The effect of gender identity on consumer decision making styles in shopping

It is believed that in addition to biological sex that is an important factor to determine companies' marketing decision and strategies, psychological- based gender identity, which are resulted in the reasons like the culture they live in and the characters they have etc., has also influence. With this study, the terms "gender identity" that can be used to determine companies' marketing strategies and market segmentation and "Decision making styles in shopping" were examined. The main purpose of this thesis study is groupping the consumers according to their gender identity and determining these groups' decision making styles in shopping are different or not. The questionnaire, which was prepared according to purpose and model of the study, was implemented to 504 consumers. In order to define the gender identity is composed of whether the research sample comes from different groups or not, cluster analysis and in order to test the styles of shopping is differentiating or not when consumers have different gender identity, multi separation analysis were used. At the result of analyses used to be able to test the research hypotheses we found that consumers can be grouped in different as androjen, maskulen, feminen and neutral and their decision making styles in shopping are different from each other.