Influence of demographics, psychographics, shopping orientation, mall shopping attitude and purchase patterns on mall patronage in India

Abstract

Retail boom in India is generating considerable interest from within the country as well as abroad. This growth in retail has been fueled by the mushrooming of shopping malls across the country. Despite this very little is known about the characteristics of the Indian mall shoppers. Also of special interest is the behavior of heavy shoppers because regardless of the footfalls at the mall, if the money spent is low, the mall does not benefit. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to profile Indian mall consumers, identify characteristics differentiating the high rupee volume purchasers at the mall and to evolve a model that can help predict heavy rupee volume purchasers in a catchment. The results of this study, spanning eight cities of India and 3026 mall consumers, indicate that the heavy shoppers are significantly different from the other groups along multiple demographic and socio-economic variables, behavioral variables, attitude and shopping orientation. Additionally, the study contributes to literature by evolving a typology of shoppers. The model evolved using Discriminant Analysis was used to predict potential heavy and low rupee volume purchasers for a city of interest, where currently there are no malls.