Understanding the Influence of Visual Merchandising on Consumers’ Impulse Buying Behaviour: Analysing the Literature

Abstract

The concept of visual merchandising is important to arouse internal emotions of customers to make impulse buying. This study is carried out to investigate important elements of visual merchandising that can stimulate customers’ impulse buying behaviour. Based on thorough review on past literature, stimulus-organism-response (SOR) paradigm is utilized to develop conceptual framework in this study. Based on the review of past empirical findings, this study identified the elements of colour, lighting, mannequins, music and floor merchandising as important elements in attracting the customers’ responses and results in impulse buying behaviour. The outcome of the study is expected to suggest a conceptual framework for future research to investigate customers’ impulse buying behaviour in different retail stores from different regions. Furthermore, thisstudy also provide an understanding for the retailers to emphasise on the specific elements of visual merchandising to increase the attention of customers to walk-in to their store and indirectly influence their purchase decision making.