| Summary: | 碩士 === 靜宜大學 === 國際碩士學位學程 === 102 === Since Mongolia has shift to the market economy, consumers have recently begun to engage actively in the market. Increasing purchasing power and increasing household consumption expenditure have caused highly competitive market for all goods and services. The family is a primary and the most important decision-making unit of society, regarding many kinds of consumer durable and non-durable products which are purchased by households on a daily basis. Because of a shared consumption, one or more members participate and influence in some level of the purchasing decision. It is easy to market the product when the target market is clear such as beauty products for women, apparels for male and female and toys for kids. However, when products and services for a group of people or when decisions are made by two or more people, it becomes less clear and more complicated to answer the questions “Who are the target segments?” “Who is the key player during the purchase?” and “Who is the influencer of the purchasing decision?” Therefore, the aim of the present study is to advance understanding of Mongolian family purchasing decisions and describe family members’ role specialization through the decision-making process.
This study investigates family members’ decision-making roles in the three stages of the decision-making process – need recognition, information gathering and final decision. Moreover, this study examines six role specialization influence patterns - husband dominated, wife dominated, child dominated, equally influenced, autonomously husband and autonomously wife decided. These patterns will be examined while purchasing family’s car, television, refrigerator, personal computer and mobile phone. To assess the reported levels of decision-making roles, this study employs to report frequencies of specific answers and analyses by the percentages of the frequencies. The samples were selected from households in capital of Mongolia, Ulan-Bator. The sample size consisted of 332 family members (father, mother, child), each questionnaire represented the each family.
Role specialization and product category were analyzed in the three stages of the purchasing decision-making process respectively with cross-tabulation chi-square test. Different role specializations are found in the first stage (need recognition) and in the second stage (information gathering) depending on the product category, but in the last stage (final decision), more joint decision were made among Mongolian households. Five of the three products were decided upon jointly and the rest of the two products were decided upon by wife dominated.
With regard to stability of the role specialization over the three stages: it seems relatively stable on stage problem recognition and information gathering, but there is a changes on the final decision stage three that the three products: car, television, computer decision made jointly, two decisions (refrigerator, mobile phone) were wife dominated.
Results show children influence the three decision making stages considerably different depending on the product category. Children’s influence is significantly high in the need recognition and information gathering stages for purchasing computer, but influenced considerably lower in the final decision stage.
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