Peer Groups Influence Consumer Decision-Making On Youth

Consumers when making consumption decisions are always faced with many uncertainties, and they are subject to many external factors, including the market environment, advertising, family and peer groups and so on. According to the existing literatures on peer groups, I find most scholars focus their mention on ideological education of the youth. While the influence of peer groups on consumer decision-making just have been mentioned a little in the literature, nobody does empirical researches about it. According to literature, I find that consumer attitude, peer groups and consumer decision-making are closely linked. From the perspective of peer groups, this paper introduces consumer attitude as a mediating variable and college students as the research object, to study the influence of peer groups on consumers decision-making.By reading the literature, this paper put the informational influence, the utilitarian influence and the value-expressive influence as three dimensions of the influence of peer groups. Consumer attitude is divided into three dimensions, namely the cognitive attitude, the emotional attitude and the willing to buy. On the base of analysising the variables, this paper presents sixteen hypotheses. In the empirical part, we use SPSS19.0to analysis the returned questionnaires. The results show that peer groups have a positive impact on consumer decision-making, peer groups have a positive impact on consumer attitude, consumer attitude has a positive impact on consumer decision-making, and consumer attitude plays an intermediary role when peer groups having a positive influence on consumer decision-making.According to the above conclusions, this paper put forward the following marketing advice:From the perspective of corporate marketing:First, taking advantage of this route of transmission of peer groups and informational carriers; Secondly, to create their exclusive brand of youth peer groups; Thirdly, to give specific meaning owned brand products; Fourth, according to consumer attitude, to develop marketing strategies.From the perspective of youth peer groups:First, peer group members supervision each other; Secondly, peer groups need to form a correct view of consumption.