Neena Sondhi

Gender Influences in Garment Purchase

The ever-evolving fashion industry is a clear reflection of the changing patterns in the social, political, technological and economic environment of a society. The past few decades have seen significant and diverse changes in consumer habits and lifestyles. At long last, garment purchase has come of age, with both male and female consumers becoming increasingly brand and fashion conscious. With the emergence of a contemporary social structure, garment purchase is no longer the forte of women alone. Research, national and international, expounds on the purchase decisions of the New Man who is becoming more fashion conscious and trend savvy when it comes to apparel. This article is an attempt to identify certain gender-based antecedents of garment purchase involvement. An attempt has also been made to identify the key drivers that influence the decision making process for garment purchase, separately for male and female customers. The findings demonstrate a paradigm shift in attitudes and purchase patterns, which can have important implications for the marketer.

An Empirical Analysis of the Organic Retail Market in the NCR

A major change observed worldwide, is the growing concern over health risk associated with consumption of food with residues of agro-chemicals used in production. This heightened awareness about health and environmental issues has generated interest in alternative farming techniques—one of which is organic farming. However, a major conversion of conventional agriculture to organic agriculture will depend on several reasons-first and foremost being whether the consumers are interested in organic foods, and whether they are willing to pay price premiums for these goods. Second, foreseeing the customer demand is the retailer willing to venture into organic retailing and provide shelf space. A very interesting and a highly lucrative potential market exists in the country itself and there is an urgent need to explore the current organic market and assess its growth potential. The present study focuses on this as well as assessing the potential of marketing organically grown agricultural produce and products in the domestic market. The organic awareness and market is predominantly in the urban metros, Delhi being one of them thus the research is confined to the NCR region.

Process of Impulse Buying: A Qualitative Exploration:

While emerging markets like India present a highly conducive environment for impulse buying behaviour, they also represent a conundrum due to their cultural and contextual distinctiveness from Western/developed markets. Most existing research in the domain in these markets aims to either (dis)affirm the causal relationships identified in the Western markets or validate the frameworks developed there. This article is an exploratory study that aims to identify the latent factors that restrain, influence or comprise impulse buying process in the Indian context and describes an impulse buying episode in its entirety. This would help to not only highlight similarities or differences from the developed world but, more importantly, also broaden the impulse buying perspective in the emerging markets and allow future research to build upon it empirically.

Role of children in family purchase across Indian parental clusters

Purpose – The study aims to explore the evolving status of children as active consumers in the emerging Indian market by assessing their impact on family buying practices across distinct parental clusters. Design/methodology/approach – The study uses a structured questionnaire to draw a quota sample of 136 urban Indian parents across four child segments from two Indian metropolitan cities to understand their attitudes towards parenting and the consequent empowerment of their children for actively participating in family purchase decisions around varied children’s product categories. Findings – Exploratory factor analysis reveals five well-defined parental attitudes towards child rearing. The attitudinal factors are used to define three discrete parental clusters, namely, time-pressed parents, child-centric parents and socially influenced parents. The demographic and psychographic profiles of the clusters expose the significant influence of the educated and affluent parents in empowering their children as ...

Assessing the organic potential of urban Indian consumers

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential for the purchase of organic food products amongst urban Indian consumers. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on a sample of 618 urban Indian consumers. The study questionnaire was developed to measure food-related lifestyle and attitudinal variables. The respondents were also questioned regarding their grocery purchase behaviour; awareness and purchase intentions regarding organic food. The data collected were analysed using SPSS 20.0 using factor, cluster and χ2 analysis to identify and profile the health-conscious segments and profile them based on their organic purchase intentions. Findings – In total, 33 lifestyle variables were reduced to five food-related attitudinal factors. Based on the five factors three potential clusters were identified. The urban Indian consumer was found to be environment, health and safety conscious. Sensitized and cautious segment of young, women living in nuclear families were more open to an org...

Attitude and Consumption Patterns of the Indian Chocolate Consumer: An Exploratory Study

This exploratory study is a pioneering research in the study of chocolate consumption amongst Indian consumers. Most studies look at chocolate consumption as deviant behaviour. However, for a developing country like India the frequency and amount of consumption is low; hence the factors influencing/hindering the consumption are of interest both for academicians as well as practitioners. The study went on to analyze the prevailing attitude towards chocolate consumption and tested the difference in attitude across relevant demographic variables. A cross-sectional consumer survey of 186 Indian chocolate consumers was conducted across the National Capital Region (NCR) of New Delhi, India. Factor analysis of consumer attitudes resulted in two distinct factors—cultural significance of sweets and chocolate value proposition. Younger consumers were found to be more value seeking as compared to older consumers. Taste followed by the brand were the most important criteria while choosing a chocolate and predominant reason for buying chocolates was for gifting purpose.

An Empirical Analysis of Purchase Behaviour for Football Ancillaries: An Emerging Market Perspective

Marketers in the modern times are increasingly viewing globalization of the sports market as a huge opportunity to enter unchartered territories by riding on the popularity of a game. The enduring motivation of the sports consumers to connect with their favourite sport comes with an advantage for marketers who can create stronger product/brand associations with the sport. Researches establishing the relationship between the sports fanship and related consumption reinforce the belief. The present study in an exploratory attempt to understand the impact of sports enthusiasm and related consumption in the context of an emerging market uses a mixed method approach with qualitative focus group discussion and a quantitative analysis of the dataset of 226 actual buyers of football ancillary from the National Capital Region of Delhi in India. Consequently, a factor analysis of the key motivators for football ancillaries buying behaviour identified three drivers; namely, social approval, individual passion and utilitarian motivation, for the urban Indian sports enthusiasts. Further, segment-wise product decisions and purchase decisions were reported along with the relative importance of purchasing football ancillaries. The significant influence of football connectedness among urban Indian consumers despite cricket being the most followed sport added a whole new dimension to the study of sports market consumers in the emerging Indian market giving directions for future research and marketing practices in the domain.

Positioning Implications for Chocolate Brands: An Attribute-based Approach

The present article is exploratory in nature and studies the attributes that an Indian chocolate consumer considers while making a chocolate purchase and based on this the present article establish...

Segmenting & profiling the deflecting customer: understanding shopping cart abandonment.

Abstract One of the key factors affecting the e-commerce in any country is the incident of shopping cart abandonment (SCA). The phenomenon occurs either when the consumer is searching for products or when the items have been selected and the consumer is moving towards checkout. The current research paper adopts the latter perspective in studying the behavior. Further, rather than looking at the manifestations of the behavior and the role of elements such as website characteristics that may be responsible for its occurrence; the paper looks at specific antecedents namely- perceived risks associated with an online purchase decision as well as mental accounting and budgeting that the consumer may carry out when faced with a decision dilemma. A 5-point, 20 item Likert scale questionnaire was designed and validated before conducting the filed study. A usable sample of 350 adult online consumers who had indulged in SCA, was segmented based their usage behavior into three distinct segments of low, medium and high SCA. Further, a segment comparison indicated stark difference in the perception of the perceived risks they experienced, as well as the mental accounting they carried out while making the final purchase. The higher was the incidence of perceived risk, more was the likelihood of SCA. The high SCA group also demonstrated significant cognitive dissonance on account of the mental budgeting they considered for the product/category. The research has important academic and market driven implications that may be critical in understanding and dealing with the phenomenon.

Scale development & validation for assessing attitude towards counterfeit luxury.

Abstract Luxury consumption has long been the area of study both for academic as well as managerial reasons. The sector operates and thrives on what are recognized as anti-laws of marketing. However, with growing consumer aspirations as well as emergence of highly symbolic and globally recognized luxury brands, an equally thriving market is the parallel counterfeit luxury brand market. The current study looked at a significant and widely accepted driver of counterfeit luxury brand consumption- consumer attitudes towards counterfeit consumption. A tri-component model to measure consumer attitude and purchase intention for counterfeit luxury brands was adopted basis a mixed method methodology. A 33 item five- point Likert scale was formulated and pilot tested on a sample of 188 urban consumers of counterfeit luxury brands and later validated through a study of 392 consumers’ across two Indian metros. A comprehensive 15 item scale measuring cognitive, affective and connative attitudinal components towards counterfeit luxury brands was formulated and validated. CFA was conducted to measure the goodness of fit of the proposed model. The instrument had satisfactory construct validity and high reliability scores. The study makes a unique contribution towards measuring and evaluating consumer attitude towards counterfeit luxury brands. Thus, the findings have significant theoretical and managerial implications not only for the Indian but also for other developing markets as well.