Influence of visual merchandising on retail consumers in the apparel sector

Abstract

Retail apparel industry in India has been growing at a rapid pace. This means an increase in competition. To succeed in this competitive environment understanding the customer based on the visual merchandizing of store becomes is quite revealing and important. Visual Merchandizing directly affects the sales of apparel in retail stores. There is a vast scope for research in this field because the constituents of visual merchandizing that influence the customer are not easy to measure, added to that the retail environment keeps changing rapidly. This phenomenon gains greater significance in the Indian market, with the introduction of larger and more diverse retail formats by organized retailers. Customers can be attracted to a store based on how it appeals to his or her eye. They have a lot of choice these days with respect to the choice of retail store based on the visual layout of the store directly affecting the visual appeal of the customer to drive sales of apparel. Through this study we have tried to come with a set of hygiene and motivational factors of visual merchandizing of a store which affect the customer while purchasing clothes. For this study we chose to analyze three retail stores namely, convenience, specialty and department stores. We have used both secondary and primary research techniques. We have used exploratory research techniques like in-depth interviews and surveys to get the important attributes. We then used SPSS software and ran on the data to get the distributions of the factors affecting the customer choosing a particular store format. We have also tried to segment and profile the customer based on the gender and psychographic data that we have gathered. From we have been able to analyze that availability of sizes, ease of navigation and window displays have largely been the hygiene factors while music, arrangement of clothes, cleanliness have been the motivational factors. Nevertheless the factors differed across the three stores and between males and females.