Editorial Board

A Refereed Monthly International Journal of Management

Impact of Attitude towards Handicrafts and Cultural Motivation of the Consumer on their Buying Intention  

Debasis Pani

Assistant Professor,

Gandhi Institute of Advanced Computer and Research, Rayagada

Mail Id: debasispani.iacr@gmail.com

Dr. Sunil Kumar Pradhan

Assistant Professor,

Department of Business Administration,

Berhampur University,

Bhanja Bihar, Berhampur, Odisha.

Mail Id: sunil.sunita123@gmail.com

ABSTRACT

Handicraft buying behaviours are completely different from the buying behaviour of other goods. The handicraft is not only an attractive product but also epitomize a sense of image, an identity for handicraft loving consumer. Previous studies have shown enough evidence on showing a significant relationship with the attitude of the consumer and intention to buy tribal handicrafts but have not incorporated the cultural influence on buying intention.  But the thrust of the present study is to investigate the effect of cultural motivation on the relationship between the attitude of the consumer and their intention to buy tribal handicraft products. To examine this relationship the researcher has collected data from 536 respondents with the help of a structured questionnaire. The collected data were further analyzed with confirmative factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modelling (SEM). The outcome of the research shows both the attitude of the consumer towards the tribal handicrafts and cultural motivation has a significant relationship with their intention to buy.

Keywords: Cultural Motivation, Attitude and Buying Intention

Introduction

 There is a growing demand for the handicraft loving consumer not only in India but also across the globe. The growing demand for these handicraft products has put an implication before the marketers and academicians to unfold the dynamic involved in buying behaviour towards handicrafts. The handicraft is not merely an attractive product but also epitomize a sense of image, an identity for handicraft loving consumer. So it requires a new perspective to understand the dynamics involved in the handicraft buying behaviour. (Dash,M.,2011), "Consumers buy handicrafts because they like to feel connected with indigenous traditions and cultures  in a  global and increasingly  commoditized  world". According to Shiffman and Kunak (2010), “Consumer behaviour refers to the behaviour that consumers display in searching for, purchasing, using, evaluating, and disposing of products and services that they expect will satisfy their needs” The buying behaviour is greatly developed through "consumer decision-making process which includes need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternative, purchase and post-purchase behaviour" (Engel et al.,1978). The handicraft buying behaviour is not similar to the buying behaviour of other goods, because for the consumer handicraft is a cultural product and signifies the great heritage of a particular locality. Moreover, every consumer is sensitive to their cultural and their social beliefs, which develops a sense of emotional bonding towards the handicraft product as the handicrafts depict deep-rooted aboriginal culture of a locality.   Therefore it is pertinent to say handicraft buying behaviour is greatly influenced by the rational factors as well as emotional factors. (Pani, D., & Pradhan, S. K., 2019). There are so many exogenous factors influences the buying behaviour and further categorized as rational components and emotional components.

Discussion

 The outcome of several research studies has revealed that the perceived attributes of the consumer have significant relation with overall preference to buy handicrafts (Pani, D., & Pradhan, S. K., 2016). The perceived attributes of the handicrafts develop the attitude of the consumer. Consumer attitude is the outcome of mental and emotional entities is a psychological construct enough to characterize a person. (Richard M. P., 2016). The attitude formed by the consumer may be of positive or negative evaluation of object, activities, ideas, events and people, it could be in the framing opinion of anything from the environment or maybe an abstract (Eagly.et.al.,1998). Cultural motivation is significantly influencing the buying intention (Pani, D., & Pradhan, S. K., 2019). In this study, the researcher wanted to know the impact of the attitude of the consumer and cultural motivation on the buying intention.

Attitude towards Handicraft

Attitude is one of the important psychological determinants of consumer behaviour have a greater influence on buying behaviour. Attitude refers to learned predisposition belief that develops a consistent favourable and unfavourable response towards a given object (Schiffman & Kanuk, 2010). Attitude sometimes leads to emotional and cognitive arousals of individuals towards a given object (Ajzen, Icek, 2001).  A psychological factor like perception, values and beliefs plays a complex role in determining the consumer attitude (Maio & Olson, 1998). Among these values are the guiding principle and ideas in the life of a person. To (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975), “Beliefs are cognitions about the world—subjective probabilities that an object has a particular attribute or that an action will lead to a particular outcome”.  The attitude of the consumer towards the various attributes of tribal handicrafts is influenced by so many psychological, social and cultural factors. The below table gives a brief description of the several studies undertaken to understand the perceived attitude of the consumer on the various attributes of tribal handicrafts.

Table-1 Attributes for measuring the attitude of the consumer

Cultural Motivation

            The tribal handicrafts are a culturally rich product and its decision to buy is based on certain motives. Culture is understood as “A complex set of values, ideas, beliefs, attitudes and other meaningful symbols, created by human beings to shape human behaviour and the artefacts of that behaviour as they are transmitted from one generation to another.”  To (Dameyasani and Abraham, 2013), culture gives shape to human behaviour and it directs and ascertains the human behaviour in a particular way. Culture significantly influences the need and want of the consumer, their attitude and preference (Venkatesh, 1995). The study conducted by Dasgupta. A, & Chandra. B, (2016) revealed that the buying behaviour towards handicraft products is significantly influenced by the emotional motives and values. The above-cited study has shown the cultural motivation is significantly influencing the buying behaviour, which is a blend of cultural influence and motivation to buy cultural product driven by positive motivation. According to (Tourism Trends for Europe, 2006), “Cultural motivation is a set of cultural motives which motivates the consumer to fulfil a more general interest in culture, rather than fulfilling very specific cultural goals”. (Yoon & Uysal, 2005) the cultural motivation attributes are very much internal by nature, which encourages the consumer to be persistent on certain attributes of the cultural product.  (Tomaz, K. & Vensa, Z. 2010) “cultural motivation as a cluster of interrelated, intellectually-based interests in culture, history and heritage” the above-cited literature envisages the intrinsic motivational aspects of cultural influence and positive aspects of emotion constitute the construct cultural motivation which is further classified as the rational components and emotional components (Pani, D., & Pradhan, S. K., 2019).  Further, the following attributes have been incorporated from the various studies to justify the construct cultural motivation.  

 Table -2  Attributes for measuring Cultural Motivation

Buying Intention

In the context of buying behaviour, the buying intention is the maximum likelihood of buying handicrafts products in a given market situation. Behavioural intention is defined as "the degree to which a person has formulated conscious plans to perform or not perform some specified future behaviour" (Warshaw and Davis, 1985). Behavioural intention is the proximal reason for actual behaviour (Shim et al., 2001). In most of the marketing studies, behavioural intentions have been specified as a surrogate indicator of actual buying behaviour. (Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975)

Table -3  Attributes for measuring Buying Intention

Research Hypothesis

1. H₀₁: The attitude towards handicrafts of the consumer does not significantly influence their buying intention.
2. H₀₂: The rational component of cultural motivation does not significantly influence their buying intention.
3. H₀₃: The emotional component of cultural motivation does not significantly influence their buying intention.

Research Methodology

            The present study mainly concerned with the primary data collected from the undivided districts of Koraput-Bolangir-Kalahandi with a sample size of 536 respondents. The primary data were collected with a structured questionnaire and the data were analyzed with a five-point Likert scale, showing strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5). Though in the present study the various constructs like Attitude of the consumer, rational components of cultural motivation, emotional components of cultural motivation, buying intention and their interrelationship is studied.

In the present study, we have followed Gerbing and Anderson (1988) process of evaluating the measuring instrument which incorporates the validity and reliability of the constructs, factor structure and validating the factor for higher-order. Before carrying out EFA the study has initially adopted the “Corrected-item total correlation”(CITC) and “Alpha-if-deleted” values for model purification. This process helps in elimination of avoidable items from the construct. The CITC values measure the contribution of each item with the international consistency of the scale. Further, Cronbach’s Alpha value is analyzed for internal consistency (Chronbach, 1951). The value of Cronbach’s Alpha above 0.70 is regarded as good (Robinson and Shaver, 1973).

The present study for measuring the construct attitude of the consumer total of 14 items was considered but in the purification of the constructs Attitude of the consumer, 5 items were removed for further analysis. Likewise, for measuring the construct cultural motivation total 8 items were considered but in the purification of the constructs cultural motivation, 2 items were removed for further analysis.  The EFA was conducted to find out the latent dimensions of the factors while executing EFA principal component analysis (PCA) with varimax was adopted to identify the constructs and grouping the items with respective constructs. The researcher has first used exploratory factor analysis, and then confirmative factor analysis was carried out to ascertain the constructs. For doing data analysis, the researcher has used the software applications statistical package for social science (SPSS) version 21.0 and Analysis of Moments Structure (AMOS) version 21.0.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

 EFA is a data reduction technique, useful in grouping all the variable under a factor. In EFA, the KMO statistics is an important indicator which gives an idea about the sample adequacy (Dziuban & Shirkey, 1974; Cerny and Kaiser 1977) the KMO value in our study is 0.835 >0.8 is considered good. The Bartlett’s test of sphericity checks whether there is any certain redundancy between the variables that we can summarize with a few numbers of factors.  In our study Bartlett's test of sphericity as  (. 000) which is significant as because it is lower than p < 0.005, which indicates that is appropriate to apply EFA for our study.

 The EFA was applied with the decision criteria as the commonalities extraction values should be greater than 0.5, individual factor loading should be >0.5 and the Eigenvalue should be greater than 1.00, the varimax rotation method is used to identify factors. Accordingly, we got 4 factors that explained approx 66.43% of the matrix variance    

The output of the EFA has given an idea about four factors the first factor the attitude of the consumer includes nine items and explains 23.60% of the total variance. The second factor is the emotional components of cultural motivation includes three items and explains 15.73% of the variance. The third factor is rational components of cultural motivation includes three items and explains 15.04% of the variance and the fourth factor is the buying intention includes three items and explains 12.06% of the variance. All these factors together explain 66.43% of the total variance.

Confirmative Factor Analysis (CFA)

Validity talks about the precision level of the instrument and the reliability talks about the consistency of the instrument. In our study to check reliability Cronbach’s alpha value is considered. The validity is of two types as convergent validity and discriminates validity.

  Table-5 Measuring Convergent and Discriminant Validity

For Convergent validity, the Average Variance Extraction (AVE) should be greater than 05 and Composite Reliability (CR) should be greater than 0.7 (Fornell and Larcker, 1981)  and CR should be greater than AVE. In our analysis all the three construct satisfy the convergent validity condition, except the AVE of attitude towards handicrafts (ATH) is 0.456, According to (Fornell and David,1981) if the AVE of the constructs is less than 0.50 and greater than 0.40, their convergent validity is accepted provided the "composite reliability" (CR) should be greater than 0.60. Therefore convergent validity of the constructs Attitude towards Handicrafts and perceived consumption status is accepted. To access the discriminant validity we have followed the method suggested by (Hair et al.,2014), Accordingly "the square root of AVE for each construct shown in a diagonal bold letter in the table should be greater than the squared correlation between the constructs and with other constructs". In addition to above the discriminant validity can be established when the average variance extracted (AVE) should be greater than the maximum shared variance (MSV)

Figure 1 – First Order Confirmative Structure

To have a good model fit (Gerpott et al., 2001; Hair et al., 2006) “the value of the root mean square of approximation (RMSEA) should be less than 0.08 and the values of the goodness of fit index (GFI), adjusted goodness of fit index (AGFI), normed fit index (NFI) and comparative fit index (CFI) all should be more than 0.9. The ratio between chi-square (χ2) and degrees of freedom (df) that means χ2/ df should be less than 2.5.”

The value we got from the measurement model is χ2 significance, p-value is = 0.000 which is less than p < 0.05,  χ2/df is 4.885 which is less than the required value <5, the estimates of GFI =0.898 which is close to 0.9,  NFI= 0.884 which is close to 0.9, IFI =0.905 which is > 0.9, CFI = 0.905which is >0.9, RMSEA = 0.078 which is  <0.08.   Therefore from this confirmative factor analysis, we conclude that the model is adequate, and all the hypothesized constructs in the model can be used further for establishing structural relationships. (Teo,2011)

Structural Equation Modelling (SEM)

Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) is a multivariate data analysis technique, which is useful in estimating the structural relationship among constructs simultaneously.

Figure-2 Structural Equation of the Conceptual Model

The value we got from the measurement model is χ2 significance, p-value is = 0.000 which is less than p < 0.05,  χ2/df is 3.374 which is less than the required value <5, the estimates of GFI =0.991 which is >0.9,   NFI= 0.979 which is <  0.9, IFI =0.985 which is > 0.9, CFI = 0.985 which is >0.9, RMSEA = 0.055 which is  <0.08. All the estimates in the above analysis are more than the required threshold. So from the above, all the goodness fit indicator are showing more than the required estimates hence the default structural equation model is considered as good model fit.

Table-6   Regression Weights of the Structured Model

*** Significant at the 0.001 level (2-tailed)

Major findings from the above study

1. The attitudes towards handicrafts of the consumer significantly influence their buying intention.
2. The rational components of cultural motivation significantly influence the buying intention of the consumer.
3. The emotional components of cultural motivation significantly influence the buying intention of the consumer.

Conclusion

Handicraft buying behaviour is a blend of emotional and rational forces. The rational components of decision making are significantly influenced by the control aspects of information processing whereas the emotional components of the decision is greatly influenced by the motives. The present study reveals that the consumer’s perceived attitude towards tribal handicrafts, rational component of cultural motivation and emotional component of cultural motivation significantly influences the buying intention of the consumer. This further connotes that emotion exists alongside various cognitive judgments in the Consumer decision-making process.  Further, the rational and emotional components of cultural motivation significantly influence the buying intention. The findings of the present study also advocate for "cognitive perspective of impulse buying" (Burroughs,1996) which connotes that impulse buying behaviour of the consumer is frequently associated with satisfaction of emotional needs.

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