INTRODUCTION TO THE TERM PAPER

Topic: Stress and its impact

By: Nahzah Rashid Faiza Saad

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Introduction Stress is an old paradigm and it has been widely discussed in the literature from the Psychological perspective. There are many theories and uncountable research papers on the stress within the context of Psychology. However stress is not much discussed from the Consumer Behaviour point of view. It is an important dimension which cannot be ignored, especially in todays life. The reason is that every individual suffers from many types of stresses and these stressful conditions change the purchasing behaviour of that particular individual. Whenever a consumer is in stress he tries to cope with it. There are numerous coping strategies observed in the consumers. But the logical sequence of every strategy is missing in each and every case. It is still unknown that why a consumer takes any particular action when he is in stress. For example if a consumer is in stress, then why he prefers to eat a chocolate or go on a long drive. Recent research suggests that marketing researchers and practitioners have much to gain by understanding the reasons consumers experience stress and how they attempt to cope with it (Duhachek & Viswanathan, 2005).

Purpose

Our intention towards the research is based on: The impact of stress on the consumer and how a consumer tries to cope with this stress Different life events like personal, professional or any other cause stress in the customer. The stress may be positive or negative depending upon the situation. Consumer tries to cope with this stress by adopting a number of behaviours. For our easiness we have made two categories of the behaviours as follows: Category A: Consumer adopts the purchase behaviour Category B: Consumer does not adopt the purchase behaviour. In our paper we are determined to find out the reasons behind selecting the Category A. There must be some variables which trigger the response towards the category A, and as well as category B. If we are successful in deriving the variables behind the decision making of consumer, then the response matrix of the consumer can also be changed with some efforts.