Analyzing consumer acquisition pattern An empirical evidence for household consumer durables

Abstract

The Indian landscape today is drastically contrasting today than it was even half a decade newlineago. The challenge of keeping up with the consumer in this information age has kept the industry newlineon toes. One such challenge is the continuous acquisition of new customers, in the background of newlinea highly competitive market and a weak link between customer loyalty and profits. To address newlinethis challenge this research is an attempt to bring about the importance of customer acquisition newlineand help the industry strategize more on acquisitions. More specifically the study was guided by newlinethe objectives of understanding the dimensions of retailer s perception on new customer newlineacquisition, and to have an insight to the promotional tools used to get a new customer. Based on newlinereview of extant literature consumer behaviour for durables, acquisition of a new customer by a newlineretailer and consumer s store choice decision was studied. On the consumer end the objective newlinefulfilled was to know the psychographic clusters of shopping orientation for selected household newlineconsumer durables, consumer s store choice selection and to know the association between newlinepsychographic clusters, store choice and demographics. The study was done in two parts, one newlinebased on the consumer in the buying process of selected household consumer durables and the newlineother based on retailers selling the similar product category. The scope of the study includes both newlineorganized and unorganized retailers selling consumer durables. The consumer sample was drawn newlinefrom customers leaving the store, so as to ensure recency of retail store experience. The retailer newlinesample constituted retailer selling the top 10 brands in the selected household durables. The newlinedimensions of store choice for consumer and retailer s new customer acquisition were analyzed newlineusing Exploratory Factor Analysis. The shopping orientation dimensions were first confirmed newlineusing Confirmatory Factor Analysis and the evaluated using K-means Cluster Analysis. The newlinevarious hypotheses were analyzed using t-test, Chi-square and ANO