Exploratory Analysis of Young-Adult Consumer Decision-Making Styles in the Western Balkans: Same Same But Different?

Young-adult consumers (aged between 18 and 30 years) have been attracting increasing attention by scholars and marketers (Cardoso Pinto, 2010; Xie & Singh, 2007; Kjelgaard & Askegaard 2006). They are interesting because they already have spending money, a desire to spend, have less financial obligations, and are increasingly autonomous in their purchasing, in spite of their young age (Grant & Waite 2003; Gronhoj 2007). They further influence purchasing decisions of their households (Grant & Waite 2003), and often act as fashion conduits and/or trend setters for other consumer groups (Leslie et al. 2001). In terms of cross-country variability young-adult consumers have been described as global citizens at the “forefront of globalization” (Strizhakova et al. 2012, p. 43), who are (more) universally cosmopolitan (Thompson & Tambyah 1999), characterized by a common global culture (Fabris 2003), are believed to have quite unified tastes (Guido 1992), and a similar life-style (Stapinski 1999). Despite a growing research interest in young-adult consumers and their decision-making styles, we know far less about young-adult consumers in non-Western markets than Western markets (Strizhakova et al., 2012; Zhou et al., 2010; Wong et al., 2008). While calls for more research on young-adult consumer decision-making styles have been mainly focused on large emerging markets, like China and Russia, the same call could also be applied for smaller transitional and post-transition markets of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). This research is set against the backdrop of a highly regionalized nature of international business and marketing (Oh & Rugman, 2014), and looks at young-adult consumers in a specific Western Balkan regional marketing context. In particular, we conduct an exploratory analysis of consumer decision-making styles across university student matched samples from Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Web-based data collection took place at a leading university in each of the countries by employing Fan & Xiao’s (1998) survey instrument, a variation of the Kendall & Sproles’ (1986) Consumer Styles Inventory (CSI). To the best of our knowledge this is the first such multi-country comprehensive analysis of young-adult consumer decision-making styles in the Western Balkans, complementing more general analyses of consumer characteristics in Western Balkans by Žabkar, Kolar & Sunko (2009), or specific country studies of young-adult consumer decision-making styles for specific Western Balkan countries, like Bosnia and Herzegovina (Anic, Piri Rajh & Bevanda, 2012), Slovenia (Raskovic, 2011), and Croatia (Anic, Piri Rajh & Rajh, 2010). Our results challenge the universal consumer identity and intra-regional universality of young-adult consumers in the Western Balkans. They show certain distinctive consumer characteristics (Žabkar, Kolar & Sunko, 2009) and support a glocal consumer identity perspective instead (Douglas & Craig, 2011); also within a specific intra-regional context. By conducting exploratory factor analyses and cluster analyses we describe and compare different young-adult consumers segments across the four countries and outline important implications for marketers targeting young-adult consumers in the region.