Conformity Consumption among Chinese Adolescents: A Re-examination Perspective

Conformity consumption is a change in consumers' product evaluations, purchase intentions, or purchase behaviors as a result of exposure to the evaluations, intentions, or purchasing behaviors of referent others so as to meet the group's expectation. Out of all age groups, adolescents are most likely to yield to conformity pressures. Therefore this paper takes the Chinese adolescents consumers as the object of study, discusses their conformity consumption's motives. The empirical study discovers that individual, group, brand and situation characteristics have the remarkable influence on the adolescents' conformity consumption behavior. Moreover, compliance and submissiveness in the individual characteristics have the biggest influence upon conformity consumption behavior; the next is popular culture, exposure rates on the media, peer group, brand familiarity, self-confidence and self-esteem.