Trendy shopping replacing traditional format preferences

Abstract

The Indian retail sector is going through a transformation and the emerging market is witnessing a significant change in its growth pattern. Both existing and new players are experimenting with new retail formats. Consumers’ are also in favor of these retail formats for trendy shopping. The present paper is first of its kind to take the various important aspects together, namely, emerging retail formats, demographic factors and attributes affecting customers’ buying preferences from these retail formats for designing a framework. A self-structured questionnaire has been used for collecting the primary data from 500 urban consumers from major cities of Punjab in India. The study has used the descriptive statistics, ANOVA test and factor analysis for analyzing the data. The findings of the paper reveal that consumers’ prefer emerging retail formats due to its significant product attributes like improved quality, variety of brands and assortment of merchandise and store attributes like parking facility, trained sales personnel and complete security. The retail formats have been classified into two categories; malls, specialty stores and hyper/supermarkets are recognized as modern retail formats and discount stores, convenience stores and department stores are recognized as traditional retail formats. Key words: Retail formats, consumers, demography, product attributes, store attributes.