Consumer shopping orientation: identification and characterization of outshoppers

Abstract

Purpose Despite having strategic inflection, retail set-ups in India have been continuously raising a challenge for suppliers of retail products aiming to all to target the right consumers in accordance with their ever-changing preferences. This adds a complexity to retailers offering services who seek valued information to devise a retail strategy by segmenting markets on the basis of consumer shopping orientations. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop and validate the consumer profile of out shoppers based on the shopping orientations. Design/methodology/approach The study has used descriptive research design. A total of 298 consumers from urban and rural areas of North Gujarat, India, were selected through quota-based sampling method and contacted personally to fill the self-rated structured questionnaire. Findings Collected data were edited and processed for first exploratory factor analysis to exactly know the factor structure of consumer perceived shopping orientation. Thereafter, cluster analysis was performed to identify consumer groups which were validated through multiple discriminant analysis. Three groups, namely, outshoppers, community-oriented in-shoppers and time-effective in-shoppers were cross-tabulated with consumers’ socio-demographics to extract the profile through chi-square analysis. Results were fairly consistent with the past studies. Practical implications The results of this study indicate consumers’ profiles based on shopping orientation to provide an input to retail services markets to devise strategy for targeting and positioning emphasising on outshoppers segment. Marketers do not consider them as an identical segment. Henceforth, more specific approach can be used for consumers who are frequently reflected through their psychographic portrait. Originality/value At macro level, study reveals some opportunities to retailers for penetrating into other segments of outshoppers. Furthermore, segmenting for retail services marketers has been ignored in past literature; the study addresses this gap by proposing bases in outshopping context for Indian businesses.