Consumer decisions in mosaic families

Abstract

Nowadays, it the Western and developed societies, the change in the status of families, the recruitment of women and the growing number of divorces can be increasingly seen, which led to the formation of new forms of families. Among others, these tendencies led to the situation that instead of traditional families new family-types “were born”. These are the one-parent-families, and the patchwork families. Earlier patchwork families were studied by psychologists, sociologists, but today marketing professionals regard them as a special target group. In our research we tried to collect and analyse decision-making conflicts concerning the buying behaviour of such products and services, which were already clarified as much different during the qualitative research phase: aspects of school-choice, additional lessons for children, purchase of clothes, leisure time activities, holidays, payment of cell phone bills, daily product, and „big” shopping. With the help of hypotheses testing, we prove that the buying decisions of people living in patchwork families differs from that of those living in traditional family models, but this difference depends on the type of patchwork family too.