Are They Really Different? A Study on Apparel Shoppers’ Retail Format Perception in USA and India

The retailer’s operating environment today is far more complex and interconnected than that which prevailed during the closing of the last century. Given the trends of changing consumer preferences and the growing importance of the emerging destinations for retail expansion, the focus is definitely on the untapped markets owing to their relatively high market growth potential. Whether global or local, the retailer’s adaptation to market conditions is crucial. However, heterogeneity of the business landscape and divergence of consumer tastes in the ‘spiky world’ calls for well suited format adaptations specific to markets. Hence, this article aims to have a clear understanding of the consumers’ perspectives on organized retail forms in two contrasting markets with the pioneering use of single and multi-brand format classifications. The research respectively uses datasets from the developed US market and the potentially strong evolving retail market in India to explore format perceptions of shoppers in the respective scenarios. The forming format perception of 126 sampled apparel shoppers in urban India is compared with 107 sampled respondents from the US with the use of exploratory factor analysis. Consequently, the failure of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to confirm the factors in the Indian case is used to highlight some interesting insights on the inherent departures in the status of consumers’ store learning pertaining to the two markets, giving directions for future research and practices in the domain.