From personality to purchase: A motivational transmission model of hedonic shopping and impulsive purchasing tendency

Consumer behaviour has largely established a relationship between personality traits and an impulsive purchasing tendency. This is insufficient to explain how exactly personality traits translate into an impulsive purchasing tendency. To address this research gap, this study examines hedonic shopping motivation as a mediating mechanism linking the Big Five personality traits to impulsive purchasing tendency. Drawing on Trait Activation Theory and Hedonic Consumption Theory, the study argues that personality traits do not directly affect impulsive purchasing tendency but rather shape the pleasure-oriented motivational states that consumers bring to retail environments. It is, therefore, these motivational states that ultimately drive the tendency toward impulsive purchasing. The four traits, namely extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness to experience, appear positively related to hedonic shopping motivation in this study. Conscientiousness, though hypothesised as a negative predictor, did not show a statistically significant association with either hedonic shopping motivation or impulsive purchasing tendency in this sample. Further, the results regarding the relationship between hedonic shopping motivation and impulsive purchasing tendency indicate that hedonic shopping motivation is the strongest predictor of impulsive purchasing tendency. Bootstrapped mediation analysis confirmed partial mediation of hedonic shopping motivation by four of the five Big Five traits (extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness) in relation to impulsive purchasing tendency. The mediated pathway for conscientiousness was not supported. The study makes three specific contributions; it advances a distal-proximal account of the personality–IPT relationship that goes beyond direct-effect models, it empirically distinguishes hedonic shopping motivation from impulsive purchasing tendency as separate but related constructs, and it extends hedonic consumption theory by demonstrating that experiential motives are partly rooted in stable personality structures rather than being purely situational responses.