“Women are happy to wander through sprawling clothing and accessory collections or detour through the shoe department. They like to glide up glass escalators past a grand piano, or spray a perfume sample on themselves on their way to, maybe, making a purchase. For men, shopping is a mission.” – (Baker, 2007 cited in Jirasek & Safarli, 2010)
It has been suggested that gender has a bigger influence on shopping practices than “age, education or occupation” (Dholakia, 1999 cited in Jirasek & Safarli, 2010).
Scientific studies on humans’ brains have pointed out a difference in gender (Lewis & LiveScience, 2013). According to science, biological differentiations between women and men seem to define the differences in women and men’s interest in
…show more content…
In other words, shopping is seen as a “gendered” activity, which is more part of the woman’s domain than the man’s one (Lunt & Livingstone, 1992 cited in Hoeger, Young, Schroeder, n.d.). When women decide on a purchase, they think of different assets and can easily be inspired by a lot of information around them, which is less the case for men (Lunt & Livingstone, 1992; Miller, 1998 cited in Hoeger, Young, Schroeder, n.d.). Women are interactive in their shopping behaviour (Campbell, 1997 cited in Hoeger, Young, Schroeder, n.d.). This means, they like to try on different items before making the purchase. They also might think of a product a few times, researching about it or asking friends or the sales personnel for advice before buying it (Johnson & Learned, 2004 cited in Chea, 2011). On the contrary, men tend to shop when they need a certain product. Instead of entering different retail stores and comparing prices and products, they tend to prefer to pay higher prices rather than to continue shopping (Campbell, 1997 cited in Chea, 2011). O’Cass (2004) conducted a gender comparison test where he found out that men have less involvement than women on fashion clothing (O’Cass, 2004 cited in Pentecost & Andrews, 2010). Another overview about the difference in gender and shopping behaviour has been researched by Campbell (1997), where he found that women are more “positive” about shopping than men, many men still view shopping as “effeminate” and do not engage in “shopping for shopping’s sake” (Campbell, 1997 cited in Hoeger, Young, Schroeder,