Fashion Store Personality: Scale Development and Relation to Self-Congruity Theory

Over five decades ago, Martineau (1958, p. 47) introduced the notion of store personality (SP), which he defined as “the way in which the store is defined in the shopper’s mind, partly by its functional qualities and partly by an aura of psychological attributes”. The strategic role of these symbolic, humanlike attributes that can be attributed to stores, has been empirically demonstrated, with respect to customer satisfaction and perceived retail differentiation (Chun & Davies, 2006), as well as with respect to store patronage and loyalty behavior (Sirgy & Samli, 1985; Zentes, Morschett, & Schramm-Klein, 2008). A potential and reasonable explanation of the power of associations with humanlike personality, can be found in the self-congruity theory. This theoretical framework argues that if retailers can position their stores in such a way that the store’s personality is congruent with that of target shoppers, they are likely to succeed in attracting and retaining these consumers (Bellenger, Steinberg, & Stanton, 1976; Zentes et al., 2008), which would in turn enhance profitability (Sirgy, Grewal, & Mangleburg, 2000). However, self-image congruity is still in its infancy in retailing research (Chebat, El Hedhli, & Sirgy, 2009; O’Cass & Grace, 2008; Sirgy et al., 2000), in comparison to the extensive corroborations of the theory across many product categories (Sirgy, 1982). The present study aims to fill this gap in the literature, focusing on fashion retailing in particular. As image and identity concepts are arguably more salient in fashion retailing than in any other sector (Cheng, Hines, & Grime, 2008; Zentes et al., 2008), store personality perceptions can be expected to be particularly relevant in this area of the retail industry. Compared to weekly grocery shopping, for instance, shopping for clothes is an opportunity for self-expression par excellence (Buttle, 1992; for an overview of the role of clothing, see Burns, 2010). We start by introducing “concept-scale interaction” effects in Section 1. This phenomenon implies that rather than applying general brand/store personality scales such as the ones that were developed by Aaker (1997) or d’Astous and Lévesque (2003), it is advisable to adopt a contextual approach by developing a SP scale tailor-made for fashion retailing. In Section 2, we subsequently define the construct “fashion store personality” according to Rossiter’s (2002) C-OAR-SE procedure and Section 3 briefly discusses self-congruity theory and its applications in a retail context. Subsequently, a measurement instrument is developed for Fashion Store Personality (FSP) in Section 4. The scale construction procedure consists of three steps. First, repertory grid analysis is carried out in fifty-one individual interviews, in order to generate adjectives that people naturally use to describe the personality of fashion stores. Female participants dominate throughout this study as the interest in fashion is characteristic among women within this age range (Evans, 1993) and clothing for men is often bought by their female partner (Banister & Hogg, 2004). After a preliminary purification of the elicited item pool, a consumer survey (n=481) is carried out. By means of Principal Component Analysis with Varimax rotation five underlying FSP dimensions are identified in the resulting dataset: “chaos”, “innovativeness”, “sophistication”, “agreeable-ness”, and “conspicuousness”. The psychometric properties of this measurement instrument are checked and the scale’s reliability, stability and validity meet the common standards. Subsequently, based on this operationalization, the role of self-congruity in the context of fashion retailing is explored in Section 5. First, the extent to which consumers shop in fashion stores with a personality that they perceive to be similar to their own, is studied (Section 5.1). An inspection of the correlations between the consumer’s self-image and her perceptions of FSP of her most patronized fashion store supports the idea of SC theory in fashion retailing. Furthermore, a multidimensional scaling (MDS) visually identifies, in a multidimensional space, which types of consumer personality do or do not cluster with certain types of fashion store personality. Overall, the findings indicate that (1) agreeable consumers seem to patronize agreeable fashion stores, (2) open-minded and extraverted consumers correspond to innovative fashion stores, (3) sophisticated and little chaotic stores match best with conscientious consumers, and (4) neuroticism in a consumer is found to be associated with conspicuousness and chaos in a fashion store. Finally, the relative importance of the five FSP dimensions in explaining fashion store choice is assessed using a stepwise multiple discriminant analysis (Section 5.2). Overall, the results indicate that it is worthwhile to take FSP into consideration when explaining consumers store choices. In particular, chaos and sophistication are the two FSP dimensions that consumers mind most when choosing a fashion store to patronize. As self-image congruence seems to have an impact on consumers’ store choice, the findings of the present study highlight the role of FSP in retailing positioning strategies. In order for retailers to exhibit a personality that matches the one of their target group, a wide variety of tools can be used (Brengman & Willems, 2009, on determinants of fashion store personality). Further research could provide additional support for this scale’s superiority over general brand/personality scales. Moreover, a cross-cultural validation as well as a study of the scale’s use among male consumers would be valuable.