نگرش سودمند قدرت نفوذ در خرید آنلاین برای تشویق خریداران آنلاین Leveraging utilitarian perspective of online shopping to motivate online shoppers

Introduction Motivation has always been a central issue in the research of marketing, psychology and consumer behaviour. Shopping motivation is a major concern for marketers and retailers. While investigating online shopping pattern, utilitarian motivation is a driving force for customers to shop online. Westbrook and Black (1985) defined motivation as “forces instigating behaviour to satisfy intense need states”. Motivations are an important element among the aspects which define people’s behaviours. Since online retailing is growing its share in overall India retail market, shopping motivation or motivation factors towards mediation of shopping are also varying. However, plenty of research has been conducted on shopping motivation in traditional marketing context, using partial and complete approaches. There are two large categories of motivations: utilitarian and hedonic (Babin et al., 1994). In online context, motivation is still being explored, and very few remarkable attempts were made by Indian researcher; none of them has highlighted the utilitarian motivation extensively in online context (Singh, 2014; Sahney et al., 2013; Khare and Rakesh, 2011). Utilitarian motivation is functional, goal-orientated behaviour (Childers et al., 2001) which orient the consumer towards obtaining economic, rational or extrinsic benefits (Martinez-Lopez et al., 2014), and it reflects the task-related value of a shopping experience (Overby and Lee, 2006). Utilitarian motivations regarded Internet shopping as a mission-oriented and rational shopping experience. The main motive of the customers who perceive utilitarian shopping motivation in their shopping is to procure the product or to give priority to complete the shopping task (Babin et al., 1994; Batra and Ahtola, 1991).Two major categories of shopping motivations, i.e. hedonic and utilitarian motivation, are not equally rated in different cultures (e.g., Turkey and British culture), as posited by Sakarya and Soyer (2013). Chinese consumers are more hedonically oriented (Zhang et al., 2007), while the Dutch internet users are more likely to do online shopping due to utilitarian orientation (Delafrooz et al., 2009). In the Indian context, it became necessary to understand the utilitarian motivation that consumers seek while using internet as an alternate means for online shopping. In other words, the retailers and managers should be aware about the individual’s motive for online shopping.