Information seeking behaviour and purchasing decision: case study in digital cameras

This case study explores the information seeking behaviour of digital camera consumers based on Assael’s consumer information acquisition and processing model. 135 responses were received from potential target group who had purchased or was planning to purchase digital cameras. Findings show that respondents who had not purchased digital camera before tended to seek for related information and generally spent more time on the search. Motivation of information seeking triggered by risk and uncertainty is also supported by resulting data .Significant difference was found in information seeking and time spent on the search based on different education attainment and income level of consumers. These results give hints to promoters to outline strategies for capturing potential customers based on their information seeking behaviour, as well as highlight informational supports that could be provided by relevant information agencies such as consumer councils and public libraries.


Introduction
In contrast with other simple goods of which people make their purchase decision on a regular basis, consumers tends to spend more efforts and resources in information seeking activities for the complex products [3]. However, the amount of information in the Web increased exponentially, hindering the efficiency and effectiveness of consumers in seeking for their relevant information. As such, our study aims at improving efficiency of prospective purchasers in information seeking processes, as well as suggesting information supports that could be provided by relevant information agencies.
The main research question of this case study is: are there significant differences in information seeking behaviour among consumers when comparing with their purchasing experiences, product knowledge, purpose of usage, level of involvement and social class factors? Digital camera (DC) is chosen as our case for study, as it becomes a more and more popular commodity in recent years. A research conducted in 2006 shows that the percentage of people in Hong Kong owning DC jumped from 25% in 2002 to 66% in 2006 [1]. The penetration rate further grew to over 70% in another survey conducted in 2010 [2]. DC is a relatively complex product when considering the technologies involved and skills required for usage.
In this study, we adopted the definition of information seeking behaviour from T.D. Wilson [4], which is "the purposive seeking for information as a consequence of a need to satisfy some goal" (p.49). Moreover, information seeking behaviour should be referred to observable behaviour instead of internal mental states such as needs [5]. Although there are plenty of models explaining information seeking behaviours such as Wilson model, Johnson model and Krikelas model as quoted by Case [6], we apply Assael's consumer information acquisition and processing model [9] (to be elaborated in the next section) as a framework for analysis with the following reasons: The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews background and related literature. Section 3 explains our research methodology. Section 4 details our results and finding and Section 5 our discussions. Section 6 states our recommendations and limitations our study before we conclude in Section 7 with our research directions.

Background and Literature Review
A purchasing process does not start at the point of actual purchase. Kotler [8] points out that there are five stages processes as shown in Figure 1. He opined that consumer needs can be triggered by internal or external stimulations. A state of tension occurs after needs recognition. This induces consumers to conduct information searching and evaluation before making purchasing decisions. The post-purchase behaviour, including satisfactions, actions, use and disposal of the product or service will become factors influencing the information searching and evaluation, as well as their subsequent purchasing decisions. This is also in line with the reputation model of Chiu, Leung and Lam [45]. Assael [9] illustrated further parameters affecting consumers' information searching and evaluation in his consumer information acquisition and processing model as shown in Figure 2. Further, France, Yen, Wang, and Chang [10] summarised the models into the 5 stages as shown in Table 1.  Input of background factors of the purchasing decisions 2 Acquire information from external and internal sources 3 Recognise and process information that will be retained for future use 4 Prioritise necessary features or acknowledge brand loyalty 5 Signify the actual purchase and use of the product

Stage 1 -Input Variables
The background factors affecting purchasing decisions can be divided into consumer characteristics, environmental factors and marketing factors:

Consumer Characteristics
Consumer's demographics characteristics such as age, gender, marital status and psychographics characteristics such as life style and personality can have significant effect on their selection of information sources and other information seeking behaviour.
Motivation of information seeking also plays a key role. Consumers tend to have higher involvement in seeking and evaluating information in complex decision making, especially when the products are: Information seeking behaviour and purchasing decision: a case study in digital cameras 3 behaviour of a large group of people. Social class is a board grouping based on income, education, occupation and so on. Individuals within a certain social class tend to have similar information seeking behaviour and purchasing pattern. Situational needs and temporal perspective during decision making also be factors influencing the information seeking behaviour.

Marketing Factors
As described by Howard [11], the well-known '4P' dimensions of the marketing mix: product, price, place and promotion contribute to input variables in different ways. New features of a product trying to solve the strong unmet needs can stimulate efforts from consumers in understanding and experiencing the product. Change of price can influence consumers demand especially for products with high elasticity in price. Distribution channels and availability can shape the habits and strategies of information seeking of consumers. Last but not least, promotional factors including advertisement and word-of-mouth, which tend to play important role in early and later stage of product cycle respectively, can always exercise influence on consumer behaviour beyond imagination.

External Sources
This includes marketing communications, family members, friends, etc. Assael further separate this item into active sought and passively received sources. Examples of active sought sources are consumers seeking for advertisements, consulting family members and friends. While unconsciously received message from media advertisements, casually hearing from strangers or known person and accidentally encountered information served as good examples for passively received sources.

Internal Sources
Basically this means our memories which may come from previous results of information processing and past experiences after purchasing and consumption. Perception of product quality among different brands is also included as an internal source, although Assael linked this by a separate arrow in order to emphasise evaluating alternative brands can result in additional needs in searching of information.

Stage 3 -Information Processing
Acquired information will be processed in this stage. Sources, message and media will be evaluated. Ironically, people always expose to information selectively. Acquired information will not hundred percent be processed. Processing capacity is also limited under a flooding of information. Categorisation and organisation helps to improve the efficiencies for the consumer in processing information acquired. Processed information will not only affect the current decision making, but will also be retained in memory for retrieval in future.

Stage 4 -Brand Evaluation
Brand loyalty represents consistent purchase and a favourable attitude toward certain brand overtime. Usually, the higher the brand loyalty, the lower the motivation in information seeking is.

Stage 5 -Purchase and Consume
Finally, customers make their decisions according to the processing and evaluation steps mentioned above. Their post-purchase evaluations will then become experiences for next purchases, which will affect their beliefs and consumption behaviours in future.

Methodology
A detailed questionnaire survey was developed, aimed at identifying and analysing consumer information seeking characteristics, behaviour, channels and contents which they commonly used (see Appendix purchased DC, a follow-up question asked them the reasons why they have not purchased DC.
Part B and C were designed for those respondents who had purchased or planning to purchase DC. Since decision on purchase would be associated with past experience and product knowledge, three questions in Part B probed this issue by asking their ownership and expertise on DC. Then, two questions were asked to understand respondents purchase intention and factors that may affect their purchase intention. It was also expected that there is relationship between consumer perceptions and purchasing decision. So, three questions were used to determine these variables. Finally, there is a follow-up question for indicating their satisfactory level toward the selected DC.
Questions in Part C were particularly focused on the information seeking characteristics and behaviour of the target group. The first question in Part C had differentiated the groups of respondents whether they would or would not seek for related information before purchasing. Those who responded with 'No' were asked about reasons for not searching information before purchasing as the researchers were also interested in their reasons. For those respondents who did search before purchasing, seven questions asked to investigate the detailed information about their searching behaviour, like reasons for searching, time spent on searching, channels and contents of searching, importance rating of information sources, influence of their searched information on purchasing decisions and so on. In some questions under Part B and C, although we offer a number of possible answers, these may not be good enough for all for respondents. Thus, extra space (i.e., an option of "Others") was provided for respondents to allow for further explanations or comments.
Finally, there were seven questions collecting demographic data such as gender, age, education attainment, marital status, time spent on the Internet, employment status and income.
The researchers adopted a four-point Likert scale in most questions requesting respondents to perform ranking in order to force them to choose either the agree side or disagree side, except for the questions related to information channels which adopting five-point Likert scale.
As this case study focus on information behaviour instead of conducting marketing survey, marketing-related issues such as brand, price, promotion and product distribution channels are omitted intentionally.
The survey was designed to test the following hypothesis:  Information seeking behaviour and purchasing decision: a case study in digital cameras 5 (80.0%) was in the age group between 15 and 34 which aligns with the target consumers of DC. Figure 4 shows that 41.5% of them (56 persons) attained education level of undergraduate or above, while the remaining were post-secondary or below. 68.1% of the respondents (92 persons) were single. In view of their employment status, 58.5% were working population and 41.5% were students, housewives, unemployed or retired persons. Of the working group, nearly half of them (37 persons accounts for 46.8%) had monthly average income below HK$20,000 while the other half of them over HK$20,000.  Out of the 135 respondents, 72.6% had purchased DC before or are planning to purchase DC. In which, 91 persons had purchased at least one DC that accounts for 92.9% of the target group ( Figure 5 & Figure 6). Only 44.9% of them agreed that they had good know-how in DC. A large proportion of the target respondents (78.6%) agreed that they feel annoying before making the decision of purchasing DC. Besides, 66.3% of the target respondents agreed that this consumption decision is important.

Results and Findings
The data collected from the target group regarding to prepurchase information behaviour were analysed statistically and are presented here according to the stated hypotheses.

Related Experience and Product Knowhow
Existing literatures suggest that previous experience in purchasing similar product will directly affect information seeking behaviour of consumers. Although statistical testing is not available due to small sample size, the summary statistics in Table 2 shows that all respondents without DC purchasing experience would seek for related information before purchasing one, which is in line with H1.
Also, it is more likely for respondents without DC purchasing experience would spend more time on information seeking before making the purchase decision, which is in line with H2. (Table 3) H3 proposes that respondents with little know-how in DC would prefer to seek information before making purchase decisions. Compared with respondents with more knowhow, respondents with little know-how would seek for related information before purchasing DC is 7.6% lower. However, the Chi-square statistics is not significant at the level of 0.05 (p=0.06789), which does not support the predicted hypothesis. (cf. H4 proposes that respondents with little know-how in DC would spend more time on information seeking before making purchase decisions. The Chi-square statistics is significant at the level of 0.05 (p=0.04451), which supports the effect of know-how on time spent for seeking information before purchasing DCs (cf.

Involvement and Motivation
H5 states that respondents agree purchasing DC is an important consumption decision would prefer to seek information before making purchase decisions. From the survey, 86.3% of them would seek for related information before purchasing DC, which is 7.7% higher than those disagreed that purchasing DC is an important consumption decision (cf. Table 6). The Chi-square statistics is significant at the level of 0.05 (p=0.00004) which supports the predicted hypothesis.
H6 proposes that respondents agree purchasing DC is an important consumption decision that would spend more time on information seeking before making purchase decisions. The Chi-square statistics is significant at the level of 0.05 (p=0.00001) which supports the predicted hypothesis. 63.8% of respondents agreed that purchasing DC is an important consumption decision would spend over one week on the search, which is 39.8% higher than those disagreed that purchasing DC is an important consumption. (cf. Table 7) Information seeking behaviour and purchasing decision: a case study in digital cameras 7 H7 states that respondents with high level of annoyance in purchasing an unsuitable DC would prefer to seek information before making purchase decisions. 89.6% of them would seek for related information before purchasing DC, which is 13.4% higher than those respondents with low level of annoyance. The Chi-square statistics is significant at the level of 0.05 (p=0.00000) which supports the predicted hypothesis. (cf. Table 8) H8 proposes that respondents with high level of annoyance in purchasing an unsuitable DC would spend more time on information seeking before making purchase decisions. The Chi-square statistics is significant at the level of 0.05 (p=0.00000) which supports the predicted hypothesis. 55.8% of them, compared to only 33.3% of respondents with low level of annoyance, would spend over one week on information seeking. (cf.   Consistent with previous studies between relationship on education level and information seeking behaviour, H10 proposes that respondents with higher education level would prefer to seek information before making purchase decisions. 93.2% of the respondents with education level of undergraduate or above would seek for related information before purchasing DC, which is 11.7% higher than those respondents with post-secondary education or Information seeking behaviour and purchasing decision: a case study in digital cameras 9 below. The Chi-square statistics is significant at the level of 0.05 (p=0.02386) which supports the predicted hypothesis. (cf. Table 11) H11 proposes that respondents with higher education level would spend more time on information seeking before making purchase decisions. 62.5% of respondents with education level of undergraduate or above spent more than one week on information seeking before purchasing DC, while only 41.9% of respondents with post-secondary or below would spend over one week on the search. The Chi-square statistics is significant at the level of 0.05 (p=0.02952) which supports the predicted hypothesis. (cf. Table 12) H12 states that respondents with higher income level would prefer to seek information before making purchase decisions. 90.2% of the respondents with income more than HK$10,000 would seek for related information before purchasing DC, which is 9.1% higher than those respondents with income less than HK$10,000. The Chisquare statistics is significant at the level of 0.05 (p=0.00000) which supports the predicted hypothesis. (cf. Table 13)

Education Level and Income
H13 proposes that respondents with income more than HK$10,000 would spend more time on seeking information before making purchase decisions. 63% of respondents with income more than HK$10,000 spent at least one week on seeking information before purchasing DC, while only 31% of respondents with income less than HK$10,000 would spend over one week on the search. The Chi-square statistics is significant at the level of 0.05 (p=0.00000) which supports the predicted hypothesis. (cf.

Discussions
Information can change one's perception and influence one's judgement and behaviour [12]. People search information for a complete, a clearer and a verified picture of the reality [13]. However, people react to information differently. The information behaviour on several areas according to this survey results will be examined.

Related Experience and Product Knowhow
Experience and product knowledge can be classified as internal source of information indicated in Assael's consumer information acquisition and processing model. According to Laaksonen [14], previous experience in purchasing similar product will directly affect information seeking behaviour of consumers. Experience will result in learning and forming habit, which reduce the amount of arousal evoked by their first purchase. This observation is in line with the concept suggested by Assael. Consumers with little experience are more likely to look for reliable sources in order to supplement their limited information.
In contrast, experienced consumers are more confident in assessing the information itself, independent of the source [15].
Our survey results also support these studies in the experience aspect. All respondents without previous experiences in purchasing DC would seek for related information before purchase. Moreover, they tend to spend longer time in seeking information when comparing to experienced DC purchasers.
Ironically, there is a completely different story in product knowledge aspect. We observed that the lower the declared know-how in DC of the respondents, the lesser of them willing to spend longer time in information seeking. When reviewing the reasons for not seeking information before purchasing DC, around two-third of them selected the option of "without knowledge to read the related information". The second most selected reason is "further information will not affect the choice" which accounted for nearly one-fourth of selection. Hjorland [16] points out that people always seek information on the basis of their subjective knowledge. All information will be regarded as irrelevant if the information seeker cannot understand the contents [17].
On the other hand, people with higher self-efficacy level will tend to conduct more information seeking activities [18] [19]. As a result, it may be possible that people with lesser product knowledge actually would like to search information. However, their information seeking desire was disrupted, interrupted and terminated prematurely due to negative learned affective norms [20]. When these processes repeated, they become unwilling to conduct information searching as they do not believe those information will effect a change on them [21]. Borrowing a well-known terminology from psychology, they become "learned helplessness" [22].

Involvement and Motivation
Consumer involvement, as defined by Hynes and Lo [23], is the "perceived personal importance or interest attached to the acquisition, consumption, and disposition of a good, service, or idea". DC is a type of relatively high-price and complex products associated with performance risk which leads to high involvement decision making, whereas reducing risk and uncertainty is a widely accepted motivations for seeking information [24]. Assael [25], Murray [26] and Aaker et al. [27] suggest that the higher the perceived risk or uncertainty associated with a product, the greater the consumers' propensity to seek information about the product. From this survey, there are two-third of the respondents agree that purchasing DC is an important consumption decision. Over 78% of respondents opine that it will be an annoyance matter if an unsuitable DC is selected, which can be viewed as an indicator for level of perceived risks involved. When pairing up with their responds selected in question C1 and C3, which are related to motivation and time efforts spent in searching information respectively, it is statistically significant that one will tends to perform information seeking and tends to spend more time in searching activities if he or she agreed that purchasing DC is an important consumption decision and this decision involves a high perceived risk.
Besides perceived risk, Assael and other scholars like Laurent and Kapferer point out that ego-involved product with symbolic meaning can also stimulate motivation for information seeking [28]. However, there is no apparent relationship found between them in this case study.
Achievement-related attitudes and avoidance-orientated conditions can also exercise influences in motivation. By crossing the purchasing purpose asked in question B4 with willingness of performing information search in question C1, it is noticed that when comparing to purchase DC as a gift, respondents bought their DC for personal interest, family or business use are far more likely to perform information-searching before making any consumption decision. Such behaviour could be explained by their motivational state of involvement suggested by Rabideau [29]. Respondents may be motivated to search for information in need by: (i) the satisfaction of achieving, such as desire of a father to look for suitable DC in order to take best picture of his family; and (ii) the avoidance of failing, such as a multimedia coordinator purchasing a suitable DC on behalf of school for the coming event, in which he would not like to fail it.
Case [30] points out that individual-defined situation shape one's needs as much as the "real" situation itself. Such personal desire can play an important role in the motivation of information seeking.
When it comes to avoidance-orientated conditions, as discussed in section 6.1, a rather large proportion of respondents answered that they do not perform information searching as they have limited knowledge in DC. The term of 'information anxiety' may give a reason for this behaviour. According to Bawden and Robinson [31], when one is under a condition of stress caused by a lack of understanding of the necessary information, one may feel lost and thus avoid searching for information.
In other words, the more one is achievement-involved or the less one suffering from avoidance-orientated conditions, the more one will be motivated to seek for needed information. Though Assael does give a general idea that motivation can be considered as a major element in his information acquisition and processing model, it may be better to emphasise the underlying factors behind in details, including one's attitudes towards achievement and emotional factors. A modified Assael's consumer information acquisition and processing model is suggested in Figure 7.

Education and Income Level
The first stage of Assael's model illustrated the background factors that the consumer brings to information acquisition. We picked education and income level which are closely related to social status for examining the relation between these two variables and information behaviour based on the survey results.
Individuals with higher education attainment are more able to organise and integrate new information [32]. Previous studies on consumer information search found that there is a positive relation between education and information search [33]. This survey also found such direct relationship between educational level and the tendency of information search. Those respondents with a postgraduate or above in education level returned an absolute result that all of them had sought for related information before purchasing DC. By contrast, the Adding the following item into Input variables: Achievement-related attitudes Avoidance-orientated conditions Information seeking behaviour and purchasing decision: a case study in digital cameras 11 tendency on information search is declining according to their education level.
In addition to education level, this survey result also suggests a strong positive relationship between income level and tendency of information searching as well as time effort spent on searching. This finding matched with the theory of social capital introduced by Lin [34]. Lin defined social capital as "resources embedded in a social structure which are accessed and/or mobilised in purposive actions" [35]. It is closely related to education and income [36]. Johnson [37] points out that with better social capital, people can enjoy better-quality resources. This leads to increase in opportunity for them to interact with other parties with different and better resources, as well as the tendency for finding the information they need in order to enlarge their social capital.
However, people will not conduct information searching perpetually even they have such social capital. "Consumers do not engage in extensive information search unless they consider the benefits gained from additional information to be worth the time and cost of such a search" [38]. In other words, they will only search until the perceived marginal costs of search equal the perceived marginal benefits [39]. Over half of the respondents replied that they will stop searching after the purchasing decision was made. This echo the concept advocated by Simon who argues that people tend to make good-enough decision to meet their needs instead of considering all possible options in decision making [40].

Implications and Limitations
As suggested by Song and Chintagunta [41], consumers are risk averse in general. Their degree of perceived uncertainty can be reduced when more information becomes available. We would like to propose the recommendations to the parties as summarized in Table  15 in order to enhance consumers' efficiency in information seeking processes. We believe that by improving the information literacy, negative factors affecting information behaviour related to purchasing experience, product knowledge, motivation, education and income level can be eliminated.
There are several limitations in this case study. First, the data collection process is mainly delivered on the Web and thus some potential target persons may be excluded due to unfamiliar of Internet usage. More different channels for the survey conduction are recommended for future studies. Second, it is a cross-sectional study that collects data at one point of time and such a restriction is mainly due to the time limit of this project. A longitudinal study is recommended for further study on information seeking behaviour due to the rapid advancement of technologies. Third, respondents may find difficulties in recalling past purchasing experiences. In-depth interviews would be a good research tool for future research to explore more specific characteristics on information seeking behaviour of consumers and to reduce the possibility of omitting important information by participants. Fourth, the researchers applied Assael's consumer information acquisition and processing model as a framework for this case study. As suggested by Assael [42], consumer models have its own limitations which include:

Parties Recommendation
Prospective Consumers  Conduct information seeking before purchasing decision is made  Avoid relying on single source of information.  Seek assistances from unbiased information agencies such as consumer councils and public libraries.

DC Manufacturers and Promoters
 Provide more product information on top of symbolic messages in advertisement.  Produce videos of online tutorials and deliver these videos to consumers via its website and other intermediates like YouTube.  Supply well-trained salespersons for satisfying a variety of needs from various customers.

Consumer Council
 Promote public educations related to DC by advertisements, subsiding public tutorials and forums in order to enhance product knowledge for general public  Deliver and enhance accessibility for unbiased product testing reports and comments related to DC for the publics Public Library  Conduct programmes for improving information literacy for the general public  Encourage prospective consumers to access the existing resources available in public libraries, including books, magazines and subscribed databases Components in models may not be equally important for all situations of usage. (iv) Model will vary among individuals in the same market. (v) Purchase decisions are not equally complex.
In summary, the researchers attempted to conduct an exploratory study to examine consumers' information seeking behaviour before purchasing DC. This case study highlights the need to explore more information seeking behaviour during decision making process of consumer associated with the purchase of other products or services. Future researches to address some of the unfound characteristics related to information seeking behaviour during the decision making process for other types of products are expected.

Conclusions
Nowadays, with widely spread portable devices with ability to connect to the Internet, information seeking can be performed at ease. However, this does not means that there are more and more people conducting serious information seeking before making decisions. People still tend to overestimate the value they already know and underestimate the value of what they do not know [43]. We should promote the value of information seeking in order to bring positive effects to the information behaviour, not only for purchasing DC but also other circumstances. In the long run, value of Information literacy, one of the most important skills in the 21st century suggested by Chu et al. [44] should be enhanced and emphasised to this information society.