Gender Differences in Wine Purchase Behavior

Gender differences in wine purchase behavior.

Author: Wai Yee Choong

Email: wai_yee27@hotmail.com

Abstract

As global wine industries are growing more competitive, it is important to understand how consumer behavior influence purchase behavior. For the past, male consumer would have to choose wine for their partners when they shop for alcoholic beverages but now the roles seem to be uncertain as now female consumers are purchasing wine more than ever before, these results indicated how the trend is changing. Using psychographic and demographic variables are easier to access and indentify the differences between gender and behaviors. This paper presents a critical review of how gender affects purchasing and consumption behaviors. It begins with how wine market industry was and how gender transforms the trend of consumed wine from the past. This starting point address the question as to “how” gender roles in seen to be of growing importance. This paper then proceeds to investigate different types of variables that will affect by gender roles.  There are four types of variable which are purchase and consumption, store choice, wine attributes and wine knowledge and involvement used in this paper to investigate whether gender will affect purchase behaviors. While the use of gender roles as a popular method to investigate wine purchase behavior, there is some argument in previous studies as every studies found different suggestion. This research paper could be further repeat in the future to investigate whether female and male would change their purchasing behavior over time.

Keywords: Wines; Gender; Wine Consumption; Wine Purchase; Consumer Behavior; Purchase Behavior; Wine Knowledge

Introduction

Marketers often use gender as segmentation criteria as it is easy to evaluate, indentify and most importantly gender segmentation are huge enough to earn profit from (Putrevu, 2001). In this new modern of globalization, it is not surprise those obligations that mainly performed by women in the past are now transformed into men, men nowadays spent more times in doing house work compared to the past  (Harnack, Story, Martinson, Neumark-Sztainer, & Stang, 1998). The traditionally ascribed gender roles have blurred due to more and more women start to work, the proportion in workplace has increased compared to past. Traditional view of women’s role which is full time house wife in raising children and cleaning house are rejected by the majority of Americans (Grigsby, 1992). The numbers of male consumers in purchasing household product are increasing; this shows that traditionally obligations of female have slowly changing. In automobile market, eighty percent of the consumers were female. Purchasing automobile would be treats as being appropriately performed by males but now research found that female today occupied more than fifty percent in automobile market as they purchase half of new cars sell in the US market (Triplett, 1994). As time goes by, a gender’s existing role seems to be uncertain, each gender will definitely have their own contribution to market segmentation and more innovation marketing strategies would be developed. For instance, Gender is an important segmentation variable in term of mobile phone technology adoption as it is easy to indentifies the differences  (Nysveen, Pedersen, & Thorbjornsen, 2005).