (see Martinez & Polo, 1999). Other research studies that investigated the influence of teenagers in the purchase decision making adopted different ranges to select the respondents; for instance, Beatty and Talpade (1994) investigated teenagers that were 16-19 years of age, while Wang, Holloway, Beatty, and Hill (2007) decided to research teenagers between 13 and 15 years. In our research, we decided to adopt a wider range, i.e. between 13 and 19 years, due to the representativeness of such group--this number corresponds to 4.2 percent of the 208m Brazilian inhabitants (IBGE, 2010). We also adopted the criteria proposed by Klein and Smart (2017) to identify teenagers as the ones who were born after the year 2000, a generation known as millennial, N or Z (Eisner, 2005). This segmentation is relevant because marketing studies have been identifying that different generations may present different consumption behaviors according to each generational profile (Noble, Haytko, & Phillips, 2009).
Even though, herein, we intend to approach Brazilian teenagers, some data related to the importance of such public in other countries must be observed. In the USA, the share of the population that corresponds to current teenagers represent 25 percent of the total; some predictions indicate that by 2020 adolescents will be responsible for 30 percent of consumption in the country (Miller, Yan, Jankovska, & Hensely, 2017). In China, children influence almost 69 percent of regular purchases, and approximately 24 percent of durable goods purchases (Wang et al., 2007).
Considering the behavioral characteristics of millennials and the context of broad communication, in which the free, social and less controlled sharing of information seems to prevail, it becomes difficult to identify the preferences of this generation regarding automobiles. As such, we took into account 54 attributes brought up by Nascimento (2014) in order to analyze automobile purchase.
Our study also indicates practical and academic contributions. In the theoretical field, it contributes to literature regarding family decision making. It also approaches the attributes of automobiles that are relevant for a well-informed, connected and with an increasing purchase power generation, especially in comparison with other previous generations, whose context was prior to the emergence of social media (Steg, Perlaviciute, Werff, & Lurvink, 2014).
For practitioners, our study enables a greater efficiency of decision-making processes of automobile manufacturers when choosing the attributes that a car should have--advertising campaigns could also be guided by our study as they could focus on the attributes presented herein (Noble et al., 2009). Another important issue is the decrease of the Brazilian production over the past three years (ANFAVEA, 2016), which indicates a higher competitiveness in the sector. Before such context, it is relevant to find out which attributes are taken into consideration by teenagers, who can become influencers when purchasing a family car.
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Theoretical review
2.1 The family as consumption unit and the influence of the teenager
The concept of family as a consumption unit has been adopted in the field of consumer behavior (see Epp & Price, 2008). Literature differentiates nuclear from extended family: the first one represents a set composed of a couple and their children, the latter aggregates other relatives, e.g. grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins, etc. (Lien et al., 2018).
Epp and Price (2008) affirm that the family presents a set of characteristics: collective, small groups (siblings, couples, for instance), relational and individual. According to the authors, regardless of the characteristic observed, it will be associated with its own rituals, social drama, history, daily interactions and, most importantly, intergenerational transfers.
The purchase decision-making process can be influenced generally by how much he/she knows about the product (Steg et al., 2014). However, consumption choices are not only oriented by individual factors; other individuals may affect such consumption, especially in family circles. Research on the family consumption behavior usually emphasizes the capacity of influence of the members--father, mother or children (Batra & Ali, 2015).
The influence occurs when the influencer provokes an intentional change in the behavior of another individual, i.e. when the impact is significant (Wang et al., 2007). When considering the family as a group, teenagers become an object of interest of the marketing field because they can be agents in three different markets: primary, in which they are consumers; influencer, where their needs, desires and opinions matter for family consumption decisions; and future, as potential consumers of products they have contact with currently, i.e. one of the most profitable markets for several businesses (Batra & Ali, 2015).
In the specific case of the influence of the teenager over the parents' choice, which is the central theme of this paper, it will be based on the perceived importance of the product, on the motivational aspect related to the anticipation in using the product (projective characteristic), and on the level of knowledge about the product (Wang et al., 2007). The authors mention that teenagers are seen by their parents as "knowledge authorities" taking into consideration that they are more used to online research and have a relative "power" to look for information, which is the second stage of the purchase process.
This affirmation was supported by Singh and Kumar (2014), who showed that the influence of the teenager in family purchases increases due to their ability to search for information on the product, for spending a significant amount of time watching online videos, and for being affected by sponsored contents (Jans, Cauberghe, & Hudders, 2018). This way, teenagers tend to take into consideration different attributes in comparison to other social groups (Rivara et al., 1998; Noble et al., 2009; Batra & Ali, 2015).
2.2 Millennials and relevant attributes in car purchasing
Millennials were born in an already technological wireless technology, with the presence of computers in their residence, as well as internet and mobile telephony. These information paths became the most transparent and rapid world borders in several subjects, especially with regard to globalization and global warming (Williams, Page, Petrosky, & Hernandez, 2010). Among general characteristics, literature has emphasized that millennials accept they do not know everything, believe they can make a better future, have a strong sense of autonomy, are adaptable and comfortable in several occasions, are selfish, live for the moment and spend a lot of money (Eisner, 2005).
About general aspects related to consumption, millennials know about brands, appreciate high-quality products when sold at a fair price, prefer direct and objective advertisements (Nowak, Thach, & Olsen, 2006), decide where and how companies will communicate...
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