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Top1. Introduction
In recent years, a multitude of political, economic and social factors have had a negative impact on consumer purchasing power in emerging countries such as Tunisia (David and Marouani 2015), Spain (Alonso, Rodríguez, and Rojo 2015), Turkey (Kaytaz and Gul 2014), Brazil (Castilhos, Fonseca, and Bavaresco 2017) and Russia (Berdysheva and Romanova 2017).
In this context of economic crisis and social turbulence, purchasing power has become a major economic, political and media problem. Tunisia is in a phase of political transition, accompanied by an economic transition whose evolution has been largely affected by post-revolution social, political and security instability. This has resulted in weak economic growth, around 1.8% on an annual average over the period 2011-2019, and 1% in 2019. The extreme poverty rate, calculated according to the World Bank's threshold of $1.90 per day, rose from more than 7% in 2005 to less than 2% in 2015.
In recent times, financial well-being and fear have received increased attention in a context of economic instability in many developed economies (Hampson et al. 2018). Marketing experts have studied the evaluation of consumers' purchasing process in times of crisis from a psychological perspective: negative emotions (Prawitz et al. 2006), feeling financial deprivation (E. Sharma and Alter 2012) and consumer concern about maintaining purchasing power (Bertrandias and Lapeyre 2015).
Consumers have become thriftier by the birth of a “consumer strategist” who does not hesitate to deploy various consumer tactics in order to preserve its purchasing capacity. Be more attentive to prices and promotions which is reflected in increased price sensitivity (Steenkamp and Maydeu-Olivares 2015), limit impulse purchases by using a shopping list (Du and Kamakura 2008) etc., there are many ways that consumers are able to optimize their purchasing power.
This has led to a change in the perception of the purchase value that change in times of crisis, its origin and its nature. How price perception affects the perception of value in times of crisis.
Drawing on recent literature on consumers in times of economic crisis and conceptual vision of financial well-being, this article addresses research objectives: