A study of consumers’ retail format choice and patronage behaviour in food & grocery retailing

Abstract

Retailing in India is an unchartered territory. Retailing in India is gaining attention like never before. Organized retailing especially is creating euphoria amongst Indian consumers drawing them into malls and trade areas in huge numbers. Retailers are offering newer service dimensions to create unique shopping experience for customers. Shopping for food and grocery products has witnessed a revolution in Indian retail market with the conspicuous changes in the consumer buying behaviour driven by strong income growth, changing life styles and favorable demographic patterns. Most of the food and grocery products reach the consumers through Neighborhood kirana stores which are unorganized. But the very fast changing trends in consumption patterns, food and eating habits of consumers have contributed immensely to the growth and development of Western format typologies such as super markets, convenience stores, discount stores and hyper markets. This desertion aimed to explore and examine the predictability of major constructs (i.e shopper attributes, store attributes, information sources and situational factors) on retail format choice behaviour in food and grocery retailing from the proposed model based on the identification of research gaps. This thesis also intended to examine the repatronage intensions with chosen store formats. The hypothesised relationships among the major constructs were examined using Factor Analysis, Multiple Regression, ANNOVA, Chisquare statistic.The overall results of this study have shown that Indian food and grocery consumers have cross shopping behaviour in nature. No single retail format seems to be prime in meeting consumer needs/wants. Consumers preferring retail formats where they can save time, money and effort. Hence, retaining customer allegiance to a particular retail format is posed as a major task.