Search, checkout, pay, repeat: How the pandemic influences the hedonic and utilitarian buying motivation of Filipino millennials on Shopee app

• Main Author: Macarat, Melanie Thea
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2022
• Subjects: Consumer behavior—Philippines; Teleshopping—Philippines; Marketing
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdm_market/50; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1054&context=etdm_market
• Institution: De La Salle University

The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak led the business operations to suffer due to a decrease in foot traffic caused by the implementation of strict community lockdowns in support of the government mandate in securing safety. The situation changed the consumer purchasing patterns and buying habits which challenged the companies to shift their operation and marketing strategies to respond to the needs of consumers. From various literature, it was stated that consumer shopping behavior is influenced by hedonic and utilitarian motivation. Utilitarianism is defined as a value with the functional benefits that consumers get from a product, while Hedonic is immediate psychological gratification that comes from experiencing an activity or from consuming a product. Therefore, the business sectors need to understand consumers’ motivation as it influences their intention to search and purchase online. If consumers choose between the characteristics of these goods with different purposes, a study of consumer behavior needs to address why they make these underlying tradeoffs (Dhar, R., & Wertenbroch, 2000; Wolfinbarger & Gilly, 2001; Zhou et al. 2007) This study will focus on Filipino millennial online consumers who are using online shopping applications, Shopee app will be used as a basis for obtaining data on how they operate and strategize their promotional advertisements to motivate the market to purchase products. The purpose of this study is to determine the buying motivation of Filipino millennial consumers using the Utilitarian and Hedonic factors, the motivation factors will be tested if it has a significant relationship with online browsing leading to actual purchase. To check the reliability of data, a Cronbach alpha test was generated to calculate the survey cascaded to 400 working Filipino millennial respondents located in Metro Manila, within ages 24-40 years old and are Shopee users whose level of response are measured thru 5-point Likert scale. It was found that the relationship of the variables on hedonic and utilitarian motivation towards browsing, as well as the browsing behavior towards an actual purchase, have Cronbach alpha values greater than 0.7, thus this study has acceptable reliability. Based on the result of the data analysis, the significant motivation factors that drive consumers to hedonically browse online are enjoyment (p< 0.001), freedom (p=0.016), trend discovery (p< 0.001), and adventure (p=0.001), while utilitarian factors include cost-saving (p Furthermore, based on the gathered result from the survey and focused group discussion (FGD) data, enhancing logistics intermediaries to arrange faster delivery, keeping the consumers aware of how to maximize mainstream promotion and continuous app innovation will likely be a key to encouraging its users to continuously patronize the application.