Factors Affecting C onsumers’ Impulse Buying Behavior in Thai Nguyen City, Vietnam

The study uses primary data collected from a structured survey of 300 customers at supermarkets and shopping malls in Thai Nguyen city, Vietnam. Using the exploratory factor analysis and a multiple regression model, the study analyzed factors affecting consumers' impulse buying behavior. Results show that five main factors having significantly positive impacts on impulse buying behavior of customers in Thai Nguyen city include availability of time and money, music and promotions, shopping enjoyment tendency, in-store factors, and surroundings. However, the findings on impulse buying tendencies and personality traits are inconclusive, as they show the expected positive signs but do not have a statistically significant impact. This means that while these factors may have a theoretical impact on impulse buying, their practical significance in this specific context remains uncertain. Understanding factors affec ting customers’ impulse b uying behavior helps the enterprises to design strategies and measures to encourage impulse buying among their customers.

ISSN Online: 2722-5674 -ISSN Print:  Ma Toan Thang -65-without their initial intention.With the boom of e-commerce, the convenience of credit cards, television shopping channels, the diversified items displayed in supermarkets and shopping malls, it is easier for consumers to purchase impulsively.Although shopping via social networks and online sales platforms has been a popular activity in recent years, instore shopping is still a favorite channel for many people because of its convenience and viewing goods directly (Iyer et al., 2018).
It is clear that not only marketing researchers but also economists and business have paid their growing attention on impulse buying.Among studies investigating the behavior of impulse buying, most of them have previously undertaken in the United States (see Rook, 1987;Han et al., 1991;Rook & Fisher, 1995;Beatty & Ferrell, 1998), and the United Kingdom (see Bayley & Nancarrow, 1998) with a focus on traditional retail context.These pioneer studies mainly concentrated on introducing an interpretation of purchase impulsively (Rook, 1987), examining different dimensions of impulse buying as well as distinguishing which buying action is impulsiveness and which buying action is not impulsiveness (Piron, 1991;Han et al., 1991).Meanwhile recent studies have paid attention on impulse buying of consumers from the perspective of not only traditional retail but also from the perspective of e-commerce shopping context (Dawson & Kim, 2010;Wells et al., 2011).Many studies have focused on this theme in the context of Asian economies, such as China (Yu and Bastin, 2010), India (Sofi & Nika, 2017), and South Korea (Chung et al., 2017).These studies have shown that impulsiveness positively affect the strong desire to purchase impulsively.This means that the higher impulsiveness of the consumer, the more likely he or she purchases impulsively.Other studies also reveal that various environmental factors may negatively impact to the impulsive hastiness.
In Vietnam, a few scholars have explored the theme of impulse purchasing behavior (Cho et al., 2014, Luu et al., 2021;Nguyen-Viet & Diep, 2022;Nguyen et al., 2003).All of these studies were conducted in largest cities and provinces of Vietnam, including Hanoi capital and Ho Chi Minh city.Even though, the question is that what are factors generally affecting the impulse buying behavior of Vietnamese consumers, and whether or not the behavior of consumer in buying impulsively in large cities which were pointed out in previous studies is different from that in a mountainous areas such as Thai Nguyen city.In that context, examining the determinants of impulse buying behavior of consumers in a mountainous city would be meaningful since shopping infrastructure of Thai Nguyen is much below in comparison with that of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city.The aim of this study is to examine factors affecting consumers' impulse behavior in Thai Nguyen city.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Previous related studies have revealed that there are multiple factors affecting impulse buying behavior of consumers.Based on different criteria, these factors can be divided into external and internal factors, or personal factors and situational factors.Yoon and Faber (2000) look at the impulse buying -personality traits nexus.In this study, personality traits are examined through three aspects, these being lacks of control, reaction to stress, and absorption.Recent studies by Mohan et al. (2013) and Saad and Metawie (2015) also confirm that personality factors, which are measured by impulsivity, excitement, and esteem, are significantly correlated with impulse buying behavior.In a research conducted by Badgaiyan and Verma (2014), personality traits are measured through five major dimensions: stable emotion, agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness.Personality factors are not only personality trait but also related to other personal conditions which directly affect consumers who are driven by the behavior of impulse purchasing such as money and time availability (Foroughi et al., 2012) or presence of family members (Badgaiyan & Verma, 2015).In-store factors, which are widely discussed among scholars, refer to marketing stimuli that are placed and controlled by the marketers in order to lure consumers into purchase behavior.In some studies, in-store factors can be considered as an external factors affecting consumers' impulse buying behavior.Hence, depending on the objectives and locations of previous studies, remarkable external factors which include culture, store atmospheres and specific situations, influence both in-store responses of consumers and their future choice decisions.Regarding to in-store factors, Morrison et al. (2011) demonstrate the impact of music volume and the existence of in-store aroma on young fashion shoppers in retail sectors.Meanwhile, Areni and Kim (1994) show that brighter lightning affected consumers through which it helps customers purchase more merchandise.However, their research cannot prove the influence of sale promotion on the increasing volume of merchandise.Meanwhile, few studies proving the positive effects of store environment on consumers' impulse buying behavior are Mohan et al. (2013), Badgaiyan and Verma (2015), and recently Akram et al. (2016).
The relationship between shopping enjoyment tendency and consumers' behavior of impulse purchasing has received attentions of scholars.Defined as the pleasure that an individual obtained during the process of shopping, Beatty and Ferrell (1998) proposed that shopping enjoyment and the tendency to buy impulsively are two exogenous variables that affecting impulse buying behavior.Their findings reveal that consumers who have higher tendency to purchase impulsively are more likely to experience rising hastiness.Mohan et al. (2013) also proved two main arguments.First, shopping enjoyment tendency have a significant positive impact on the urge to purchase impulsively.Second, hasty purchases have a positive impact on consumers' impulsive behavior.
The tendency of impulsively purchasing can be understood as the degree to which a customer is likely to make unintended, immediate, and unreflective purchases, such as impulse buying (Beatty and Ferrel, 1998;Rook and Fisher, 1995).Since impulse buying tendency is a common trait which is expressed across merchandise, this is a general action of purchasing impulsively.Previous studies have demonstrated impulse buying tendency as an individual trait that leads to impulse buying behavior (Weun et al., 1998;Yoon & Faber, 2000).Tendency of impulse buying was considered as the tendencies "to experience spontaneous and sudden urges to make on-the-spot purchases and to act on these felts urges with little deliberation or evaluation of consequence" (Beatty & Ferrel, 1998).Due to lack of control, when a consumer has a high impulse buying tendency, he or she tends to allow himself/herself more impulse buying (Yoon & Faber, 2000).Parsad et al. (2017) also pointed out the positive association of shoppers' impulse purchasing tendency and hastiness to purchase with the behavior of impulse buying.

Study area
This research was conducted in Thai Nguyen city, the capital and largest city of Thai Nguyen province with the natural area of 222.12 km2, accounting for only 6.31% of total natural area of Thai Nguyen province.The average population of Thai Nguyen city in 2021 was 354.331 people, accounting for 26.7% of total population of the province (Thai Nguyen Statistics Office, 2022).
Thai Nguyen province is located in the Northern midlands and mountainous areas of Vietnam, and is also one of the economic centers of this region.Thai Nguyen also connects with the highly developed economic triangle, including Ha Noi -Hai Phong -Quang Ninh.The province covers a natural area of 3,521.96km2 (Thai Nguyen Statistics Office, 2022).By the end of 2021,Thai Nguyen province's population was 1,323,150 people (approximately 1.33% of the country's population), ranking 3rd in the Northern Midland After Samsung's construction of a second high-tech complex in 2013, the scale and structure of Thai Nguyen province's economy has changed in almost every important aspect.The Gross Regional Domestic Product (GRDP) of the province increased from 37,371.0 billion VND in 2013 to 63,562.9 billion VND in 2015 and to 125,808.0 billion VND in 2021 (Thai Nguyen Statistics Office, 2022).The economic growth rate reached 33.2% in 2015 -the highest level ever (Thai Nguyen Statistics Office, 2016).From 2016 to 2019, the annual economic growth rates were all over 9%.Investment attraction, industrial production, import-export, budget revenue, and job creation have reached great performance.
Thai Nguyen province's economic growth and development has positively impacted on the income and living standards of the local residents.In 2021, the monthly average income per capita in Thai Nguyen province is significantly higher than the average for the Northern midlands and mountain areas (3,814 thousand VND as compared to 2,838 thousand VND) (Thai Nguyen Statistics Office, 2022).

Data and Methods
Data used in this study were collected from a structured survey of 300 consumers at supermarkets and shopping malls located in Thai Nguyen city.The survey was conducted in December of 2020.Population is all consumers at selected supermarkets and shopping malls, including Vincom Plaza, Minh Cau Supermarket, Lanchi Mart, Aloha Mall, Media Mart, HC -Home Center, Green Electronics Supermarket (Dien May Xanh).The sampling technique used is a non-probability convenience sample of consumers who are impulsively purchase or buying things at these shopping locations.The primary reasons for selecting convenience sample are as follows: First, there is not fixed list of consumers who shall be and when they will be visiting the shopping malls, super markets and other shopping places for purchasing.In this context, probability sampling cannot be a suitable technique.Instead, non-probability convenience sampling is more realistic.
Second, in order to get the real outcome for this research, respondents who are not serious will not be requested for information and opinions.Instead, only genuinely interested respondents are approached and requested for response.Hence, convenience sampling is the most suitable technique in collecting data for the research.
The respondent is considered as a consumer with impulse buying behavior when he or she sees a product in a shop and his/her inner feelings strongly urge himself/herself to purchase and bring it into possession.The size of sample is decided due to the suggestion of Hair et al. (2010) in case the population number is unknown.Accordingly, the minimum size should be higher than five times of the total number of observations which are under the analysis.Normally, the acceptable sample size should be the ratio of 10:1.Applied to this dissertation, there are 10 observed variables, so the minimum sample size is 100.However, the author intends to choose the expected sample size of 300 customers who have bought impulsively at the selected supermarkets and shopping malls.
The survey questionnaire is structured by two main parts.The first one is to collect the socio-demographic information of respondents in terms of age, gender, occupation, educational attainment, marital status, and monthly income.The second one is to get the respondents' evaluations on items reflecting factors affecting their impulse buying behavior, and their impulse buying behavior.All measurement items of the second part of the questionnaire were measured on a five-point Likert scale (strongly disagree = 1, disagree = 2, neutral = 3, agree = 4, strongly agree = 5).

Ma Toan Thang
-68-Before applying the regression model of factors affecting consumers' impulse buying behavior, I employed exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with a varimax rotation to pool and reduce the number of items measuring factors affecting consumers' impulse buying behavior to a smaller number of factors.
In order to examine factors affecting consumers' impulse buying behavior in Thai Nguyen city, the form of multiple regression model is as follows: Where: IBB is dependent variable, standing for Impulsive Buying Behavior of consumers in Thai Nguyen city.The independent variables include Impulse Buying Tendency (IBT), Personality traits (PER), Time and money availability (TMA), Music and promotion (MP), Shopping Enjoyment Tendency (SET), In-store factor (ISF), Surroundings (SR).

Demographic characteristics of respondents
Table 1 exhibits the detailed demographic characteristics of the respondents.Almost half (49.7%) of the respondents are aged under 30 years-old.It can be seen that the percentage of women customer are still dominated with 52.3 percent of the respondents are females and 47.7 percent of them are males.With respect to educational attainment, most of the respondents are well-educated with 41.7 percent of them are at college level and 29.7 percent of total respondents are at bachelor level.The majority of the respondents are married with 54.0 percent.Single respondents are used to buy impulsively with the second highest ranking of 34.3 percent.There are merely 35 respondents, equivalent to 11.7 percent are widowed or divorced/separated and used to purchase impulsively at least one time before.The survey showed that most of the respondents are engaged in manual/factory work (19.3 per cent), office/clerical/administrative (17.7 per cent), and domestic/household work (17.0 per cent).Meanwhile, the respondents who belong to the 'other' group, which accounts for 18.7 per cent, are mainly students, and some respondents are doctors, hairdressers, etc. with a minority percentage.The statistics show that 57.3 per cent of the total respondents have a monthly income of more than 7.5 million VND.This threshold is higher than the average income in mountainous areas and the average income nationwide.It can be seen that monthly income can significantly affect consumers' impulse buying behavior in several ways.

Results of exploratory factor analysis
The exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was used to factorize factors affecting consumers' impulse buying behavior in Thai Nguyen province, Vietnam.The results of the EFA are shown in Table 2.The KMO index test was 0.739 and the value of Bartlett's Test of Sphericity was found to be significant (with p-value equals 0.000).These results indicate that Exploratory Factor Analysis was suitable, and all the variables are not orthogonal, hence could be factorized appropriately.All observed variables which have the Factor Loading satisfied the condition of greater 0.55 are kept.As can be seen, there are seven factors affecting the impulse buying behavior of consumers in Thai Nguyen, including Factor 1-Impulse Buying Tendency (IBT1, IBT2, IBT3, IBT6), Factor 2 -Personality traits (PER7, PER8, PER9), Factor 3-Time and money availability (PER1, PER2, PER3), Factor 4 -Music and promotion (ISF7, ISF8, ISF9, ISF10), Factor 5-Shopping Enjoyment Tendency (SET1, SET2, SET3), Factor 6-In-store factor (ISF2, ISF4, SF11), Factor 7-Surroundings (ISF1, IBT7).

PER1
.895 I don't set a time limitation when I go shopping.

PER2
.837 I feel that I have enough money to shop, so I can spend a little more freely if I find something I really like.

PER3
.804 When I go shopping with my family member, I finish shopping longer than my initial plan.

PER7
.914 When I see something I like, I often find it difficult to control myself and purchase immediately.

PER8
.848 Whenever I am under pressure, I usually go shopping to release my stress.

Ma Toan Thang
-70-Tactful and friendly salesperson often offers me to purchase product that I didn't plan to buy.

ISF1
.738 I usually attracted by smiling and cheerful salesperson who often prompts me to purchase spontaneously.

ISF2
.652 The atmosphere in the store (such as layout of the light, the fragrance) urges me to purchase impulsively.

ISF4
.770 The music displayed in the store attracts me and urge me to buy impulsively.

ISF7
.879 Lively and modern music in the store draws me in and makes me purchase impulsively.

ISF8
.578 If I see a compelling advertising campaign (with images of famous celebrities) in the store, I tend to make an impulsive purchase.

ISF9
.734 Promotions and attractive discounts make it easy for me to purchase.

ISF10
.677 I am often attracted to products having attractive discount, then I often buy them.

ISF11 .826
Shopping is a time enjoyment.SET1 .920 I feel entertained when I am shopping.

SET2
.813 Shopping is one of my hobbies and I love shopping

SET3
.793 Most of my purchases are in a sudden inspiration.

IBT1 .802
Sometimes I buy something just because I want to buy it, not because I need to buy it.

IBT2 .780
I carelessly plan most of my purchases.IBT3 .763I feel fun when I buy things spontaneously.

IBT6 .747
When I see a product that is very attractive, I often decide to buy it right away, rarely considering the consequences of this immediate purchase.

Results of regression model of factors affecting consumers' impulse behavior
Table 3 reports the summary of the regression model.In this table adjusted R square is 0.391, hence it can be concluded that 39.1% of consumers' impulse buying behavior in Thai Nguyen city can be explained by the independent variables.F change is 28.375 with the significant value is 0.000 (smaller than 0.01).Hence, it can be concluded that the model is suitable with the actual dataset.Saying in other words, the independent variables are correlated linearly with the dependent variable and the confidence level is 99%.

Ma Toan Thang
-71- The results of the multiple regression model for factors affecting consumers' impulse buying behavior in Thai Nguyen city are reported in Table 4.As all the values of VIF are smaller than 10, it can be concluded that there are no multicollinearity in this model.The general multiple regression model can be expressed as follows: Time and money availability have positively affected to impulsive buying behavior of consumers in Thai Nguyen city ( ) at 5% level of significance.This result implies that consumers having more available time and not suffered from time limitation will buy more impulsively.In addition, money availability helps consumers more believe in themselves while put their feet in shopping areas.Hence the availability of both time and money are positively associated with impulse buying behavior of Thai Nguyen consumers.This finding is consistent with previous research, such as Foroughi et al. (2012), Badgaiyan and Verma (2015).
Music and promotion have positively affected to impulsive buying behavior of ISSN Online:2722-5674 -ISSN Print: 2722-5666    Ma Toan Thang -67-and Mountainous area (Thai Nguyen Statistics Office, 2022).The population is concentrated mainly in the southern and plain areas of the province.

Table 2 .
Explanatory Factor Analysis results for factors affecting consumers' impulse buying behavior

Table 3 .
Regression Model Summary

Table 4 .
Results of multiple regression model