A STUDY OF BUYING BEHAVIOUR OF FEMALE CUSTOMERS TOWARDS WOMEN S APPARELS AND ACCESSORIES IN MALLS IN DELHI AND NCR REGION

Abstract

In the current scenario, the study of female buying behaviour especially for products in malls is undeniably a subject of great interest and importance. This research study aims at studying the buying behaviour of female customers for women apparels and accessories in the malls in Delhi and NCR (National Capital Region). It aims at segmenting the market for women s apparels and accessories on the basis of demographic and psychographic parameters. The first aspect of this study aims at examining the relationship between the demographic variables (age, marital status, education and income) and the buying behaviour or pattern of female customers represented by their psychographic score. The next aspect deals with their psychographic segmentation followed by relating the segments formed with the demographic variables. This study has been conducted on the female shoppers in malls in Delhi NCR. This research aims at gaining insights into the demographic and psychographic profiles of the segments formed through VALS study and hence, providing marketers with the most profitable segments to target and likewise develop the marketing strategies. The theory based lifestyle research initiated in the 1950 s by Havinhurst and Feigenbaum (Yu, 2011) have been taken forward by a lot of researchers across the world till present. Lifestyle segmentation has been quite popular in the western countries. The major typologies used were VALS, AIO and LOV (Ma, 2004). Still, there has been very less research based on it in the Asia Pacific region (Tai and Tam, 1997). In the field of consumer research and market segmentation, the term lifestyle has been extensively used in many studies over the past 60 years. Still, referring to the developing economies like India, the studies have been quite fewer in number (Kumar and Sarkar, 2008). newlineIndian market is huge in size and the Indian market is almost unsaturated in all the sectors/ fields. Creation of segments is new or neo here or can say, it exists in its nascent stage. In India, though geograp