Consumers’ Attitudes Toward Retail Markets: A Multi-criteria-Based Group Decision-Making Approach

The present paper identifies the attributes that the buyers consider while they purchase in the three types of retail markets such as traditional, modern, and online using a pilot study in tune with findings of the extant literature. Next, for each such market, a group of buyers with varying demographic profiles were approached to order the attributes reflecting the fundamental psychology of the consumers. We use a consumers’ opinion-based integrated framework wherein a widely popular scale-based measure such as Thurstone scaling (TS) is applied to find out the preferential order of the factors that manifest the attitudes of the customers toward different types of retail markets. Further, we prioritize the attributes for each market using the Full Consistency Method (FUCOM). Our study reveals that sales person’s behavior, product quality, and options for touch and feel are given more importance by the consumers in traditional market. In case of modern markets, consumers select quality of the products, market location, and touch as dominant criteria. In this respect, the behavioral choices are quite similar in nature. For digital retail markets using online media, buyers look for quality, offers, and price of the products with more significance than others. Our findings therefore support the general notions about these three types of markets. We observe that product quality remains a unanimous choice for the consumers irrespective of the nature of the retail market. For all cases, the DFC value is significantly low suggesting the validity of the results obtained by using FUCOM. The results of TS and FUCOM are found to be consistent.