Consumer Decision Making From a Social Perspective - A Study of the Outdoor Space

Sammanfattning: The purpose of the thesis is to investigate how social and cultural factors influence the decision making behaviour regarding publicly displayed items, using the outdoor space as an example. We want to provide a more dynamic view on decision making concerning publicly displayed products, taking the personalities of the consumers into consideration. By using a qualitative research design we found that the investigated social aspects - the social environment, status, and the identity- seem to influence the decision making behaviour concerning items located on the outdoor space to a quite large extent. Moreover, consumers appear to be affected by these influences to different extents as they move between different stages in life. Different types of decision making strategies regarding publicly displayed goods are furthermore identified and summarized in a table.