Female consumers' utilization of diagnostic cues to evaluate work wear assortments in major department stores

Abstract

Department stores offer extensive product assortments and services to diverse consumer populations under one roof. Determining which attributes (cues) are important to and used by consumers to evaluate product assortment are essential in planning popular product assortment, that will ultimately lead to consumer patronage of the store. By adding and combining the right diagnostic intrinsic/extrinsic cues in a product assortment; the consumers’ overall anticipated identification costs (i.e. the costs of the process to establish the character of each alternative in the assortment) are lowered (Herpen & Pieters, 2007). Specific study objectives were to determine the priority ranking of diagnostic a) intrinsic cues (i.e. style, colour, size and quality) and b) extrinsic cues (i.e. price, brand, store image and store name) that are used by female consumers to evaluate work wear product assortment in department stores.